TFS 2013 : Multiple build controller on the same machine - tfs

I wish we could use multiple build controllers on the same machine because we have many team project collections but they're not used at the same time so there's no real performance issue here and most of our build servers are not used for extended period of time. I know it's possible to do this with TFS 2010 and TFS 2012 (see following post) but it's an unsupported feature.
Anyone can tell me if it's now officially supported with TFS 2013, I've not been able to find any useful information about this.

This is still an unsupported feature. This feature would be loudly trompetted should it arrive.
On the chances of this arriving in the TFS 2013 updates, I don't expect it. Maybe with TFS v14 (they're skipping v13) or maybe the version after that?
Make your voice heard on UserVoice:
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2037679-remove-one-one-binding-between-collection-and-buil
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/4417771-use-a-build-controller-over-more-than-one-team-pro
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3872254-tfs-2012-possibility-to-have-more-than-one-build
Update
A new build system was introduced in TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Team Services. It's agent based. doesn't have Controllers and you can install multiple agents on a single machine.
Agents are grouped in Pools and live at the Server level, allowing you to use them across collections.

Related

Sync 2 TFS servers?

We have 2 TFS servers, one is inside the firewall, and the other one is outside the firewall. Because of security reasons, we still need to keep it this way. But the question is: is there a way to Sync these 2 TFS servers, say at every night?
Say we have servers TFS1 and TFS2, right now, we only want to Sync from TFS1 to TFS2, not bidirectional synchronization. If possible, we want to have complete synchronization.
I searched some time, but I could not find a good solution. It seems all recommendations are for old version TFS.
Are there any solutions for the latest TFS? existing products? Or, some information about API that we can use to make a tool for this?
Thanks
There is nothing changed with sync two TFS servers for the latest TFS version. Just as Daniel and many other expert suggested:
TFS generally lives in 1 instance and 1 only. TFS is a production
environment for the development team. It doesn't make sense to have
two TFS systems and have them synchronize to make this separation.
Having your teams work on two different TFS environments at the same
time is a very strange requirement.
Source Link
The best solution in your case, negotiating with your IT team, set up a safe and stable way to allow your top Management users to connect the internal TFS. You could also set up SSL for your TFS server to improve the safety.
It will also save you a lot of time costs for maintaining two servers syncing.
If you insist on syncing two TFS servers take a look at this similar question: Sychronising work between two TFS servers
Another way is using VSTS instead of your external TFS. Microsoft has documentation on this exact scenario which can be found here: Migrate to Visual Studio Team Services : Move from Team Foundation Server (TFS) to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and bring your data along.
This link also contains the download link for the migration tooling which you will want to use
Currently the following versions of TFS are supported for import:
TFS 2017 Update 3
TFS 2018
TFS 2018 Update 1

CodeLens only showing references?

I installed Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise RTM and only seeing "references" from Code Lens. We are using TFS for source control. I expect to see related commits from TFS. Based on this article, I have everything enabled in options:
Here is what I see in VS:
Is there anything wrong with my VS setup?
The TFVC lenses that are part of CodeLens only work when connected to a version of Team Foundation Server that is running the background job that generates the historical data. This means that you need to be running at least TFS 2013 or 2015 in order for this feature to work. Some features require a specific version of Visual Studio.
It is also possible that your server admin has disabled indexing on the server, one can do that using the tfsconfig codeindex command on the application tier.

Difference between TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 process templates

We are planning to upgrade from Tfs 2012 to Tfs 2013. Can anyone help me understand the difference in process templates between them? We use all three process templates for different projects.
The changes are very minor, except for:
The introduction of Portfolio backlogs.
Test Plans and test Suites are now Work Item Types (TFS 2013 update 3).
The AgileConfig and CommonProcessConfig files have been merged to a single file inside the template
The minor changes:
Git support for the Source Control options
Stackrank type fields are now hidden by default (because Agile task boards are now features of the Standard CAL).
Tag field support through the API.
The easiest way to visualize all differences is by comparing them through the TFS Team Project Manager which can be downloaded here.
TFS 2013 did not work well with our existing workspaces defined on remote network drives. TFS 2012 did work with this configuration.
After working several hours with our System Administrators, we gave up on trying to get the trying to get the existing network drive workspaces to work with the TFS 2013. Converting the workspaces to local drive locations enabled us to work with TFS 2013.

