Library of tooling and guidance solutions (aka.ms/vsarsolutions)

This bog will be retired soon!

Bookmark https://www.almdevopsrangers.org/solutions/ for future reference of ALM DevOps Ranger solutions.

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A library of out-of-band tooling and practical guidance, extensions,  and community solutions, complementing our publications (aka.ms/vsarpublications). You can get information about new features and bug fixes included in the releases here.

Extensions | Guidance and Tooling | Community Solutions | Retiring Guidance and Tooling | Deprecated Solutions

Extensions

Library of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services Extensions.

| Allows you to visualize your Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) branches for your current project.

| See how many build minutes are being used by users, build definitions, team projects and more.

  | Counts down to a configurable moment in time.

  | Create a folder in your source repositories from the web. No need to clone the repository or install extra tools.

| Allows the Tester to perform the Test Steps even if disconnected from Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), using the exported Excel Spreadsheet.

| The widget shows the number of cards in each column of the Kanban board.

  | Ever needed to have sample data to try things out on? Want to explore what Visual Studio Team Services can do? This extension lets you create and remove sample work item data in your project.

| Enables users to visualise the overall health of builds (and in future releases) on their dashboards.

 (v2) | An extension to explore test cases.

| View Details of work item(s) on your dashboard

| Visualize relationships between work items from within the work item form.

Guidance and Tooling

Library of guidance and gap-filling solutions.

This plug-in enables Azure Active Directory (AAD) users to automatically be sign up (a login is created if they don’t have one already) and authenticated on a SonarQube server.

This practical guidance explores how to extend the lab and how to practically deploy it in a DevOps environment, based on a number of lab artifacts.
Assets: Install Google Chrome, JDKs for Linux, Set up Web Deploy server, Install Sublime Text, Install Slack, NPM Package, Selenium Grid, Apt-Get, Yum Package, gVim (Cream) for Windows, AWS CLI for Windows

| Automatically generate breakpoints for all the public entry points in your solution.
VS2015 extension - 4,132 installs

This practical guidance and sample code is based on extensive research to address two of the commonly heard requests on Team Foundation Server security:

1. Report on the effective permissions of a TFS user/group.
2. Report on security auditing for TFS.

The Extracting effective permissions whitepaper and sample code been released. The Security auditing whitepaper and sample code is available, but will not be released publically as the sample may have performance implications and is not supported by Microsoft. If you need information on the auditing research, please contact the ALM Rangers.

  | Migrate assets from 2015 or 2013 U4 RM server to 2015 TFS server, and start using the Release hub in Team Web Access.

This template deploys an Azure SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, Windows Server 2012R2 VM (Standard DS1 v2) with SonarQube installed. This template can be deployed to a new resource group (recommended) or to an existing resource group. Once the deployment is complete you can increase the resources provided to SonarQube by changing the VM from a Standard DS1 v2 machine to any larger DS_x_ v2 machine without the need to redeploy SonarQube or migrate any data.

SonarQube Installation Guide, which explains how to set up a production ready SonarQube installation to be used in conjunction with Team Foundation Server 2013 to analyse .Net apps.

Supporting blog posts and articles: Integrating SonarQube and Reporting Services, Manage Technical Debt with SonarQube and TFS, by Cesar Brito and Hosam Kamel

   | Get insights in the usage of your extension by leveraging Microsoft Application Insights.

Practical guidance for the implementation and disaster recovery planning for Team Foundation Server.
v1.4 - planning guide, workbook, and quick reference poster. All guidance, including TFS on Azure guide, is included in this package.

Practical guidance for branching and merging strategies on Team Foundation Server, Team Services, and other source control environments:

• Latest Articles (aka.ms/techarticles) - Branching strategies with TFVC, Effective feature isolation using TFVC, Effective TFVC branching strategies for DevOps, Map TFVC actions to Git, Move Git repositories between team projects, OMG, I just checked in a huge binary. Now what?.
• Blog posts – Alternative Branching Strategies, Frequently Asked Questions
• Walkthrough (Branching Strategies) - Part 1 - MAIN Only and Simplicity Rules Part 2 - Development Isolation, Part 3 - Feature Isolation, Part 4 - Release Isolation … audit alarm, Part 5 - Servicing & Release Isolation
• Walkthrough (TFVC) - Part 1 – Create a new local workspace,  Part 2 – Use the local workspace in online mode, Part 3 – Use the local workspace in offline mode, Part 4 – Explore the diff and merge tools
• Git for the TFVC User Workflows - Part 1: Making Changes , Part 2: Reviewing Changes (No Conflicts), Part 3: Reviewing Changes (With Conflicts), Part 4: Converting a TFVC repository, To fork or not to fork a Git repository
• Latest versions of the Strategies, TFVC Gems,  Dependency Management, and Git for TFVC guides.

  | Making Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) part of your daily digital conversations. Preview 1.0.

   | Yeoman generator to create an extension for Visual Studio Team Services or Team Foundation Server.

