I'm trying to set up a TFS server for our small dev team, and since this is fairly new to me I have a couple of questions.
1) We are developing ASP.Net websites for internal use (intranet etc), these websites currently are not saved with visual studio solutions, they get saved basically as they are on the server and we just update them using Visual Studio by doing file > open website.
So my first question is should I save these as solutions in TFS? What would the benefit of this be?
Im coming from a background of developing WPF applications and have always seen everything saved with a solution in TFS.
2) What should we store in our TFS repository (and what should we exclude)?
At the moment I am storing source code & Documentation but is it really appropriate to store things like installers for VS plugins / small applications or should this kind of thing all be placed on a server someplace?
So my first question is should I save these as solutions in TFS? What
Yes, you could create a solution containing the different ASP.NET web applications.
would the benefit of this be?
Your source code will be version controlled
What should we store in our TFS repository
Source code, third party assemblies that your ASP.NET applications might require, script files, basically everything that allow to get your site up and running. Documentation should also be stored along with the project. Same stands for installers (the source code only, not the MSI) if those installers allow to deploy the ASP.NET application on the live servers.
and what should we exclude
Compiled assemblies, but they are automatically excluded by TFS anyway.
Related
I have several websites that I manage for a company and they want me to transition to TFS. As part of their policy, I can only deploy files that have changed since the last deployment. I.e. if a view has changed then it gets deployed, if it has not changed then it not part of the deployment package. They use automated tools for the deployments.
Currently I use a custom tool I wrote that hooks into my local source provider (Vault Pro) and finds all the changes from a given date and copies those files to a zip file.
How can I accomplish something similar with Team Foundation Server?
TFS provides you with an SDK that you could use to query it from code. Here's the documentation of the client API.
We are just beginning development and implementation for dynamics crm 2011 on premises. Is it possible to implement automation for code check-in to promote code from development to test systems? It looks like this would involve export/import of unmanaged solutions containing the development code that was checked in. I have not been able to find APIs around this functionality.
If that is not possible, how close can you get? It looks like there are APIs to automate the uploading of web resources and plug-ins (e.g. webresourceutility in the sdk), but the web resources still need to be manually linked to the form they are to be used on (in the case of javascript etc). Has anyone made progress in automating parts of their CRM environments?
for reference, we're using vs 2010 & tfs 2010 using MSuild for current continuous integration.
We have a few techniques that provides us a very solid CI structure.
Plugins
All our Plugins are CI Compiled on Check-In
All plugin code we write has self-registration details as part of the component.
We have written a tool which plays the Plugins to the database, uninstalling the old ones first based on the self-registration
details.
Solution
We have an unmanaged solution in a Customisation organisation which
is clean and contains no data. Development is conducted out of this
organisation. It has entities, forms, Jscript, Views, Icons, Roles,
etc.
This Customisation database has all the solutions we've imported from 3rd parties, and customisations are made into our solution which is the final import into a destination organisation.
The Solution is exported as managed and unmanaged and saved into
TFS
We store the JScript and SSRS RDLs in TFS and have a custom tool
which plays these into the customisation database before it is
exported.
We also have a SiteMap unmanaged Solution which is exported as unmanaged (to ensure we get a final resultant Sitemap we are after)
Deployment
We have a UI and Command Line driven tool which does the following :-
Targets a particular Organisation
Imports the Customisation managed solution into a selected environment. e.g. TEST. Additionally imports the unmanaged Sitemap.
Uninstalls the existing solution which was there (we update the solution.xml file giving it a name based on date/time when we import)
Installs/Uninstalls the Plugin Code
Installs any custom SQL scripts (for RDLs)
Re-enables Duplicate Detection Rules
Plays in certain meta-data we store under source control. e.g. Custom Report entity we built which has attachments and XML configuration.
It isn't entirely perfect, but via command line we refresh TEST and all the Developer PCs nightly. It takes about 1 hour to install and then uninstall the old solution per organisation.
