TFS Trial Edition Licensing Question [closed] - tfs

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My trial of Team Foundation Server has expired. Why can't I just install a fresh copy on a different server and use it for another 90 days?
I am using the same source code.
I don't want to do this, but my boss is trying to make me.

Assuming that your employer is wanting you to do this to extend your evaluation period and not to use software against the license terms then you might want to try the utility posted at the bottom of the following post instead:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/01/15/checking-your-tfs-version-and-extending-trials.aspx
TFS doesn't currently migrate well to another TFS instance, so if you were continually moving to a new TFS server every 90-days you wouldn't have a great experience. Also you be in breach of the EULA and therefore committing a form of software piracy under most legal systems.
If you are doing this to extend your trial then the tool above will give you an extra 30 days and if you talk nicely with your local Microsoft rep then you might be able to get a longer extension.
BTW - Microsoft BizSpark is an excellent program run by Microsoft which provides all their dev tools (including TFS) and is designed for cash strapped start-ups. Contact your local Microsoft office if you want to find out more about the program.
Good luck,
Martin.

Apart from this being illegal, I would think the hassle of switching to a new server every 90 days will out weigh the cost of just paying for the software.
So you have 3 choices
pay for the software and get legal
keep switching servers every 90 days
switch to a free open source system (subversion?)
There's a 4th choice: you can go to ALL Microsoft events and hope they give out free licenses to TFS at one of the events :)

Are you using VS Team Edition? This includes TFS Workgroup which is good for up to 5 users without further licensing.

You can do this, but I'm sure there's something in employment regulations (wherever you live) about being coerced to break the law, which is effectively what you'd be doing.

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POC for Team Foundation Server [closed]

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I am technical guys from bank and my job scope is mainly on ETL and reporting. We just set up ETL team in my department and we want to have some tool that can help us on source code control and release management. One of the tool that I know in the market is TFS.
I'm going to ask TFS vendor to provide POC to us, and since my knowledge on TFS is very limited, I want some suggestion from your guys, what kind of POC I should ask vendor demo to us and are there any sets of scenario idea that highlighting the power of TFS 2010? Thanks you very much
Just focus on the things your need, Source Control and Release Management.
Source control
You can ask them to show you something like code review, view and manage past versions, use branch isolate risk and so on. Also make sure which version control you want to use, for TFS2015 there are two options(TFVC vs Git).
Moreover, show some related sections, show associating a work item with a checkin and then lead in to the automated builds and tests , which then lead in to the build reports. Bug tracking is also a good thing to demo.
Release Management
Choose some topic below you are interested in
Automate your deployments
Automate approval workflows
Retain full traceability
Apply security policies and manage users
Easily deploy to on-premises and Azure
Extend Release Management with customizations
Cause of the particularity of banking, you can also ask them demo something about reporting, chart and Excel. TFS show nice graphs :)
The POC should show:
How a change is propagated from developer to various environments (development, test, production):
check-in -> unit testing -> build -> release to environment 1 -> integration testing -> release to environment 2 (without rebuilding)
How you can trace from a requirements(user story) to the line of code that is implementing it and back.

TFS2012 vs Jetbrains TeamCity+YouTrack [closed]