Community Solutions

Delivered by the ALM community with collaboration and support from the ALM Rangers. They are not required to meet ALM Rangers quality standards, allowing the community project team to also be creative, agile, and responsive to community needs. Also refer to VS and TFS community widgets (aka.ms/widgets) for more community widgets.

Export work item queries and test plans to word direct from the web, without client installs and moving templates files between computers.

New Build/Release task to record deployment event securely to your New Relic account with a new dedicated endpoint type.

Export build definition as neatly formatted PDF. View all your build defintion details at once instead of navigating between steps or tabs.

Monitor your extension downloads, ratings and downloads/day right from the VSTS/TFS dashboard.

A requirements management and integration tool for Visual Studio Team Services.

| Add the ability to view the state model for a selected work item type.

Scrumary report for your daily scrums.

Shows a summary of the activity in all the team rooms that you are a part of.

VSTS and toggl.com integration.

| Send a welcome email to an individual or the entire team.

View Details of work item(s) on your dashboard

This is the MyHistory Team Explorer extension originally provided as a sample in the June 2013 MSDN Magazine article - Extending Visual Studio Team Explorer 2012

VS Online news and updates inside Visual Studio.

The TFS Community Branch Tool Visual Studio Extension is based on the ALM Rangers Quick Response Sample ALM Rangers Branch Tool vs extension. The goal is to provide a tool to automate branching task in the ALM Rangers branching guidance.

Access Team Rooms inside Visual Studio.

This package audits a specific field of a work item, showing only the revisions in which its value has changed.

An innovative visualisation project, started by Robert and Gordon as part of the ALM Rangers Community and their continuous visualisation and technology research and collaboration initiative. Store.

Community TFS Team Tools is a community project based on the example code from ALM Rangers - Quick Response Sample Command line utility to manage TFS Teams Quick Response Sample – Command line utility to manage Team Foundation Server Teams and Users

In Team Foundation Server (TFS) it is not possible to change Process Template on an active project which contains many WorkItems data. To address this specific issue, we have developed an application called TFS Morphing. Purpose of this tool is to perform “In Place Conversion” of data from one format to another.

Retiring Extensions, Guidance and Tooling

Shared “as is”. No bug fixes, new features or updates planned.

ALM Rangers Personas and Customer Types

Common definition of personas and profiles used in Visual Studio ALM Rangers guidance.

Demonstrates how to build a release pipeline with Team Foundation Server. It uses an iterative approach that begins with a flawed pipeline and ends with one that has automation, parallel stages, and monitoring. A collaboration between p&p and the ALM Rangers.

This guidance delivers practical, scenario-based guidance for the use of PowerShell desired state configuration (DSC) to design, develop and deploy custom configuration as code resources. We guide you through the basics and practical walkthroughs, based on a real-world proof-of-concept deployments and experience from the ALM Rangers.

| In the new DevOps Culture, it is becoming increasingly important to react to the customer feedback quickly and ship quality product – quality is the key. One of the best practices to achieve or maintain quality is thru “Test Automation”. There are many benefits of test automation measuring quality, avoid regressions in a timely fashion and in turn help ship a high quality product that can keep happy customers. Automation has to be done in the right way and right time or else it can negatively impact productivity or quality. Here’s the latest guide and videos.

Requirements Management Guidance focusing on new features of 2010 and how these features deliver better support for our Release Management practices.

Scenario based and practical guidance for test planning and management of test plans, test cases and shared steps when going to the next sprint, next release and when working with multiple code branches.

Focused on providing practical guidance and a reference solution to enable Team Foundation Service users to create a tabular store model and generate reports based on WIT data, and to enable TFS users to create valuable reports using the TFS Data Warehouse, based on real-world scenarios.

NOTE - Trend Charts have been added as a feature to Visual Studio Team Services Update on 21 July 2014 and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 with Update 4. The feature provides all the same functionality that was provided by this CodePlex project, including several additional advantages.

Upgrade scenarios and post-upgrade issues for Team Foundation Server and associated technologies. For more information, see Upgrade your deployment to the latest version of TFS, and these blog posts New Elements of TFS 2015 that influence an upgrade, Short Lead Checklist, Long Lead Preparations, Long Lead Checklist, Post Upgrade Checklist.

A range of Microsoft Test Manager (MTM), CodedUI, and Fakes guidance.

Deprecated solutions

Light has been switched off – use at your own risk! Contact us for more information, if you’re looking for any of these projects.

