Chat with Visual Studio Team System group

Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group on December 5th!

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

There will be two sessions:

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

OR

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

MSBuild team wants your feedback!

If you ever used MSBuild (and if you have Visual Studio 2005, you probably do it daily) and have ideas how to make it better, MSBuild team is asking for your opinion. And if you use mainly Team Build, that should be of interest to you too, since MSBuild is the engine used to execute all builds.

Dan Moseley recently wrote a post that lists 11 propositions for future MSBuild features (though they numbered from 1 to 12 with number ten missing - I guess ten is unlucky number for MSBuild :). You can spend virtual $100 to rate the propositions and root for the features dear to you.

I urge you to go over there and vote with your money!

Changeset - a unit or set of items?

I came across this post on forums, and thought it is worth to elaborate a bit.

In a nutshell - when you merge from path X to path Y, and specify certain changeset to merge, will all files in the changeset will be merged from X to Y? The answer: no, only files that both under X and in the changeset will be merged.

From one point of view, it is not very logical, since when you select a changeset you probably trying to merge all changes in it. On the other hand, you explicitly specify source and destination path and expect to merge items only under path, so if you look at changeset as a specification of versions to include in the process, rather than as a "container" unit of sorts, the results are logical.

Another changeset usage that I have found to be puzzling for some users, is specifying changeset for "Get specific version". Again, many people assume that changeset here behaves as a unit, and expect to get only files included in the changeset. But changeset instead behaves as mere date/time specification, and therefore versions relevant for that changeset timestamp will be retrieved for all files in the specified path.

Overall, those nuances are pretty important to be aware of (especially if explained to the users in advance).

How to extend TFS-related menus in VS

I wrote a while ago about extending TFS-related menus, and as a follow up just wanted to elaborate a bit.

Usually, the problem with adding menus related to TFS is that the parent menu GUIDs/command IDs are not well known. For example, the following post describes typical problem.

But once the GUID:id pair is known, adding the menus is a no brainer. The easiest approach I have found so far is to use EnableVSIPLogging registry setting. That simple setting may save countless hours full of frustration (and I am speaking from experience :).

And those IDs is not something that will change within same version of VS (though for 2008 probably some testing will be required).