Visual Studio Team System 2010 CTP available!

For the benefit of those, who missed the huge announcements in the blogs and are not at the PDC, among other great things unveiled CTP of Visual Studio 2010 is available!

To get maximum fun out of CTP, here are several links

• Download VPC 2007 and SP1 for VPC
• Download CTP (available as 7.2 Gb zipped VPC 2007 image)
• Read Jeff Beehler’s announcement with list of walk-throughs
• Read Brian Keller’s post on working around time bombs and other trial artifacts in the CTP image [since retail version of the software are used, Windows Server 2008 and Office in CTP will behave in trial mode. VS 2010 version will expire on January 2009]. Good supplement is Buck Hodges’ post on extending trial of Windows Server 2008

Now, few additional helpful notes

• Make sure that you have undo disks set up (by the way, works fine for me with Virtual Server as well), so when you mess up something in the CTP, or hit maximum trial uses limit for office you can easily rollback
• Note, that Hyper-V is not officially supported with CTP image release. Though some people are known to successfully set it up, it ain’t that easy
• When looking at CTP, to get maximally friendly expirience  make sure you follow the walk-throughs. Current CTP is not in the state, where you can go anywhere and do anything

And don’t forget to let guys at MS know, what you think! There is whole set of forums dedicated for the purpose.

Back To Future - Short File Names in TFS

Today I got reminded of something that I wanted to write about quite a while ago (when TFS 2005 was all the rage).

If you have legacy projects, chances are you have some DOS-style 8.3 file names. Not that there’s anything wrong with that... However, you might hit a problem when you start putting these files into TFS. That is, if you have certain file (say parameters.xml) under source control, and have another file with short file name (i.e. parame~1.xml) under the same folder – then you have a problem, since TFS 2005 will become confused when you get files from that folder (that’s how I know about these SF names – in my case there was a file and a subfolder with the same short name). There is wonderfully explicit knowledge base support article (KB 947649) on the topic.

Interesting fact that I did not know before today is that in TFS 2008 you will not have that problem anymore, since you will not be able to add SFN files. However, the data that already is in the repository can still exhibit the weird behavior.

Now, you are going to say that the scenario described above is extremely rare occasion. Yes, it is and this is a good news. But if you have some legacy DOS 8.3 file names stored up in VSS, conversion from VSS to TFS 2008 will not work now, since the short file names are not supported anymore. There is workaround for that described in another wonderfully explicit knowledge base support article (KB 951195).

And finally, there is a whole lot of useful (if a little bit outdated) information on Microsoft Support [make a note to check there often for 2008 stuff].

StyleCop 4.3 Checkin Policy version 1.2

Since the last release of the policy, I have received several comments that required attention, and finally I was able to make changes to the code.

Version 1.2 of the policy is available as MSI installer or as zipped source code (available AS IS), and contains the following new features:

• Ability to import settings from existing *.StyleCop settings file when creating new policy
• Support for VS projects placed under solution folders
• Every StyleCop analysis violation is displayed as separate check-in policy violation; summary window is still available when double clicking the policy violation

Using the occasion, I would like to touch upon some points in policy implementation detail

1. Policy needs Visual Studio to execute, since it makes use of VS extensibility to analyze only the files contained in C# projects in currently opened solution. The idea behind it is as follows: if you have an analysis violation, you should be able to fix that and then compile the code, and that can be done easily only for the current solution
2. Policy supports all flavours of C# projects in VS; I have tested most and am not aware of any unsupported projects at this time. Any feedback welcome!
3. Current version of the policy displays every analysis violation as separate check-in policy failure; however, it does not support easy navigation between policy failure and source code that caused the violation. This is the big must have feature for the next release

And talking about the next release, I am hoping to move source code to CodePlex, so it would be more easily available for modifications. Right now, if you have patches be welcome to send them in.

Related posts:
- StyleCo 4.3 Checkin Policy available
- Get New Version Of StyleCop
- StyleCop Confusion Cleared
- Source Analysis For C# Checkin Policy
- Source Analysis For C#: Custom Rules And More
- Beautify Your Code With Microsoft Source Analysis

MSBuild Extension Pack is released!

MSBuild Extension Pack is the library of over 170 MSBuild tasks including

• System Items: Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound
• Code: Assemblies, CAB Files, Code Signing, File Detokenisation, GUID’s, Mathematics, Strings, Threads, Zip
• Applications: BizTalk 2006, Email, IIS7, MSBuild, SourceSafe, StyleCop, Team Foundation Server, Visual Basic 6, WMI

The library is authored by Mike Fourie, who has been very active in custom MSBuild tasks area for the last few years. And I mean active – he was the person who single-handedly maintained well-known SDC tasks library for the last year.

You might wonder – what is so different about this new project? Several points of note:

• Extensive documentation – every task has example and a usage sample
• Uniform implementation (since all tasks are implemented off the same base classes)
• Remote execution support (where applicable)
• Novel concept of TaskAction, that provides several related functions in the same task (f. e. <Folder TaskAction=”Remove”> would remove a folder as compared with <Folder TaskAction=”Rename”> renaming folder)
• Last but not least, this project will probably have very high level of support. While MSBuild Extension Pack is stable (since it is based on several beta released of FreeToDev tasks), you still might need someone to communicate with – and judging by the awesome work Mike did with SDC tasks one might expect that the new project will be maintained well.

And if you have something to contribute, the project is at CodePlex which means that the contributors are welcome.