Help, the backlog is gone!

Just beware – if you are migrating stuff from a Team Foundation Server to Visual Studio Team Services, it might happen that despite correctly moving all the Work Items involved in the migration you can’t see the backlog as you would expect.

But don’t panic, this doesn’t mean data is lost, it just means that data is not showing up – a completely different matter. That is confirmed by creating some custom queries asking for all of a certain type of Work Item Type (all PBIs for example): you would get all the Work Items you are looking for.

So, what is the problem here? Look at the areas: if you do not allow areas to automatically link sub-areas, your backlog is not going to show what you want.

Lots of panic for nothing

Where are TFS and VSTS heading?

This week Microsoft made published an update to the Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services roadmap, and it looks very promising.

As we already know, TFS and VSTS are an ever evolving platform. This is true for both on-premise with regular updates delivered roughly every quarter and for the cloud service, where the new features are always delivered first.

There are already a few set of features slated for TFS vNext – this is neither a surprise nor a defeat admission, the amount of work for such features is very big – think at the listed improvements for Work Item Tracking alone.

But it isn’t everything for vNext – there is a lot coming in Update 2 and Update 3 as well. The Lab Management overhaul is one of these features, coming in Update 2, like extensions on-premise and the new Release Management.

Keep an eye on that page for TFS and VSTS, because it is updated on a regular basis and it is a great source of information for planning well in advance.

A cryptic story around Git, VSTS and Azure Active Directory

This is a short and easy tip with an interesting background.

If you try to push stuff to a Git repository hosted in a VSTS account, where this account is backed by Azure Active Directory and you are not logged on with the relevant credentials, you are going to get a quite cryptic error:

The Output window is not quite helpful either:

 
What is going on here? The reason, as I stated, is simple – I wasn’t using the right credentials. But the problem is that Visual Studio is not warning me, while instead the command line would just ask for the credentials.
One of these things you need to just know, I assume