VSTS Chat Transcript (Experts) – Team Foundation Server – January 26, 2005

Q: What Windows/AD permissions does an AD User need to connect to TFS?

A: You need to be granted access to connect to the TFS. You’ll need a domain account in an AD enviornment or a local account in a workgroup environment. Authentication is handled via Windows integrated authentication. Authorization is handled by TFS.

Q: Will MSDN Cover the licensing for TFS, or how will that work? Is it a solution thats viable for a smaller team (10-15 developers) without a large budget?

A: No, you will have to purchase TFS separately. Pricing is not yet established, but it will be viable for a 10-15 developer team.

Q: Is Sql server 2005 is necessary for tfs in the final release?

A: Yes. SQL Server 2005 is used now and will be part of the V1 solution.

Q: The TFS groups Global Namespace Admins, Global TFS Everyone, Global Service Accounts, Project Administrators, Project Contributor, Project Reader are built-in. Are these groups stored in ADAM or SQL? (repost to ‘Submit a Question’)

A: They’re stored in ADAM – and synced down to SQL databases.

Q: Akashm – what platforms will you be building migration tools?

A: We are developing converter tools for Visual Source Safe and Clearcase to Team Foundation Version Control.

Q: Can you categorize projects? If I have a large enterprise, I might want one huge scaled TFS with all projects. If so, how would I organize them?

A: Not in V1. All your team projects will show up in alphabetical order in the team explorer.

Q: is team system an overkill for a group of 10 – 15 ?

A: No. <5 would be overkill

Q: When creating a new team project and branching, can you move over work items?

A: It will be possible to copy a work item from one project to another, but move did not make V1.

Q: When do you plan to rename the databases and Web services? They are still codenames!

A: We will scrub the codenames after Beta 2.

Q: Any converter for StarTeam?

A: We’ll have ClearCase and VSS for sure. Others will come over time as demand requires. It is of course possible to get the latest out to the file system and move into TFS.

Q: Still the constraint that VSTS is the only app on the SQL2005 box? How about just an instance?

A: VSTF uses the default instance of SQL.

Q: Does source control store each version of the file, or only differences?

A: Version control store the differences in the database for each version getting checked in for that file.

Q: Any converter for StarTeam?

A: We do not have plans for converter from starteam yet;;

Q: Can you limit the resource list in MS Project when working with work items. It seems to pull from AD?

A: Yes. The list of users is not pulled directly from AD even though that may appear to be the case in the current tech preview releases. The list is actually drawn indirectly from TFS Groups. The set of all users in all TFS Groups is the default list of users available in MS Proj. This list can be constrained by adding additional rules to the Work Item definition to further scope the set of users that are available.

Q: How about the extensibility of Team Foundation? I mean can we use it with some other dev system, like a Java dev system?

A: Team Foundation has a set of extensbility APIs for other tools to plug into. The APIs are rich but have a .NET dependency.

Q: Can TFS be load balanced (Scale-out)? It’s just ASP.NET, right?

A: There is both application tier and data tier components to TFS. On the AT it is primarily web services. We will not be supporting NLB clusters for the AT as we store session state in memory. For the data tier we’ll be 100% SQL backed by the time we ship. We looking at what if anything additional we would need to do to support failover scenarios.

Q: I’d like to start using team system as soon as possible and wanted to know if the code versioning and bug tracking sections were stable enough for production

A: In general , we do not recommend use of these features in production for Beta 2.

Q: I’d like to start using team system as soon as possible and wanted to know if the code versioning and bug tracking sections were stable enough for production

A: We’re dogfooding this in-house today with about 80+ developers in 3 locations. We’re planning to have a small set of customers come up on Beta2. I would not go production alone at this point.

Q: Along the lines of Dan’s question, any converter for Perforce?

A: No. ClearCase/VSS are first up.

Q: Shelving stores local or remotely? do you have a choice?

A: Shelves are stored on the server, and then become available for other users of the system to “unshselve”. This is a useful way to pass changes to another developer or tester for a buddy build.

