So in case you haven’t noticed, Visual Studio Live is coming back to Chicago after many, many years of not being here.  This makes me very happy because a) I don’t have to pay for a flight and hotel in L.A. or Seattle, and b) well, see a) because cost is one factor that makes attending great conferences like this so hard to do for some of us.  Regular price of admission is $1,995 for the full 4 days, which isn’t bad when you think of all the awesome content you get.  Early bird registration ends soon and saves you $300 but wait, there’s more! Actually it’s more discount that I can give you.

In case you did not make it out to the last Chicago Visual Studio ALM User Group you may have missed out on the discount code that I was able to get for all of you.  Sign up right now using the links in this email (or the code UGCH1) and you’ll save $500 off of the $1995 registration too, so it would be only $1495 for the full 4 day pass! 

• Visual Studio Live! Chicago tracks include:
• ASP.NET
• Azure / Cloud Computing
• Cross-Platform Mobile
• Data Management
• HTML5 / JavaScript
• SharePoint / Office
• Windows 8 / WinRT
• WPF / Silverlight
• Visual Studio 2012 / .NET 4.5

So no travel costs, no hotel stay, AND save 25%. How can you NOT go? Hope to see you at our next meeting, and at VS Live Chicago this May!

Since we have used Recover on a production database and lived to tell the tale I thought I would share our experiences. If you read this post you will know that one of my client’s got themselves into a world of hurt where we needed to restore a nightly backup that was not detached.  I know, I know, detached backups, or using the TFS Database Backup Power Tool to backup and Restore, are the way to go.  Well, now THEY know that too   Nonetheless, sometimes you may find yourself needing to recover a TFS Team Project Collection (TPC) database, and if you’ve read the MSDN documentation you’ll know this is not an ideal situation. The Recover command is very lossy, BUT you get your data back. And in our case it was worth the risk.

So here is the backstory…  Someone deleted a Test Plan with a month’s worth of data in it, and if you know MTM you know there is no “undelete”. Restoring a backup was our only hope. BUT our nightly backups are SQL backups of the entire SQL Server instance, so undetached (we are addressing this NOW). The TFS Backup Power Tool does not detach the databases before backing them up, but it automates something a bit more complicated to allow you to restore single collections from a full backup. Plucking one TPC out of what we had, and attaching it to the TFS instance was just not an option.  You cannot attach a collection that thinks it is already attached.  Trust me, I know. And unfortunately we did not have extra hardware sitting around to allow us to restore the entire thing to a different instance to detach it properly.  So here is what we did:

1. Restore the backed up TPC from the nightly backup into our dev TFS environment
2. Used the TFSConfig /Recover command, followed by TFSConfig /Attach to get it attached in dev
3. Used the TFSConfig /Recover command to get the TPC into the proper state
4. Detach the hosed TPC from production
5. Restore that detached version of the TPC to production
6. Attach the backup to production (we actually hit an interesting bug in TFS 2010 at this point, so the attach was quite harrowing and involved an emergency hotfix to our TFS sprocs, I may blog about later.)

Now, I would love to say everything was perfect but the recover command did blow away some things that we had to get back into place before people could use the TPC again.  What we lost:

1. All the security setting ever!
   • Collection level groups and permissions
   • Team Project (TP) level groups and permissions in every TP in the TPC
   • Permissions around Areas and Iterations in every TP in the TPC
   • Permissions around Source Control in every TP in the TPC
2. SharePoint settings  (in every TP in the TPC). Settings on the SharePoint server themselves will be fine of course but you will probably see a “TF262600: This SharePoint site was created using a site definition…” error when you try to open the portal site that was once attached to those TPs. You will need to fix this in 2 places.
   • Go to TFS Admin Console, select the TPC you just restored and make sure the SharePoint Site settings for the TPC are correct. It will probably be set to “not configured” now.
   • Open team explorer (as an Admin user), and for each TP go to “Team Project Settings | Portal Settings” and verify everything there is correct. Ours were just plain gone so we had to enable the team project portal and reconfigure the URL.
3. SSRS Settings – this will probably be fine if you restored the database as-is but we also renamed it as part of the restore, and so had to update the Default Folder Location through the Admin Console for the TPC in order for this to work again.