We use CI extensively for Dynamics CRM. For managing solutions, I would recommend using a "clean" Dynamics CRM implementation which will be the master for your solutions and also for your "domain data". See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.crm.sdk.messages.importsolutionrequest.aspx for importing solutions. Also check out - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh547388.aspx
At my work we are just starting to use TFS with our team of 4 developers, and are at the same time transitioning from single developer projects to team projects. We are mostly using the default settings in TFS
I was the first to push up a simple Silverlight MVVM project consisting of a solution with a Silverlight and a web project.
When my team-mate pulled down my code and tried to compile, he was faced with many missing references (.dlls), Expression blend SDK, Ria Services toolkit, Telerik controls, simple mvvm toolkit, silverlight toolkit, etc.
What do we need to do, to add projects to TFS that have everything needed to be compile it when the next developer pulls it down?
There isn't a really good way to do this all automatically. What you'd generally do this this:
in your branch create a bin folder next to your src folder.
in the bin folder create folders for each component you're relying on
in each folder place the setup or a link to the setup
in each folder place the binary files you're using in your solution
in each folder place a readme with any manual steps that must be completed
if wanted you can create a powershell script or batch file which installs all required components. It isn't too hard to detect whether or not an application is already installed using powershell and wmi
Now you'll have to fix a few things in your solution:
make sure your references don't point to the GAC, but that they point to the assemblies inside the bin folder of your branch
make sure all the paths are relative to the solution. Any c:... paths will not carry over from one system to another
I found that the easiest way to do this is to unload the project in Visual Studio and then edit it. You can then quickly add hintpath="..\..\..\bin\component attributes to each reference. There are a few blog on this subject which provide different solutions which all solve this same issue.
This setup allows you to at least get the latest version of any solution and build it without having to install any tools. If some of your components rely on visual studio add-ins, then the designers for these tools usually won't work, but at least you're able to build them.
An often used alternative is to create a Virtual Machine base image for your project and install all the required components onto it. Then copy the image to each developers workstation and sysprep it to ensure they all have a unique name and identifiers. When the project needs to update its dependencies, let one developer create a new clean machine and re-distribute that to all team members.
If you're using Windows Server Virtualization or VMWare, it's quite easy to create differencing disks and allow developers to access these images remotely.
Another approach would be to use NuGet and script NuGet using a powershell script for your solution. This will work for most cases, but products like Expression Blend still need to be installed separately.
We're using this process to use WebDeploy to deploy and compile two web sites that are a part of the solution. The approach we took was found here:
http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-build-web-deployment-web-deploy-vs.html
But it's only deploying one of the web sites; is there a way to tell it to publish both?
Thanks.
Web Packages created based on the above walkthrough (i.e. via VS 2010 and its derivatives like TFS etc) can only contain one web project. Unfortunately VS generated Web Packages will be limited from this sense. If you use Web Deploy (MSDeploy) EXE or API directly and then you can package more than one web site within IIS etc. I believe you are trying to accomplish this via Team Build so that is not really an option.
Although, in Team Build you can create more than one build definitions to cause multiple packages to be created. You can also set properties in your .csproj or .vbproj file (same properties mentioned in Step10 of the walkthrough). If more than one project have properties DeployOnBuild set to be true then from within single solution build within TFS you can have multiple web packages generated. You will still have to deploy each web independently.
Hope this helps
Our .NET team works on projects for our company that fall into distinct categories. Some are internal web apps, some are external (publicly facing) web apps, we also have internal Windows applications for our corporate office users, and Windows Forms apps for our retail locations (stores). Of course, because we hate code reuse, we have a ton of code that is shared among the different applications. Currently we're using SVN as our source control, and we've got our repository laid out like this:
- = folder, | = Visual Studio Solution
-SVN
- Internet
| Ourcompany.com
| Oursecondcompany.com
- Intranet
| UniformOrdering website
| MessageCenter website
- Shared
| ErrorLoggingModule
| RegularExpressionGenerator
| Anti-Xss
| OrgChartModule etc...