Although the pace of new development technologies, processes and tools present a big challenge to keep up with, software quality has its roots in Application Lifecycle Best Practices, which is usually independent from the latter. Are you consulting or part of an organization which is constantly under release stress? Are you experiencing issues that make you and your developers less productive? You know that there are issues and potential for improvement but you don’t know where to start? If yes, the Rangers ALM Assessment is for you. Also see DevOps Self Assessment and ALM Catalyst Assessment.

DevOps Deployment guidance is based around build once, and deploy to multiple environments.  The ALM Rangers introduced the DevOps Workbench sample companion solution and practical guidance in collaboration with the Patterns & Practices book Building a Release Pipeline with TFS , as a great way to start learning the concepts of DevOps & Release Management for TFS 2012 and to kick the tires.

Provides a master catalogue (treasure map) of the available ALM Readiness content to guide us through the process of becoming proficient in ALM practices.

The Build Release and Deploy (BRD) Lite is a set of build process reference templates that allows you to quickly setup a real-world build process in your environment.

Perfecto Mobile's unique cloud-based approach to mobile quality enablement, based on real devices and powerful ScriptOnce automation capabilities, complements Microsoft's vision for and end-to-end mobile ALM.  This project contains an overview poster, a practical guidance document, and a hands on lab that will enable understanding of the integration of the Perfecto MobileCloud for TFS and Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server.

| Simplifies the process of determining ownership of a file.

Lab Management Guide

Practical guidance for VS Lab Management.

Offers teams that are new to Kanban and teams that are using a manual, paper-based Kanban board, guidance and tool support for Kanban in Team Foundation Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2012.

NOTE - The Kanban board has been added as a feature to TFS 2012 Update 2 which is available for download as a preview.

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers Ruck process evolved and used by the geographically dispersed and virtual ALM Rangers project teams.

Switch to our free Managing Agile OSS Projects with Microsoft VSO eBook (PDF).

  | Print cards from your Kanban board for use on a physical board.

The Visual Studio Team System Project Server 2007 Connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities of VSTS with Project Server 2007. It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution.

  | Show area path dependencies a team has with other teams.

This tool takes a SQL Profiler trace file and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of database calls found in the trace file. The unit test is designed to be used in a Visual Studio Load Test. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing.

Includes hands-on lab guidance for the customization, deployment of Team Foundation Build.

The Team Foundation Server 2010 Monitoring Management Pack delivers the capabilities for professional monitoring and management of Team Foundation Server 2010 infrastructure components.

Implement a consistent branching model as part of team project or team creation process, that complies with the Branching and Merging Guide.

The TFS Integration Platform is a project that facilitates the development of tools that integrate TFS with other systems

Practical guidance for Work Item Tracking (WIT) and Process Template customizations.

Command line utility, such as TFSSecurity.exe , to add Teams and Team members to a Team Project.

The Team Foundation Server Word Add-in sample allows you to import work items from a Team Foundation Server Team Project and generate professional-looking Word document from TFS Work items. Find latest sample here.

Once you’ve moved to Visual Studio 2012, what’s a dev to do without the Create Unit Tests feature? Based on the high demand on User Voice for this feature to be restored, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers have introduced the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension. The extension adds the “create unit test” feature back, with a focus on automating project creation, adding references and generating stubs, extensibility, and targeting of multiple test frameworks.

NOTE -  This feature has been reintroduced with Visual Studio 2015.

Guidance and a reference implementation of a software solution that automates the creation of Microsoft environments, in particular Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

Scenarios and FAQs for modeling tools and understanding and reverse engineering an existing application or starting a new application from scratch.

Practical guidance and tooling for the Visual Studio Coded UI Microsoft Word Plug-in, which extends the Coded UI feature support to Microsoft Word documents. Find latest sample here.

Practical guidance for Visual Studio 2010 database projects.

The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around Visual Studio Team Test.

An overview of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server in the form of compact, quick reference sheets. Users who are unfamiliar with Visual Studio get a “quick” overview of features, value and associated Rangers guidance.

This tool takes a WCF trace file and a WCF client proxy, or a WCF interface contract, and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of calls found in the trace file. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing. Find latest sample here.

Feedback

Are we missing any solution in this consolidated library? If yes, please contact us with the details.

For a list of contributors for these solutions please visit Contributors of tooling and guidance solutions (aka.ms/vsarimpact).

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2015
  The new look is very smooth.  I like it.  :)

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2017
  I am looking for the replacement to the "Visual Studio Database Guide". is there one?

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2017
    The latest 2010 version can be downloaded from here. We have no plans to update or replace this guidance with a new version. Can you elaborate on what you're looking for?
    • Anonymous
      May 05, 2017
      I am looking for Best practices with SQL objects and Source Control and Large team management of deployment.

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2019
  Where can the original TFS 2012 Branching Guide be found. all the links I'm finding point to the new cloud or GIT based documents. I am still managing a 2012 instance and need to get the original document.