So word to the wise, make sure you understand what the settings above are for all of the TPs in your TPC BEFORE you perform a Recover command because chances are you will have to manually set them all back up. And please, PLEASE backup your TFS databases properly.

So this week, we had a little bit of fun, by which I mean a day that started with panic and scrambling when someone accidentally deleted a Test Plan (yes, a whole test plan) in MTM in production. A well established test plan with dozens of test suites and over a hundred test cases with a month’s worth of result data no less... Some important things of note:

• test plans are not work items, they are just a “shell” and so are a bit easier to delete than they should be (in my opinion)
• there is no super secret command-line only undelete like there is for some artifacts in TFS, so recreate from scratch or TPC recovery are your only options here to get it back
• when you delete a test plan, you lose every test suite you had created.  Thankfully, not test cases themselves, those are safe in this situation.  Worst case, a plan can be created, although it is tedious and can be time consuming.
• when you delete a test plan, test results associated with that test plan will be deleted*. Let that sink in – ALL OF THE TEST RESULTS FOR THAT TEST PLAN, EVER, WILL ALSO BE DELETED.  ::this is why there were flailing arms and sweaty brows when it happened::

So at this point, you may be thinking it’s time to update your resume and change your phone number, but hold up. You may have some options to recover that data, so buy some donuts for your TFS admin(I like cinnamon sugar, BTW).  I should mention, there may be a lot of other options but these are the three I was weighing, and due to some things beyond my control we had to go with #2.

1) Best Case Scenario: restore your DETACHED (this is required) team project collection database from a backup, cause you’re totally taking nightly backups and using the TFS Power Tool right? You lose a little data depending on how old that backup is, but it may be more important to get back your test runs than have to redo a few hours of work.

2) Second Best Case Scenario: If you cannot lose other data, and are willing to sacrifice some test run data, then restore the TFS instance from a traditional SQL backup to a separate TFS instance (so, NOT your production instance), open up your test plan in that secondary environment, and recreate your test plan in production.  Not ideal, but if you didn’t have a ton of test runs this may be faster and you don’t sacrifice anything in SCM or WIT that was changed since the backup was taken.

3) Worst Case Scenario: if your backups were not detached when you did your last backup, cry a little, then use the recover command to re-attach them. The gist is to use the TFSConfig Recover command on the collection to make it “attachable” again, then attach it to your collection. I have written a separate post on this because it can be complicated…

Once you are back up and running, make sure rights to managing test plans is locked down!  It might not be obvious that you can even do this, or where to find it, since it is an “Areas and Iterations” level permission. But do it, do it now!  This permission controls the ability to create and delete Test Plans, so be aware of that. But for the most part, anyone with authority and knowledge to delete entire Test Plans, considering what they contain, should be the only person creating them.  If everyone needs the ability to create/delete these willy-nilly, then you are doing it wrong, in my opinion anyway.

I am still in the midst of getting this back up and running so will update once we’re finished. There is an MSDN forum post out there regarding one bug I seem to have uncovered, if anyone wants to look at it and maybe fix my world by answering it I am sure I’ll be able to add some more tips and tricks by then.

I know, Microsoft supporting non-.NET developers and non-Windows folks? Inconceivable! ::gasp:: 

OK, so if you’ve been paying attention for the past couple of years, you might already know that this has been happening slowly. But recently there have been some seriously MAJOR developments. First, Microsoft made Entity Framework open source, and now they have added MVC, ASP.NET and more to that list. Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria…and all that.  Then when you thought it couldn’t get crazier, they announced TFS integration with Git!  My head just exploded a little, how about yours?

Come to the Chicago Microsoft office on August 29th and meet one of the TFS product team members, you heard it, ONE OF THE DUDES WHO WRITES CODE FOR TFS ITSELF! Edward Thomson will be discussing how to take advantage of the new git-tf tool to synchronize a local git repository with Team Foundation Server.  This cross platform bridging tool is especially useful for cross-platform developers, such as iOS developers on Xcode.