Q: Back on work items, can I copy ALL of them. let’s say V1 is done and I want V2 of my project to a new “Team Project”, can I branch source code and copy all the work items when creating the new team project?

A: Yes. As far as limits on the number of workitems we support with one copy, we haven’t set that yet.

Q: Will Team System be licensed to service providers to provide the platform to people not able to maintain thier own infrastructure?

A: The licensing for Team System has not yet been finalized. This information will be announced with Beta 2.

Q: Can I tell TFS to use an existing Sharepoint or Reporting site rather than have it create new ones?

A: We are considering this, but plan of record is no.

Q: (Follow-up) so, it’s ok to have other instances on the SQL 2005 box? How about other databases on that instance?

A: A qualified yes. As VSTF uses the default instance, there is nothing prohibiting the use of the other instances in SQL, but as with all betas, we do recommend that you do not necessarily use a beta product in combination with others.

Q: Since all/most settings are persisted in the SQL 2005 database, what would be the pros/cons of having the application tier (Web Services) on each developer’s workstation, vice having the application tier on the SQL box?

A: We will only be supporting one AT pointing to on DT for V1, so if I get this question right the answer is you can’t do it. Note, you will be able to install on one server by the time we ship.

Q: You will have conversion from VSS and CC; what about for bug tracking tools?

A: Yes we have migration tool from Clearquest; We have also developing tool to import bugs/workitems from a CSV/XML files;;Most of bug tracking system provide a method to export bugs to CSV/XML format;;

Q: A question about the team test, does the test suite will cover Functional and Process testing? It seems that the current build include unit test, loading test and limited features.

A: Unfortunately, we do not have experts from the Team Test group to answer this question today. Feel free to post this question on http://blogs.msdn.com/askburton

Q: Will the version control in TFS support true branching and merging unlike the control we have with VSS?

A: It does support branching and merging. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by “true”?

Q: Is ADAM required on both the AT and DT? Will the need for ADAM be dropped eventually?

A: ADAM will just be on the DT for Beta2. We are planning to drop the dependency upon ADAM before we ship.

Q: will TFS have an integration with pwa ?

A: We don’t have plans to integration with Project Server in V1 of the Team System. We’re thinking about it for the future.

Q: Can I run unit test without install TFS? I know I can edit a unit test for some methods, but we can excute the selected unit test, it cannot run.

A: Yes, the Team Test features can be used independently of TFS.

Q: Along the lines of a converter for ClearCase, what about CVS which seems to be very dominate of the market today?

A: CVS is pretty widely used since it is open source. Would be a good open source project to build a CVS converter

Q: Shelving stores local or remotely? do you have a choice?

A: To answer the second part of the question, there is not an option to store only locally.

Q: Will we provide a view to show the relationship of the work items. for example, some work items are root of another work items.

A: Yes. We have the ability to link workitems together 1…n.

Q: will the source control system provide alerts/email notification?

A: Yes, it will provide email notifications for check-ins.

Q: How does TFS support development teams located in different countries in the world? distributed architecture?

A: We are architected to work over the internet. All client/server communications are soap over HTTP. We will be testing over high latency/low-bandwidth networks to support this scenario.

Q: I’m not asking this work item question well. How do i copy work items when creating a new project? Is it automatic when I branch? or is it manual?

A: it won’t be done automatically. You’ll have to do it manually. it was one of the things that we had to cut.

Q: Along the lines of a converter for ClearCase, what about CVS which seems to be very dominate of the market today?

A: As of now we are developing converters only for VSS and Clearcase. As we move forward we expect other ISVs to provide converter from other Source Control Tools;;

Q: Any plans to plug Hatteras into SQL Server 2005’s management studio interface as a VCC choice?

A: I haven’t heard anything about this. If you could send me email (remove _MS from my email ID) @microsoft.com. I would follow up on this.

Q: Please make a quick comparison of TFS and CVS?

