Category TFS

Team Foundation Server

Visual Studio

Visual Studio and Git error: “URI formats are not supported”

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

TFSRecently, while trying to synchronize with my Visual Studio Online git repository, the Visual Studio Git plugin started displaying the error “URI formats are not supported” while attempting to execute a pull operation. This appears to be an issue introduced with Update 2, and at least from my own experience only appears to be affecting Pull operations.

This issue appears to be manifesting in my case due to either a web application or WCF service application that I added to my solution and synchronized to the repository. If you’ve done something similar, you’ll probably start seeing this error as well. After this error occurs, push synchronizations will continue to work, but attempting to pull changes or use the ‘Sync’ operation on the remote repository will fail with the error message.

The issue has been reported to Microsoft back in May and a few workarounds have been posted, including a suggestion to use another tool like SourceTree to execute your repository synchronizations.

UPDATE: Microsoft has stated that this issue will be resolved in Visual Studio Update 3.

Visual Studio

How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes

Jason St-Cyr 10 Comments

TFSFor the last year or so, I’ve been living in a mostly Atlassian world: JIRA OnDemand, BitBucket, SourceTree… likely more before the year is done. Sure, I still use our on-premise TFS 2010 at work along with Visual Studio of various editions, but my ALM world has really been rocked by those gorgeous tools from Atlassian. This past Friday I should have been doing something productive (like writing a blog post) but suddenly I was captivated by the world of Visual Studio Online. Continue reading “How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes” →

A starters guide to Git for TFS GitWits…

Jason St-Cyr 1 Comment

This is a great blog post for those users who have hesitated adopting TFS as an ALM tool because of their dislike of TFS source control. René covers the advantages of using Git with TFS, and also maps it out for users who want to make the transition.

The Road to ALM

When I started my development career way back in 1999, the first Source Control System I ever used was Visual SourceSafe. After a few years I switched to SVN for a while and I liked that. The, in 2005 came Team Foundation Server and I embraced it, including the Source Control of course. And since then I must say, I really like TFS Source Control. You need to remember that the server must always know what you are doing, but once you know that and practice that it is simply a great and easy to use Version Control System.

When TFS 2012 introduced Local Workspaces, it became even better, because now all the advantages of TFS and all the advantages of a system like for example SVN were combined. The perfect world !

But then came Git. And I must say that is something different. When I first heard…

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Microsoft completes acquisition of InRelease software

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

TFSWhile I was at the ALM Summit in January, Claude from InCycle (now with Microsoft) was doing demos of their InRelease software.  The deployment software allowed for a massive amount of deployment configuration, moving a build between labs and retaining environment-specific configurations using a tokenized language.  The workflow definition for how the build should flow from environment to environment also allowed for accepting or rejecting the build.

I was impressed at the time, and obviously Microsoft was as well, since they started the process for acquiring the product a few months ago.  As of July 10th, the acquisition is official.

This means InRelease will soon become a full part of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013.  The preview download is available from the InCycle website.

Media:

TFS as perfect tool for Scrum (Part 1) – Introduction in Scrum and TFS

Jason St-Cyr 1 Comment

I’ve been using TFS 2010 and 2012 as an ALM tool for the last year and a half, and this blog post summarizes my thoughts on the good parts of the platform perfectly!

I will note that I don’t think TFS is a “perfect tool”.  Any tool has ways in which it can improve, and you can just look at the competitors in the ALM space to see where they are trying to differentiate themselves in order to see where TFS might fall short, or be missing some polish.  However, I haven’t seen any other ALM tool that covers as many aspects of the application lifecycle.  TFS may not be best-in-breed at any one task (bug reporting, source control, build management, etc.) but it can do it all in one product, which is what I like best about it.  Having a “single truth” to what is happening, instead of having it spread across multiple disparate tools.

The Road to ALM

This year I was invited again to present at Microsoft TechDays. This event is held every year in the World Forum in The Hague. This year I spoke about why TFS is the perfect tool for Scrum.

My session was about how to use TFS as tool for Scrum. I talked about the different stages of Scrum, and what TFS can do in these stages. For example, Where to put the Sprint Goal, How to Split up PBI’s etc.

For the people who speak Dutch, my session can be found on Channel 9 and the slides can be viewed here.

For all people who do not speak Dutch or who do not want to see slides or video alone this blog will be the answer. In the upcoming weeks, I will blog about this session. I will talk about how TFS can support the implementation of Scrum and…

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Dungeons and Dragons TFS Process Template

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

TFSThere was no way that I could resist downloading the D&D process template posted by the TFS product team on their blog.  I absolutely NEEDED to see what had been done inside here.  The blog post was very bare on the details, but it seems that with a few configuration changes this process template can help to make your daily work a little more fun.

Here’s what I was able to find by digging through the files in the ZIP that you can download:

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons TFS Process Template” →

Automating Sitecore Deployments with TFS and TDS

Jason St-Cyr 34 Comments

Visual StudioDuring development, your team makes a lot of changes to fields, templates, presentation details, and various other elements that need to be tracked, verified, and deployed.  You need a way to source control those database changes, and then make them available to your team to test.  Here’s how to accomplish that using Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Development for Sitecore (TDS)!

Sitecore content items in source control

Our teams use Team Development for Sitecore from Hedgehog Development to create .NET TDS projects to source control the changes we make in the Sitecore database.  There’s a great guide from Hedgehog to start with, and I’ve previously written a post on some project configuration basics.

Automating deployments of Sitecore content items

With your content items now in Source Control, you can start getting your database changes deployed along with your build.

Note: This assumes you are automating your file deployments to push code changes out to your environments.  If you aren’t yet, you should be!  Look for my upcoming posts on setting up deployment build configurations.

In order to get TFS to be able to deploy, there are a few things you need:

Continue reading “Automating Sitecore Deployments with TFS and TDS” →