Configure PreEmptive Analytics for Team Foundation Server 11

As I previously talked about, PreEmptive included an instrumentation and analysis tool for Team Foundation Server.

After you install it, it’s needed a little bit of configuration. So you have to open the PreEmptive Analytics Aggregator Administration Console:

On the left side, click on the + sign to add a Team Foundation Server.

After that, the form is populated with the data from TFS. You need to deploy the PA items then:

This operation adds a Work Item Definition, a query, and two reports if reporting services are found:

After that, you might have to configure the Exception Sets caught by PA, but that’s not required.

Limits: the PA Community Edition includes just one Team Project Collection monitoring and two Team Project inside it. It can only record unhandled exceptions and there is a three exception rules limit.

Step by step configuration of the Team Foundation Server and Project Server Integration Feature Pack

This post is aimed at helping who has never configured the Team Foundation Server and Project Server integration

First of all: do not use NT AUTHORITY\Network Service as a service account.

After this sanity check, the prerequisites: a Team Foundation Server 2010 or above, a Project Server 2007 or 2010, and the Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 and Microsoft Project Server Integration Feature Pack (FP for us , it must be installed on the servers)

Then, the configuration. It’s a four steps procedure, from the Visual Studio command prompt.

First: I register the Project Web Access with the Team Foundation Server.

Second: I map the Project Web Access with the Project Collection I need.

Third: I load the field mapping.

Fourth: I map the Project Server’s Enterprise Project to the Team Foundation Server’s Team Project

That’s it

How to run local Web and Performance tests with Visual Studio 11

In Visual Studio 2010 to run Web Tests or Performance Tests you were editing locally, you had to run them from the Test menu, telling Visual Studio itself to pick up the local.testsettings file.

In Visual Studio 11 everything has been reshaped, and now it’s only needed to tick the Active Load and Web Test Settings flag, after right-clicking on the Test Settings file.

Team Foundation Server upgrade of April 27th: what changed?

April 27th Team Foundation Service got upgraded to a new version. As you know (and if not, I’m going to explain now ), Team Foundation Service doesn’t have a RTM – GDR – Service Pack maintenance cycle, but every update is rolled out with a cadence of circa a month/five weeks.

Then, there are some new UIs…

You can now reorder your backlog using the Alt+Up/Down combination.

The taskboard has been improved for touchscreens.

You can filter your areas and iterations, really useful for large projects.

They removed the identity screen in most all cases, letting you automatically sign in with Windows Live. Why that? They found out some bugs because it was just a view to live.com, so for instance in Visual Studio it didn’t properly work. They’re now working on fixing it (remember: they already support other providers apart from Windows Live ID, because they use Windows Azure ACS, but this capability is currently disabled).

There’s now the Windows Azure 1.6 on the Hosted Build machines.

That’s it

Standard Environment in Visual Studio ALM 11 using Workgroup machines

As I mentioned before, there’s the possibility of creating Standard Environments using Workgroup-joined machines and not just domain-joined machines.

All you need is to use Shadow Accounts (ie. “DOMAIN\account” and “account” on the local machine, or both “account”), better in the form .\account.

The magic is behind that is really easy: as the Microsoft’s KB says, “…NetLogon does not differentiate between a nonexistent domain, an untrusted domain, and an incorrectly typed domain name.”.

So if you use the same account&password couple, you won’t have problems in using them in Standard Environments