A: Biggest differences are likely to be: integrated fully with the rest of the lifecycle, deeper VS GUI integration, backed by a database, shelving (a really cool feature allowing you save the state of your workspace and retrieve it later)

Q: I looked at ClearCase, which has explorer integration – Can TS source control use explorer – would it look something similar to the way that ClearCase works?

A: The Source Explorer offers this functionality

Q: We’ve invested a lot in the VSS API, how easy will it be to migrate our processes to VSTS / is there a similar API?

A: There is a managed API for TFS source control. It is different than the VSS API.

Q: laby_ms: the question was will you provide a graphical view, not does it link.

A: No graphical view will be presented. It’s just a flat list in the Form.

Q: any shot there will be a facility for unix / *nix type clients to use the source control facility

A: Take a look at my blog, there is a link to a company building unix, mac, and eclipse clients to TFS.

Q: Does the source control system provide the ability to obsolete/archive versions, files, branches, releases.

A: In short, no. However, if files are no longer needed by anyone on the team, they can be deleted. This does not remove them from the database, it simply removes them from the items that are available to be changed. If individual users do not wish to download files or branches, they can cloak the appropriate folders to prevent download.

Q: will vsts support development processes directly eg RUP ?

A: VSTS suppots MSF v4.0 which is a process framework with a SPEM-like meta-model. The product will ship with two process instances MSF Agile and MSF for CMMI Level 3.

Other partners will develop other process instances. We know that one UK partner has a Scrum instance and there will almost certainly be an Extreme Programming instance.

You would need to ask IBM whether or not they intend to provide a RUP instance for VSTS. It’s technically possible!

Q: What check-in policiess will be supported in V1? Pass unit tests? Code coverage? Others? Build my own?

A: You certainly would be able to build your own policies as required. The default policies would be decided by the Methodology template you would select for the Team project.

Q: I am not able to create a team project the message referencing Rosetta. In the general newsgroup I was asked to verify if the reports server was working. When I get to the server, I get a message “Server installation was not initialized”. Need help.

A: The December CTP does not support reporting. It will be supported by Beta2 if not early.

Q: I’m not asking this work item question well. How do i copy work items when creating a new project? Is it automatic when I branch? or is it manual?

A: There is no automatic way to copy work items from an existing project to a new team project. Users can manually do this by using the Copy Work Item… command to copy selected work items across team projects.

Q: BhavikS_MS: When I merge back in from the branch, I expect that to be kept in a record and hopefulyl viewable (as in CVS/Perforce/BitKeeper/SVN), as well file additions/removals to be automated.

A: It absolutely would be that way.

Q: TFS will conver every aspect of MSF, am I right. Say, DailyBuild, Risk Asserting and so on…

A: Yes! Is the short answer. The longer asnwer is that it depends on the process instance. If the instance doesn’t have daily build then it won’t be there.

Q: Currently, I can configure a Project Model Hierarchy and Iterations with plenty of flexibility; other than just great record keeping when I create work items, how does TFS use these hierarchies?

A: Yes, you will be able to set rules against these hiearchies like Read/Write permissions, etc.

Q: Regarding ClearCase – Explorer integration, VSS does not host projects as folders in Explorer – that’s what I mean – why have two explorers, which behave pretty much the same – does VSTS have this facility?

A: There is a source repository explorer that is hosted in Visual Studio. I don’t know of any plans around the Windows Explorer.

Q: will there be a tool for planning projects perhaps integrating project objectives/milestones and ms project data

A: This is done via the work item tracking component. For example, the MSF AGile methodology will have a work item type called Scenario that can be used during the planning/prioritization process. The integration with MS Excel adn MS Project helps here as well.

Q: a followup question: if items that are deleted from the available list but not from the database, when can files be removed from the db?

A: We had destroy command that would really destroy the item from the database but we have dropped that feature for V1.

Q: Will we see any more work item types, besides QoS Requirement, Task, Bug, and Scenario? Or does this depend on how baked MSF/Agile is?

A: These are the work item types in MSF Agile. There will be a different set in MSF Formal. We expect many companies and partners to build process templates with other work item types.