Edward Thomson is a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, where he works on cross-platform version control tools for Team Foundation Server.  Before joining Microsoft, Edward worked on numerous source code control tools for Microsoft and Unix platforms.

Register now to make sure you get a spot. Building security also requires it, and it helps me not order gobs of food no one will show up to eat.  So help a girl out huh?

Now, I am no @ZainNab, the guru of “Tips and Tricks”, but I occasionally run across features that have been staring me in the face for YEARS and yet somehow went completely unappreciated, sometimes unnoticed.  And then one day it hits me and OMG my life is easier, and I want to tell everyone.  Sure, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit sometimes given that I worked at Microsoft for 5.5 years focusing on the Visual Studio tools, but who hasn’t done that?  Not you? Really?  I am skeptical…  There are after all, a bajillion commands to try and remember. For real, if you don’t believe me, look at the entire book that Sara Ford and Zain wrote about it. It’s worth every penny and Amazon has a great deal on it, pick up a copy!

So, back to my point. I was sitting in MTM, looking at a fairly daunting list of PBI based test suites, thinking “now which PBI’s were the ones where I had test cases to run again?”  I started thinking about writing a query, but that only helps is YOU are assigned to the test case, it doesn’t really help with test RUN assignment. Then it all came flooding back.  Wait, there’s this FILTER button to sort that out.  And conveniently it’s right there in front of my face ::face palm::  I felt a little better when no one else admitted to noticing it was there either. Maybe they were just being nice to me.  Either way, in case you didn’t notice it, check it out. Before:

After, I have MUCH fewer test suites that I have to look at:

That’s my Microsoft Test Manager tip o’ the day!  I won’t be posting them every day like Zain has been doing on his blog around Visual Studio 2010 for the past couple of years, of course I also don’t mainline 5 hour energy like he does   I will do them whenever I can.  Hope this was helpful! Feel free to post any tips of your own or shoot me a note if you have other questions or comments.

So if you’re reading this you are probably finishing up my 3 part story about updating a process template from Agile 4.2 to Agile 5.0 on a TFS 2010 server.  This is the last installment where I embarrass myself further by sharing one more stumbling block that I encountered along the way.  So now we have all of our awesome tools installed, we downloaded Hakan’s script, we got our work item definitions imported and updated, and finally added our trusty old Quality of Service Requirement to the new Requirements Category in the process template.  Everything was working beautifully until I went and tried to link a QoS Requirement to a Test Case. Cue Sad Trombone again…

This was certainly not handled in any script, and I couldn’t find any documentation of it on MSDN, so hey, maybe this is something actually NEW in terms of guidance   As soon as I saw this I knew what was happening.  I was pretty sure that somewhere there was some XML specifying what work item types were allowable in that dropdown, and my guess was QoS Requirement was not one of them.  I would have thought it was covered in the updated TestCase.xml used by Hakan’s script, or that maybe it was using the “Requirement Category” from Cateogires’xml but that would have covered QoS Requirement.  I double checked and it was not.  Here is the xml included with the script, note only “User Story” is allowed here:

I went ahead and made a little tweak so that QoS Requirements were allowable for the “Tested User Story” functionality and re-imported the TestCase work item definition using the Power Tools.  Essentially all I had to do was add my work item type to the TypeFilter node in the XML:

And now when I click “New” or “Link To” from a TestCase work item, I have access to my Quality of Service Requirements, HUZZAH!

Now, I am sure this is intentional. I assume in most cases you really only want “User Story” type work items to be linked in this particular tab, but for our purposes this is what we are looking to do.  I was a little curious as to why Hakan’s update script did not include the User Story work item type definition…  But hey, at the end of the day I demystified some more of the “magic” going on behind the scenes in TFS.  I am currently digging in a bit more to figure out if it makes sense to add User Stories to these upgraded Team Projects as well, since there are some very different fields and metadata being collected on them.  As I mentioned before, these are mostly inactive projects I am “experimenting on” so I’d love to hear and feedback or opinions on what you have done with your own projects.