JIRA vs TFS 2012 as full ALM system [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
we are on the research level of choosing a full ALM system for our company.
we consider both TFS 2012 and JIRA for use in product, project managment, QA, support and developemnt teams departments.
the things to support are bug tracking, workflows, project graphs (such as bugs count, burn down and so on).
any recommendations? pricing?
as far as i can see TFS is better for R&D teams using visual studio and less for eclipse.
Here are TFS advantages:
TFS is an application life-cycle management (ALM) solution, but Jira is simply an issue tracker. Many features of TFS, e.g. source control and automatic builds are not supported in jira and you should use other solutions, e.g. Subversion or Bamboo to this aim.
All TFS components, i.e. source control, issue tracker, build automation are fully integrated. Such level of integration cannot be attained on other solutions.
It is fully integrated with Visual Studio.
Here are Jira (and other Atlasian Solutions) advantages:
It has been used in MANY open source projects, e.g. JBoss, Spring, etc.
For launching TFS, you need a high end server, MS SQL, etc. But Jira could be installed on an ordinary PC on open DBMSes, e.g. my SQL.
If you are using Java technologies, many Java IDEs, e.g. IntelliJ, Eclipse and Netbeans fully support Jira. I have not seen such a nice support for TFS.
There are lots of plug-ins available for Jira. You can take a look at them here.
If your team is small, Jira costs only $10. It is really cheap.
Atlasian solutions have better support for java technologies (Ant, Maven, junit, etc.)
I have worked with JIRA / Subversion and now with TFS 2010, and I think JIRA / Subversion are much better tools.
I like the idea of having source control, workitem control, build control, test control in one integrated package, but somehow TFS is just a below average implementation of everything (Except Gated Checkin because that is cool).
TFS version control uses binding just like VSS, so doing multiple checkouts of the same requires extra effort. The ability to Suspend/Resume work using TFS shelveset, is the official workaround for being able to do concurrent work.
TFS sometimes goes haywire with its SQL table locks, so it has be restarted. Also the SQL indexes randomly gets broken, so suddenly showing folder history takes minutes. TFS in VS2010 needs to be online all the time to do any source editing, though this has been fixed in VS2012. But the VS2012/VS2013 GUI is so tightly integrated with TFS, so if the TFS-server has issues, then everything becomes sluggish in VS. This is really visible with the new VS2015 CodeLens, where all TFS WorkItem Lookup should be disabled, or else VS2015 will get stuck more often than usual.
Visual Studio will one or two times during a work week fail to get latest source (sometimes silently). If you attempt to get latest again, then it will say you already have latest. When you perform a build, then it will ofcourse fail. The workaround is to perform a get specific version with forced overwrite.
To create a wiki for documentation, then one have SharePoint, and version 2010 is a really crappy wiki tool.
For some really strange reason Microsoft System Center (really expensive) is completely detached from the TFS solution, and lingers around like an old lady. Making it super difficult to synchronize incidents with TFS-workitems, and get TFS-builds deployed using System Center. VS2013 Update 4 now includes the almost free InCycles Release Management, that should make the continuous integration work better (IIS applications can use Web Deploy).
If you work with advanced stuff like release-branching, then you will be surprised how difficult it is to generate a release notes document (read requires unsupported 3rd party tools). There is no automatic association of Work Items when merging to release-branch. And if you suddenly want to release a new build, then no help around for creating a release-report that lists the changes/workitems that has been included since last released build.
The integration of JIRA/Subversion in Visual Studio (VisualSVN) is so much better (ankhsvn is an alternative opensource version of VisualSVN). Still don't understand why Tfs-annotate cannot jump to next previous version like Svn-blame can.
I have no idea about the difficulty of setting up TFS 2010/2012, but JIRA / Subversion / CruiseControl.NET was very easy and cheap (Guess one would now use Git and Jenkins that also supports Gated Checkin).
VS2012 also includes a redesign of the entire user interface, which includes a new "improved" TFS Team Explorer that is really a pain to work with as a developer (Compared to VS2010). Microsoft has declared that Team Explorer has been fixed in VS2013, but it is not true. It is mouse-click hell to perform checkin and associate tfs-workitems.
Visual Studio 2012 now includes a virtual kanban board, but I would be surprised that this feature is not added to JIRA.
Became very suprised when the Visual Studio Team announced that they will implement GIT support in Visual Studio 2012. Guess it is easier than trying to rewrite TFS into a distributed version control system. Hope the new GIT integration will come up to the standards of VisaulSVN.
We use JIRA and GreenHopper for all our development tasking, bug tracking, and product management needs. We have a team of 46 developers, testers, and management. It integrates fully with Eclipse. I highly recommend it.
The tasks and workflows are fully customizable, you can add fields, add automation (like assigning tasks to team members when the task changes state), support drag-and-drop attachments, and more.
The pricing on JIRA just dropped to a significantly for managed hosting.
Well this is basically about the tend in the market, IF you people working on open source technologies specially java , mostly professionals of java are familiar with JIRA, JIRA has almost all type of plugin for project management, SDLC, Code Review and Bug tracking. But if your people working on the .net or microsoft technologies than they are comfortable with TFS.
In general, if your project is built in Java (Or other Open Source), go with JIRA. If it's built on .NET technologies, go with TFS.
Theoretically you could use either one with Java or .NET, but the integration won't be as tight and you will have to use plugins to get everything working.
JIRA / Subversion / Bamboo are much more configurable and integrate with other open source tool with hooks and triggers. TFS does not allow integration with anything. It's not extendable. You can't improve it with modules or plug-ins or extensions. In my opinion, TSF is quite unexciting and dull, that is if you think of source control and change management as a necessary evil then TFS is for you but if you are in Configuration Management or a Build / Release Engineer, JIRA is the way to go.