Q: the final release of tfs will work together with wss , so could it work well with sps next version? sps 2005?

A: V1 of TFS requires WSS and will not run with SPS.

Q: Follow to “How does TFS support development teams located in different countries in the world? distributed architecture? ” What about clock sync–is everything stored in UTC and the offset based upon the clients time zone.

A: Currently, reporting aggregates based on server local time. Other parts of the TFS store date/times in GMT/UTC and offset to local time zones on the client. We are investigating aggregating reporting data based on client side time zones after Beta 2.

Q: Will we see any more work item types, besides QoS Requirement, Task, Bug, and Scenario? Or does this depend on how baked MSF/Agile is?

A: By the way, you will be able to define your own types and customize existing ones.

Q: adamsi_MS: about deleting items from source control. Is there an option to hide the deleted entries? I created one project and screwed it up while playing around and I’d like to recreate it now that I know what I’m doing.

A: Deleted items still exist, in a sense, but other items can be created with the same names in their place. Since version control tracks items based on their item ID rather than the name, you should be able to add new items without a problem. If, however, you’d like to roll back to an earlier version of the code, you can run a get with the /version option to return to a stable setup. (e.g. “h get /version:c23 MyProject” if you’d like the version at changeset 23.)

Q: I did not find any features about team architect in the CTP DEC Build, exceptit for a distributed system diagrams

A: The team architect features are known to be less stable in this December CTP.

Q: Since both Excel and Project documents have the ability to Load Work Items, Make Changes, and then Publish/Synch — do we need to keep the .XLS or .MPP files around in the mean-time? best practice?

A: It depends on the scenario you’re going after. If you’re doing one-time operations such as a ‘bulk edit’ in Excel, then it is safe to not save the file. However, if you’re doing ‘charting’ in Excel you’ll want to keep the list object around to maintain relationships with pivot tables etc. In Project, we only round-trip a few important fields from the project plan to the work item database, so you’ll definitely want to save the file to record all the other information (e.g. task hierarchies, predecessors, etc.).

Q: Does TFS support cross-domain and workstation users, or only users in one domain? Is this working in Dec CTP?

A: It should work cross domain, but I’m not sure we have tested this scenario yet intermally. For December CTP, you need a Win2k3 DC environment.

Q: Will we see any more work item types, besides QoS Requirement, Task, Bug, and Scenario? Or does this depend on how baked MSF/Agile is?

A: MSF for CMMI Level 3 includes risk, issue, change request and functional requirement in addition to all of those you already saw in MSF Agile.

Q: You mention that the AT uses in-memory session state. Couldn’t I just change the session state to SQL Server or the TCP State Server and then LB the severs?

A: No. The MT server state is not limited to session state. We limited the deployment options in V1 to reduce complexity. We are planning to support scale-out in a future version.

Q: To re-iterate earlier question, when merging from a branch, will history be retained in a tree like manner as (CVS/Perforce/BitKeeper/…) , and will new files, renames, and deletes be handled properly (VSS does not handle any of those cases cleanly)

A: Yes, Team Foundation Version Control keeps track of merge history. New files, rename, deletes etc are handled properly during branch/merge etc;

Q: The December CTP does not support reporting. It will be supported by Beta2 if not early. …does that mean I cannot create a team project until beta2?

A: No, you should be able to create a team project. A couple things to check. You need to enable IIS on the DT before installing SQL. You need to install all SQL options during SQL install.

Q: adam: about delete. I think you misunderstood. Currently the UI shows deleted items as greyed out files. Is there any way to hide these?

A: Ah, my apologies. In the December CTP, there is not a method for hiding deleted items in Source Control Explorer. The same is true of cloaked items, which also show up as greyed folders or files.

Q: The current work items in a new project have no details. Presumably they will in B2 or later?

A: Beta 2 ships with a heavily updated set of guidance for MSF Agile. So, yes, there are more details. We will drop an update to MSF Agile to MSDN when Beta 2 ships. There should be a page of guidance showing the full state transitions for each work item.

