VS ALM Library Updates on MSDN for May 2011

Correspondents have asked how we determine the order of listings for our monthly updates. The answer, as always, is cookies.

Here are the updates for May:

Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, SQL Server

Building the Application

Team Explorer Everywhere

Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Feature Pack

You also need to check out all the new, fantastic links in the right column of this blog. Esther has gathered fantastic MSDN content about ALM that you might not have found, lists of the blogs that address ALM content, and everything you ever needed to know about becoming a socially connected ALM user.

Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, SQL Server

Notes from Tim:

I spent a lot of cycles figuring out how to do things with MOSS 2010 this month.

Here is a video that walks you through how to configure MOSS 2010 on TFS 2010. If you’re using the TFS 2010 MOSS Configuration Tool, you may run into annoying problems small (like how the tool lacks a start menu item) and annoying problems large (like how the tool may crashes with an unknown error)but either way, we got your back.

I also took a little time out to answer questions about permissions required to install TFS on SQL Server and the least amount of permission one ought assign to the TFS service accounts. The answers to these questions appear in the docs, but it’s always nice to have a friendly pointer.

Building the Application

Andy:

Build Content 2011 Spring Cleaning We are expanding coverage into some Team Foundation Build details that in the past have received shallow or no coverage at all. The Visual Studio ALM wing of the MSDN library now offers several new topics to help you understand and work with fundamental build process.

For a look into the writing process involved in one topic, Manage Build Information and Control Verbosity, see Andy’s blog post Build Information and Verbosity from Whiteboard to Publication

Team Explorer Everywhere

Lei:

All the topics about Team Explorer Everywhere are now up-to-date based on SP1 changes. We also added new content to address specific authentication scenarios through the Cross-platform Command-Line Client.

When you perform version-control operations in Team Explorer Everywhere from a command prompt, you must authenticate yourself to the version-control server for Team Foundation. To authenticate yourself, you must specify either your domain credentials, if your organization uses Active Directory, or your workgroup credentials.

• By using the login option, you can specify your credentials every time that you use any command in the tf command-line tool.
• If you set the TF_AUTO_SAVE_CREDENTIALS environment variable, you can also use the login option to save your credentials in a workspace cache and update them automatically when, for example, your password changes.
• If you often use different sets of credentials, you can save each set in a connection profile so that you do not have to specify it every time when you run a tf command.

For more information, see the following new topics:

• Command-Line Authentication for Team Explorer Everywhere
• Connection Profiles

Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Feature Pack

Kathryn:

If you are synchronizing data using the Team Foundation Server and Project Server integration feature pack, you should read Understanding How Updates to Specific Fields Are Managed to learn about all the rules that govern specific field updates. Particularly if you believe that data is not getting updated as expected, you may find out the reason why. The data type of the affected field or fields, the OnConflict field mapping attribute, and task hierarchy affect how the synchronization engine updates specific fields.