OK, one last pro tip before I go. How often do you get an error dialog from TFS or VS, and you want to Google or Bing it, but now you have to type in all of the text by hand and hope you don’t miss a letter or number?  For me, daily!  *Sometimes* you can copy and paste the test, sometimes there is even a tool or link to let you copy it, but often times you are on your own. I totally ran into this on accident the other day.  So in OneNote you have a great screen capture tool that will work in any app, even on the desktop.  Make sure you have opened the OneNote app at least once, and seriously if you haven’t you’re crazy cause it’s the only tool I use for taking and sharing notes.  Hit Control+S, drag the cross hair around what you want to capture and let go. Copy the image to your clipboard and paste anywhere.  Cool huh? It gets better.  I noticed if you right click an image, you get the option to “Copy text from picture”. I saw that and thought, “no way that works!”, and lo and behold it does.

You’re welcome

That’s it for now, hope you learned something in reading about my adventures in process template upgrading.

Part 1 – Process and Tools

Part 2 – Field Mismatches

So hopefully you’ve already scanned through this other post where I cover the overall process I used for doing my updates. It also has some great tips and tricks for making the whole job easier using a few free tools, as well as a few links to helpful blogs and MSDN resources to save your sanity! So, that being said, here are some of the issues I encountered during my upgrade, and how I was able to work around or fix them.  Again if you are using Hakan’s script and just running as-is, you might not see some of these errors.  I just figure you learn more by screwing up, and I was working with some test projects and so had the luxury of being able to try out several different strategies without affecting anything critical, and so I did a lot of things by hand first.

First stumbling block I encountered during the upgrade was a weird issue with inconsistent “friendly names” for some of the fields.  Essentially, I had some naming collisions when I tried to import some of the new artifacts like SharedStep.xml and TestCase.xml.  You might at some point encounter an error message similar to “TF26177: The field XxxXxx cannot be renamed from ‘XxxXxx’ to ‘Xxx Xxx ’.” In other words, “Area ID” vs. “AreaID”, “Iteration ID” vs. “IterationID” and a few others.

The ones I was importing had field names that didn’t match EXACTLY. Now I started thinking, “But I am just re-uploading the work item type definitions that TFS was ALREADY using. They should be exactly the same right?”.  I opened up the work item type definitions (thank you TFS Power Tools) and found that indeed, some of the field names did NOT match the ones on the server. You’ll note in the screen shot below that in just a handful of cases, a blank character was missing from the field name, so the import process sees this as a rename attempt. You are looking at a new Agile 5.0 Team Project work item definition on the right, and the standard Agile 5.0 Team Project work item definition used to create that new project on the left.

In essence, what I ended up having to do to rectify this was to go in and modify the work item template definitions for the appropriate work items to ensure that the field names being imported matched the field names on the server, before attempting to import them again. For me, it was an issue in both the ShareStep and TestCase work item type definitions, but certainly didn’t take long to fix.  Once that was done, I had success! 

UPDATE: Turns out some of the fields being used were of course already defined on the server from the previous implementation of TFS 2008, and when TFS 2010 was released a few of the names had been altered slightly. After struggling with this for an hour or two and somehow not running across the documentation stating that this was a known issue, I eventually figured out the fix on my own.  Today, I was kindly pointed to a couple of places where this was documented, including a post by Gregg Borr that was pretty much written specifically to address this very situation ::facepalm::

Last thing we need to do is update the categories.xml. Silly me tried just importing the Categories.xml from the Agile 5.0 template which will of course NOT work because 4.2 requirements were named a bit differently than 5.0 ones.  You’ll see something starting with “TF237059: The import of the category definition failed” because the new Categories.xml will refer to “User Story” and what you have is a “Quality of Service Requirement”.  I opened up the XML provided with Hakan’s script because I was wanted to verify what was happening, and what I was doing wrong, and was not shocked to see that it was essentially updating the “Requirement Category” to support the new world order of work item types. RTFM Angela, RTFM.  Here is what you will see in Hakan’s updated Categories.xml file:

