A few catches on customising the new Work Item form

If you use Team Foundation Server 2017 you already know this:

The new form is brilliant: it makes a much better use of the screen space, with a better UX in general.

But what if you have forms that were already using customised fields and a specific arrangement of controls?

The answer is that Microsoft uses a best-effort transformation system to automatically migrate your old form to the new, but for some reason I found myself in this situation – these two tabs won’t migrate to the new layout.

The new customisation model is brilliant – everything is now much cleaner and easier to use. All you need to do is add what you want to the <WebLayout> tag:

You can see that you now have Page, Group, Section as containers for controls, making life actually much easier when it comes to customisation. In my case I added two new Pages with the relevant control in there:

Of course you can customise the display layout by using the LayoutMode attribute. All the documentation is available here.

How to encrypt your Team Foundation Server data tier

For all sorts of reasons (including GDPR looming on you) you might feel the need to encrypt your Team Foundation Server databases. Proper encryption at rest.

I realised this is not a really well documented scenario, but it is surprisingly easy to achieve.

What you need to do is leverage SQL Server TDE (Transparent Data Encryption), which is out-of-the-box since SQL Server 2008 onwards. It acts at page level and it is transparent, with little overhead.

The process of enabling TDE is very well documented, and it is based off two keys (the master key and the encryption key) and a certificate. It is very straightforward if you have a single server as a data tier, off you go.

Now, this gets slightly more complicated if you have (like me ) AlwaysOn protecting your High Availability. Well, complicated if it is the first time you approach the topic.

Working with AlwaysOn requires:

• On the Primary Replica - creating the master key, the certificate and the encryption key. Remember to backup the master key and the certificate.
• On the Secondary Replica - creating the master key and the certificate. The certificate must be created from the backup of the Primary Replica!

After these two steps you can enable TDE on the database hosted on the Primary Replica, which then will propagate on the Secondary as per AlwaysOn schedule.

If your databases are already encrypted and you want to add them to an Availability Group you’ll need to do so manually – the wizard is not going to show encrypted databases to be added to the AG.

This SQLServerCentral.com article features a set of queries I found really helpful to get started.

A suggestion though: prepare a single query for the Primary Replica preparation, run it, prepare a single one for the Secondary Replica preparation, run it, and eventually encrypt from a separate query.

The reason why I say this is simple: if anything goes wrong before you encrypt the database you can easily drop the master key, the certificate or the encryption key and start again.

Eventually, remember that encryption for large databases can take a long time. During this time, the process might stop because of database size, so remember to check the logs as well so you can restart it if you need to.

Why Work Item rules are so important

I was on holiday for the last couple of weeks so I had only a limited coverage of what happened since the beginning of the month but I could not miss the release of custom Work Item rules on VSTS.

Why such an emphasis on my end? Well, because custom rules on Work Items involved fiddling with xml files and command line tools or using the Process Template Editor in Visual Studio and a UI that is a bit tough.

It is something that any TFS administrator does on a regular basis though. Now rules in VSTS can now be defined in a web UI with a consistent experience and multiple sets of conditions and actions can be defined easily in the same page.

Also, this makes involving team managers in the definition of these rules extremely easy, as there is no Visual Studio, XML, command line involved anymore.