Setup for Team Foundation and ClearCase with TFS Integration Tool

I want to do daily migration of TFS changes to a ClearCase system. I was going to try out TFS Integration tools but I can't get any of the toolset pieces to work. What are the requirements to run this app? I have VS 2010, TFS 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 installed. The assemblies it's trying to load don't seem to be present in VS2010 and I don't if it requires VS 2008 or not. Anyone ever had this running? I'm migrating from TFS to CC. Not the other way around.
Update:
I've been using this tool to sync TFS 2010 changes back into a UCM ClearCase implementation at the client. It has been going poorly. The tool should be clearly marked as Beta or even Alpha. A peek into the code reveal around 100 TODO's and "This needs to be fixed". I have spent a good deal of time trying to iron out some of the issues and have made progress. My suggestion is before using this tool on mission critical projects, spend at least 3-4 weeks evaluating it in your environment. When it works, it works pretty well with moving changes.
I don't know much about how to access TFS2010 elements, besides "check an individual project for pre & postbuild steps either by loading the project in visual studio or manually reading the project file".
If you need Sharepoint assembly, this technote describes the requirements.
And I don't think an automatic import utility exists (from TFS2010 to ClearCase 7.1.x), as this technote mentions:
Change request (RFE) RATLC01005874 had been submitted requesting a conversion utility to export source code from Microsoft Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) to ClearCase;
however, the decision was made by Product Management to exclude the requested feature from future upgrades and releases due to the significant architectural changes required to implement the solution.
The right approach is to manage to list the content of relevant labels for a given scope, and make a clearfsimport into a ClearCase view, with a full label applied right after it.
You don't need TFS (server), VS or SharePoint installed. You will need a SQL server for the core platform. Then you will need the various assemblies for TFS, which you can get by installing the Team Explorer component (it's on the TFS install media).
We decided to go with the TFS Integration Platform. It allows us to sync TFS work items back into ClearCase when ever we want. It provides the level of integration we needed to keep the traceability. The TFS to CC integration is bleeding edge, but it works enough for what we need. (Syncing work items and user check ins.)

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