So..
The OurCompany.com solution in the Internet folder would have a website project, and it would also include the ErrorLoggingModule, RegularExpressionGenerator, and Anti-Xss projects from the shared directory.
Similarly, our UniformOrdering website solution would have each of these projects included in the solution as well.
We prefer to have a project reference to a .dll reference because, first of all, if we need to add or fix a function in the ErrorLoggingModule while working on the OurCompany.com website, it's right there. Also, this allows us to build each solution and see if changes to shared code break any other applications. This should work well on a build server as well if I'm correct.
In SVN, there is no problem with this. SVN and Visual Studio aren't tied together in the way TFS's source control is. We never figured out how to work this type of structure in TFS when we were using it, because in TFS, the TFS project was always tied to a Visual Studio Solution. The Source Code repository was a child of the TFS Project, so if we wanted to do this, we had to duplicate the Shared code in each TFS project's source code repository. As my co-worker put it, this "breaks every known best practice about code reuse and simplicity". It was enough of a deal breaker for us that we switched to SVN.
Now, however, we're faced with truly fixing our development processes, and the Application Lifecycle Management of TFS is pretty close to exactly what we want, and how we want to work. Our one sticking point is the shared code issue.
We're evaluating other commercial and open source solutions, but since we're already paying for TFS with our MSDN Subscriptions, and TFS is pretty much exactly what we want, we'd REALLY like to find a way around this issue.
Has anybody else faced this and come up with a solution?
If you've seen an article or posting on this that you can share with me, that would help as well.
As always, I'm open to answers like "You're looking at it all wrong, bonehead, HERE'S the way it SHOULD be done.
I think there's some misunderstandings here. First, you can have multiple (as many as you want) solutions in a single TFS project. Also, a single Visual Studio project can have any number of solutions referring to it.
Second, what version of TFS are you using? 2010 is different from 2005/08 in how it handles TFS projects.
Under 2008, there are several ways to approach this depending on what you want to get out of it. You can either have multiple TFS projects or a single TFS project.
I'll start with multiple.
Set up a TFS project for your shared library type code, and others for each regular project you have. As part of the development process on this shared library, check in the completed assemblies. Then Branch those assemblies into any other TFS project you want to use them in. When you do a feature update or bug fix to the shared library, simply merge the branch into any other TFS project you want the updates to go into.
This allows you to make shared changes for a single app without having to push all of them.
If you want a single TFS project holding everything, just add folders for each Visual Studio project you want. The visual studio solutions can refer back to projects outside of their base tree without issue. Now, when configuring things like Builds for each solution, make sure you limit what directory the build server pulls from / watches. That way you don't have it building one of your internal sites when changes were made to an external site.
Only recording this in the hope that it helps someone else some day, I fear I'm a little too late to answer your original question ;)
We have a very similar situation, and your question (and subsequent answers) made it very easy for us to set up TFS properly.
To use your example to explain our setup:
# = Project Collection, > = Team Project, | = VS project
# SVN
> Internet
| OurCompany
| OurCompany2
> Intranet
| UniformOrdering
| MessageCentre
> Shared
| ErrorLogging
| RegularExpression
This means that work can be assigned (using Scrum templates in Sharepoint) to any of the Team Projects (which are SAAS apps in our case) and the developer can choose to open any or all of the VS Projects to get the job done.
The majority of the senior developers (those that are across multiple products) have one VS Solution (maybe "WholeEnterprise.sln" to continue the analogy) that contains ALL the different VS Projects and can therefore work on any/all of them at any one time. We can also ensure that projects build properly, and all the dependencies are up to date before pushing an update.
The structure of this in your operating system of choice is totally up to you! Some of us have replicated the structure of TFS, others have a totally flat hierarchy... This doesn't seem to make a difference at the end of the day.