So now my categories were imported correctly and I was feeling good but had to do some testing as I was SURE I would encounter some additional problems once I dug into Visual Studio and Microsoft Test Manager and started creating work item types in the new and improved Agile 5.0ish Team project.  It was definitely a trip seeing the co-mingling of the 2 versions of the Agile template in the Team Explorer:

For the most part this all “just worked”. I created work item types, linked them together, created hierarchies, opened them in Project and Excel and made changes and published. Life was good.  And then I tried to link a TestCase to a “requirement” in my new world. Wah, wah, wah, waaaaaaaah.  Check out my third post for details on how I managed to fix this.  Again, it could very well have been something I did wrong but it was a lesson learned…

Part 3 – Swapping in QoS Requirement for User Story

So, I am NOT calling myself the absolute guru of Team Foundation Server work item tracking or process template upgrades just yet, but I did learn a ton during the process and wanted to share my experience in case you can glean some wisdom from it.  Now I leveraged a LOT of content written by other VERY smart people from the TFS product teams so I try to be sure to give credit where credit is due. I experienced some bumps and bruises along the way because I was following at least 5 different sources on the internet for the upgrade and they did not all contain the exact same info.  Since the same things might trip you up, give the post a quick run-through all the way to the end.  I know it’s a lot to sort through, but you’ve probably played Mine Craft for hours at a time so I am sure you can handle this. Also, I broke it into 3 parts since there is so much to cover and it WAS getting a bit ridiculous, even for me  

We (Polaris Solutions) have a TFS 2010 instance that has a lot of legacy TFS 2008/Agile 4.2 Team Projects on it. I have been working on getting all of those projects upgraded to be more in line with the newest Agile 5.0 templates so that we can take advantage of some of the great features of TFS 2010 like Test Case management, hierarchical work items, new relationship types, and more. Now my life was made easier by the fact that this particular instance was not running SSAS/SSRS or SharePoint, and the original Agile 4.2 templates were unaltered, so really I was only concerned with making basic updates to the process templates and didn’t have to deal with reporting, merging customizations, or enabling the agile planning workbooks. But I still ran into some snags…

So, first thing is first, dump that chump command line and get a more functional one. You’ll spend some time at the command line so might as well not have it be painful.  I seriously owe Scott a big box of Sugar free brownies or something for this. Rocked my world!  If you’re not a fan of the command line, download the TFS 2010 Power Tools which will give you a lovely GUI interface for doing things like downloading your process templates and exporting/importing work item definitions and global types.  I actually switch between them depending on the task.  Also, the Power Tools just got updated in December of 2011, and some of the new features will bring a tear to your eye.

Next, download Hakan’s update script. Make note that you must be upgrading from a virgin Agile 4.2  process template to a 5.0 one to be able to just run it and be more or less done. If you have some customizations the script will still come in handy but you may need to tweak it, or reverse engineer your customizations back into the resulting template. Hope you documented all those changes, hehe. But don’t panic, the first thing his script does is back up your original template before changing it. Like I said, he’s a smart dude.  Here is what you will see when you grab the zip file and unpack it:

It includes a batch script to execute all of the necessary backup and import operations, a new Categories definition, 2 new link types (TestedBy and SharedStep), and new (SharedStep, TestCase) and updated (Bug, Scenarios, Task) work item definitions. Even if you decide not to use his script, these files could come in handy for manual updates as well, so I suggest grabbing it nonetheless.