Q: I haven’t looked closely, does WIT support start date (so a dev knows what is first of his 10 work items)?

A: Yes, there is a Created Date field that tracks the date and time the work item was created.

Q: V1 of TFS requires WSS and will not run with SPS. so i can not get the document for the portal search results, Right?

A: Yes, this is an SPS feature.

Q: V1 of TFS requires WSS and will not run with SPS. so i can not get the document for the portal search results, Right?

A: Can you clarify your question a bit? I’m trying to understand what you asking for on the portal search results.

Q: does the tfs will conver the full features of UML, or just a limited implementation instead?

A: TFS does not provide any UML implementation, but the team architect product does. It will be a subset.

Q: If currently stuck with VSS and having to do large branches/merges and finding doing this a very painful process, I have suggested a move to CVS for the company, with a very tight budget and about 10 people, would it be worth dealing with VSS till TSF?

A: Team Foundation Version Control will handle large branches/mergers elegantly;;

Q: Is GotDotNet the source for MSF Agile or MSDN (cause GDN is soooo unreliable).

A: In future we will be using MSDN.

Q: I haven’t checked, but are the Excel and Project Work Item toolbars and functionality based on Whidbey/VSTO bits? or something else (VBA)?

A: The current Excel and Project toolbars are created by an add-in based on the Whidbey bits. It is a managed add-in.

Q: Will developers be able to use existing Sharepoint team sites with team system or will we be required to update sharepoint team services in order to leverage the integration?

A: Yes, each team project has its own site and the site heirarchy and documents are surfaced in VS or in IE. The implementation is based on WSS though, not SPS.

Q: The December CTP does not support reporting. It will be supported by Beta2 if not early. …does that mean I cannot create a team project until beta2?

A: Team Build is a feature that uses the build technologies in Visual Studio, namely MSBuild and VC Build, to provide repeatable automatable builds for distribution and maintenance

Q: Can VS 2003 coexist with TFS on the same machine?

A: Yes, VS2003 can coexists with Team Foundation Client; However, we do not have SCC plugin for VS 2003, hence you have to use command line interface of Team Foundation Version Control;

Q: Are there any plans to integrate ORM into the VSS Team architect tool?

A: We do not have experts on Team Architect in this chat. Feel free to post your question on http://blogs.msdn.com/askburton or wait for the next Team Architect chat.

Q: create date is different than start date – the PM is going to be rearranging work on the project plan, regardless of when the work item was created. So there needs to be a start date, not a create date?

A: We do need a create date in order to track the work item. For project plans built in MS Project, Project will calculate the start date when you give it the start date of the project plan, the duration/work and resources associated with each task.

Q: does it hold build version info for files? so I can revert to all the source from build x then revert back to build y ( more recent ) code?

A: I am not sure if this question is continuation of any other question. However, with version control you would be able to label each build and that would allow you to revert back to the specific build very easily. LEt me know if this answers your question.

Q: Will Team System be able to install on an Oracle 10g database?

A: No. Team Foundation Server will use Microsoft SQL.

Q: from the sound of it, tfs will be on one server utilizing session state, what happens in case of errors which require a restart? will changes be lost or will there be a restoreable log?

A: TFS can be deployed on a single machine hosting IIS and SQL or in a two-machine configuration with a separate middle tier and data tier. We do not maintain a log to play back all changes on the client in the case of an error. What we strive to do is to manage common errors like communication problems with the server in a manner that allows you to recover without data loss.

Q: Is a TFS SCC plugin planned for VS2003 so it can support existing apps that won’t be updated?

A: Currently, there isn’t any plan for such plug-in.

Q: Will Team System be able to install on an Oracle 10g database?

A: No, Team System can not be installed on an Oracle database;

Q: will the source control use ITIL compliant terminology and structures

A: Our Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) LING_BAO_MS (Expert):

Q: I hate to ask, but how solid is your Web Service API at this point? Database structure?

A: It is solid enough for us to dogfood against with over 100 team members in 3 geographic locations.