Visual Studio 2010

Connect any version of Visual Studio to Azure DevOps or Azure DevOps Server

Visual Studio has been around for a long time and there are still people developing in Visual Basic 6 or Visual Studio 2008. Even if you're using a more recent IDE, you could need one or more hotfixes and/or service packs.

Team Foundation Server

Install Team Foundation Server Power Tools side-by-side

You might be connecting to multiple versions of TFS and use multiple versions of Visual Studio. Which Power tools work with which?

Azure DevOps

Codelens features and Visual Studio versions [Updated for 2013.3ctp1]

Update: Visual Studio 2013.3 CTP 1 Adds support for Git repositories! If you're as happy with the new CodeLens features in Visual Studio 2013 ultimate as I am, you've probably found out that some of the features rely on server side features. This means that some Code Lenses only

TFVC Checkin Policy

Ask a developer for confirmation in a TFS checkin policy

A TFS checkin policy can normally only be dismissed by overriding the policy. There is no way to selectively allow a user to override one, but not another policy. And there is no way to interact with the user from the Check-in dialog using custom UI other than the message,

TFVC Checkin Policy

Creating a custom check-in policy pack that works with multiple versions of Visual Studio.

Anyone who has ever tried to create a custom check-in policy for Visual Studio probably knows that the policy isn't specific to the TFS server version you're using, but to the version of Visual Studio that is connecting. This can be confusing for companies that are upgrading their Visual Studio,

XAML Build

Resharper 8.1 goes gold & Resharper CLI

For those of you who are using Resharper, version 8.1 was just released with Typescript support and better integration with Visual Studio 2013. The full release blog can be found here. With Resharper 8.1 also ships an updated version of the Resharper Commandline Interface. This allows you to

Static Analysis

Updated MSOCAF for Visual Studio Code Analysis rules

2 years ago I worked on a huge SharePoint project where we had to run the MSOCAF wizard before deployment to the production environment. And of course, every time a few rules triggered that caused huge rework efforts. So I ended up recompiling the FxCop 1.36 rules that ship

XAML Build

Change the "Sources", "Binaries" and "TestResults" folders in Team Build

Team Build by default creates 2 folders on your build agent: 2010 Sources Binaries TestResults 2012: src bin TestResults 2013: src bin tst These folder names were shortened as part of the 2012 release, partially to resolve "Path too long" issues with team build. But some of your

Team Foundation Server

Which UIEditors are available for Team Build by default

| | | Types inheriting from UITypeEditor | Recently I was asked to extend a Build Template for Team Build. There were a few fancy things which were required for this template, including picking files and folders in Source Control, selecting Work Items etc. I looked around the documentation on msdn.microsoft.com, but

TFVC Checkin Policy

Which Check-in policies do you use with your projects?

Team Foundation Server allows an administrator to define a Check-in policy to ensure all code that is checked in conforms to a certain standard and that a minimal set of quality attributes have been applied to that code. Not all of these policies make sense in every situation and implementing

Visual Studio 2012

Red-Gate releases Reflector 8.0

Red-Gate just released Reflector 8.0. Not with a lot of fanfare, as I only noticed because my Early Access Program Build wouldn't start and because there was no new EAP build available to download. They improved searching and filtering inside Reflector by introducing a filter bar in the tree

Team Foundation Server

Updating your Team Foundation Service Uri to the new tfs.visualstudio.com

Microsoft has decided that the Team Foundation Service (I'll start calling it TFSvc for short) has had enough testing and that it is now live and out of preview. They've also put it under a new domain name, tfs.visualstudio.com. The old domain tfspreview.com will remain operational for

Azure DevOps

Quickly generate Work Item Query for use in the TFS API

Some time ago I responded to a question on StackOverflow regarding a couple of ways to optimize a team query. The query was used in from the TFS Client Object Model and one of the things that was clear from the way the original code was formatted, was that the

Tools

Red-Gate silently releases 7.6.0.808 version of Reflector

It looks like Red-gate pushed out their new version a little in advance of the official announcement. When you download the latest version from their site you will get 7.6.0.808, the new version that includes The new installer experience. Better support for SharePoint. It's very limited so

Team Foundation Server

Just-in-time updating of source files in an existing solution

Today a developer on my team tried to create an MsBuild task that would re-generate a few generated files during a Rebuild or as part of a Clean. Turned out to be a lot harder than we expected and it was mostly caused by an unknown feature that speeds up

Team Foundation Server

Why I like TFS :)

As a response to Joe Ferner's post on why he dislikes TFS. I'll first touch upon the items brought forward by Joe. Some of them are just true, and I won't put too much effort in those, but some I just don't agree with. Joe's complaints CodePlex -- First there

Visual Studio 2012

Speaking at the dutch TechDays conference

Thanks to all the votes my readers, followers and colleagues have put on my wildcard talk at the dutch Techdays website, I'll be speaking about the (code) review features of the upcoming version of Visual Studio. I'll also include a look back on how to do code reviews in VS2010

Team Foundation Server

Solving: MSBUILD : error : Unable to read Code Analysis output report. Make sure that the directory is writable (default is the project output directory).

Today a new error popped up in Team Build. One we've never seen before and one that doesn't happen in Visual Studio during the build. The error was: MSBUILD : error : Unable to read Code Analysis output report. Make sure that the directory is writable (default is the project output directory)

XAML Build

Funny issue with Code Coverage and Reflection

Just stumbled upon a tricky change which happens to your assemblies when you're running your tests with Code Coverage enabled. Take the following piece of code: var types = typeof(Program).Assembly.GetExportedTypes(); foreach (Type t in types) { // ... } In our case the behavior of the code under test changed completely between

.NET

Windows Azure Appfabric RelayConfigurationInstaller and FileNotFoundException

After installing the 1.6 version of the Azure SDK I tried re-registering the service bus bindings to the machine.config. In v1.5 this was pretty easy, open an command prompt (with admin privileges) and run "RelayConfigurationInstaller /i". The documentation for this tool hasn't been updated for

XAML Build

Referencing Public/Private/Reference Assemblies folder from your project

When you're working on Code Analysis Rules, Custom build activities, MSBuild tasks or anything that integrates directly in Team Build or Visual Studio for that matter, you often need to reference assemblies that ship with Visual Studio. These assemblies are usually stored somewhere in the Visual Studio installation path. Now

Team Foundation Server

Things that make your unit tests unreliable

Over the past few months I've come across a lot of Unit Tests that triggered all kinds of crazy corner cases inside mstest. The most interesting observation is that the behavior inside Visual Studio is often different (or doesn't occur) than in Team Build when this happens. This post will

Team Foundation Server

Helpful Visual Studio Add-ins

Over the past years I've found myself to rely more and more on a number of very handy, some well known, Visual Studio add-ins. I've split this list into two parts, the free and the paid tools: Team Foundation Power Tools [link] [free] These tools are now installed on our

Static Analysis

FxCopContrib project and DoNotIgnoreResultOfImmutableMethods custom rule

Already a month ago I needed a place to store the code of the FxCop rules I was working on. I ended up at Codeplex, not only because they offer native TFS integration, but also because I hope others will join in on the effort. As of this moment, the

Static Analysis

Have your Custom CodeAnalysis rule integrate properly with Visual Studio

After porting the MSOCAF rules to FxCop 10, I noticed that you can't use the "Suppress in Source" option. Only the option "Suppress in Project suppression file" is available. Another problem with the global suppression is that it isn't scoped to a type or method, basically