Now honestly, I’m not one for blindly running ANY script, even one written by someone as awesome as Hakan, so I dug through his script line by line, looked at the artifacts it used, and compared it to the documentation on MSDN for updating old process templates to leverage new functionality.  I realized that the first couple of steps could be skipped altogether since I had some TFS 2010 projects in that collection already, and so things like categories and link types already existed.  You will see in a later post that this bit me in the butt Uploading any of the template artifacts using Hakan’s script won’t hurt anything so long as you haven’t modified the ones on the server, import = overwrite in this case.  I did a lot of it by hand at first, using my spiffy new command line tool and the power tools just so I would understand better what was happening.  Once I was comfortable with that, I updated another project using Hakan’s script. Much faster process and way fewer errors, shocking right? Hehe.  I did run into a couple of errors that the script could not handle; one that I address in my next post that has to do with some “friendly name” value changes between 2008 and 2010, and another having to do with something that may or may not be a standard practice which I address in my third post.   For now my process is to start with Hakan’s script to get the imports done quickly, then make manual tweaks to bring the template the rest of the way in line to what we need. 

Now if unlike me you do also have SSRS/SSAS and SharePoint installed and need to turn on some other features, check out Aaron’s post and Allen Clark’s post on how to finish up the upgrade. Like I said, mine was a little less involved but those articles are widely held as THE ones to use as a guide if you find yourself in this situation as well. Hopefully I sprinkled in some tips and tricks to help you out as well

One last thing you absolutely should have any time you need to work with process templates is a good compare tool.  I ran across 2 tools used for visualizing process template artifacts that saved my butt!  The first is the “Team Project Manager Tool” on CodePlex. Gives you a quick and easy way to look the XML in your template, do quick comparisons, but also includes tools to help you visualize/manage build templates, security and even source control. I love this tool SO MUCH!

And while in this instance I did not need it as much, the TFS Rangers Integration Platform Mapping Tool is a pretty neat tool and came in pretty handy too. When I had an instance where I wanted to quickly compare two WIT definitions and see how the fields mapped and where there were differences, it had some great visualization capabilities:

Well that’s it for my process and tools bit.  I have 2 more posts that cover issues I ran into with field mismatches, and making changes to allow for QoS requirement work items to take the place of User Story work items. They will be posted shortly!

Part 2 – Field Mismatches

Part 3 – Swapping in QoS Requirement for User Story

If you are joining us in Chicago this Wednesday for the VS 11 load fest, I am assuming your plan is to install the bits and get your hands dirty as quickly as possible. We will have a few external hard drives that we can pass around to make getting the bits on to your machine fast and easy, but if you don’t want to wait that long you can also get the bits in a number of places on-line.

If you don’t have the luxury of a PC you can install the Beta bits on, there is also the option of using great Hyper-V image that Brian Keller posted to his blog a couple of weeks ago. It includes VS 11 Ultimate Beta, TFS 11 Beta and Test Pro 11. It even includes some great Hands on Labs to walk you through some of the new capabilities. If you have Windows 8 or Windows Server running, this is by far the fastest and easiest way to get your hands on it.

If you don’t have MSDN, you are in luck because the VS 11 Beta became publically available on February 29^th.  All freely available VS 11 Beta Tools can be found here.  The list of available bits can be overwhelming so at a minimum I would install:

· One of the server versions:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Team Foundation Server Express Beta
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Team Foundation Server Beta
• You can also connect VS 11 Beta to a TFS preview account but YMMV based on the quality of the internet connection: http://tfspreview.com/

· One of the Visual Studio IDEs

• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Professional Beta
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Premium Beta
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Beta

· One of the Team Explorer Clients

• Team Explorer for Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta - if you are on Windows and/or are developing in Visual Studio
• Microsoft Team Explorer Everywhere 11 Beta - if you are using Mac, Linux, Unix or developing in Eclipse

· If you want to get crazy, here are 2 other great tools to try out:

• Feedback Client for Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Test Professional Beta

If you do have an MSDN subscription, you have a slightly wider range of bits available to you.  Login to your MSDN subscription here and go to Subscriber Downloads where you will have access to all of the bits for the various products.  If you don’t have an MSDN subscription or are wondering “why on earth would I want one?”, I spent a little time on my blog today waxing philosophical on that point for you J

Looking forward to seeing you Wednesday, and please don’t forget to email me if you need to back out so we can adjust the food order! And if you haven’t RSVPd yet, what are you waiting for?