Behind the scenes of the Work Items’ states: Team Foundation Server Metastates

Despite present since the RTM version, the metastates became notorious to the mainstream after the introduction of the Kanban Board. Why? Let’s see…

 

New, Approved, Committed and Done are metastates. Have you ever heard about them before? I don’t think so J

They are not something particular, but just an aggregator of various states for Work Item Types. Metastates are defined into the Process Template of course, in our case just for the Product Backlog Item Work Items:

As we see, we can have a Proposed (state) Work Item which can be either New or Approved.

This is the easiest sample, you can customize the board to show more metastates, you can report against them, and much more.

Web Access Licensing for dummies

With Team Foundation Server 2012 the licensing became way easier, in order to have a clearer path of adoption for the involved features. One big example of that is the new Web Access.

The new Team Web Access now features three levels of information access, dependent on the CAL you have:

These three levels exposes a different set of information to the user.

A user acceding the Web Access with a Limited Access level is roughly the same as the old Work Item Only View in Team System Web Access, so the user can access to what belongs to him without the need of a CAL.

The Standard level is for who has access to Visual Studio 2012 Professional, and it adds all the standard Web Access features plus the Agile Boards introduced with the 2012 release.

The Full level is for who has access to Visual Studio 2012 Premium and above, it enables every feature of the Web Access, so the Backlog Management Tools, the Feedback Management and – with the Update 2 – the Web Test Case Management.

A clarification on the Team Foundation Server Integration Platform support

Often many people think that as the Team Foundation Server Integration Platform is an open-source project, it has no support.

WRONG!

It is the only Microsoft supported solution for all the migration needs you might have.
But only if you download the Visual Studio Gallery package, which is the stable and supported version. If you have an issue with it, you can raise a call to the Customer Support Service.

If you download the Codeplex package (with the source code), you might get the betas, which are obviously not supported.

I hope this clarifies a bit around this really important topic

Solving mess on behalf of others: tf undo

Sometimes it happens the TFS Administrator has to solve problems caused by unexperienced (or untrained) users, and maybe the most common is to undo ‘ghost check-outs’.
Here’s the answer: Attrice Corporation Team Foundation Sidekicks. Cool. But sometimes you can’t use third-party tools, and you only have to rely on what Microsoft provided in the OOB installation.

So here’s the real answer, since Team Foundation Server 2005: fire the Developer Command Prompt, and launch the tf undo command with the proper switches.

Here there is the relative documentation.