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We have used TFS2012 on the cloud and we don't like that there's no reporting service so we're looking to move to on-premise TFS2012. At the same time, we're starting to like Git and we're thinking that it may make more sense than TFS version control.
This obviously requires research and developers to "play admin" so we're taking the time to evaluate whether Jetbrains' highly-appraised solutions are a better fit.
Given a team of 6-8 people that run with Scrum that is eager to be on the "best practice" train for agile and a project that combines .NET technologies for the back-end and Javascript (AngularJS) on the front-end, considering a move from TFS2012 to a TeamCity/YouTrack/Git stack for scrum planning, source control, continuous integration and quality control and issue tracking:
What would/could we miss from TFS2012?
What are we going to enjoy from the new stack?
Is the new stack falling short in any respect that TFS is not and vice versa?
Note: This is a question specific to TFS2012 - there are several comparisons on SO and elsewhere for previous TFS versions and TeamCity, perhaps YouTrack too.
Here's a brief account of my two-week long experience with Git/YouTrack vs 6 months of TFS.
The new stack feels a lot more lightweight than TFS. Both installing (we tried the on-premise TFS shortly) and using TFS gives the sense of a very heavyweight enterprise suite for no reason. This is partially an illusion that the UI design gives but it seems that with YouTrack:
Takes less clicks to do anything and even less if you learn some shortcuts and how to use the commands.
It's easier to navigate between the views - there are less of them but give a better overview than TFS. This is not because they present more info - in most cases they present less info - but because they give the key information in a visually clean way.
The ability to run ad-hoc searches in YouTrack makes such a big difference! In TFS you have to create a query with a UI that tries to makes it easier but ends up making it harder for you than just typing the query params. I mean, we are developers after all.
I've enjoyed the local commits of Git and how pull requests work to integrate work from other people into a main branch vs merging on TFS.
TeamCity has also been very lightweight to use - though I have no experience with CI on TFS. Having said that, it's an area I didn't delve into much because I was already spending a lot of time managing TFS.
Hiccups and things that I miss from TFS:
It's a little harder to manage releases with YouTrack or I haven't figured out how to do it effectively. The management and separation of product backlog, release backlog and sprint backlog is easier on TFS.
There's no way to plan a sprint based on capacity of developers - I believe JetBrains is working on that though.
You gotta pay for a private Git - though YouTrack/TeamCity are free and full-featured for a few users.
I'll try and keep this up to date as I go.

Using open source code/software in web apps [closed]

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I'm having some trouble recently with the open source licenses. I started to feel like if they are somehow tricky! So, I'm just asking about the rights, attribution and so on..
Know, if I for example used a Ruby Gem, licensed under GPL, I install the gem, use it, my web app works! But there is no referring to the Gem, how is behind it, its license. I can't just believe that I have to include those for every gem I'm using. Do I have to? Or can I just use it silently?
So, a website with Rails (MIT), some GPL ruby gems, and so on, what should I include publicly? I think I'm not going to modify the source code of any of those gems.. Yeah, and if I have to attribute in my web pages, do I have to link to the licenses or even worse distribute my source code under the same license?
Also, if I found a tutorial or something like that that is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC, should I distribute my whole work or put it under the same license, if I wasn't going to run them outside my own server? What if I wanted to distribute my software, which used ideas (and modified code) from the tutorial?
What about using formulas, which are more general than being owned? One-liner commands from stackoverflow when a gem doesn't install - Should I attribute that I used that to install the gem?! I think of course not, but just asking to make sure of the whole thing..
A website is normally the output of a program. Like you save a text-document with your word processor in disk, the document itself does not fall under the reciprocal license of the proprietary word processor (MS Word) or the reciprocal and permissive licenses of the free software word processor (Open or Libre Office Writer).
Only in case you create and distribute derivative or combined works (e.g. packaging multiple programs together in one package) you need to care about the licenses.
That for sure always depends on the concrete things you do. You need to document these concrete things, then go to your lawyer and then find out for the stuff you exactly do if and how copyright is in effect and based on the licenses used and if in effect, which steps you need to do.
Here on SO we are all only software developers (or if lawyers, not your lawyer) so we can not give you any legal support.
Usually stuff about licences can be a little confusing with open source software being released under different licences and usually the license documentation is usually written in lawyer jargon which proves difficult to understand for a lot of people.
Luckily this kind of question has been asked alot of times in SO. Just look at the licensing tag and order the questions by votes and you should find a few questions that pretty much answer your questions. In particular look at this question.

Is Scrum for Team System a good tool for managing the scrum process? [closed]

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We've had several sprints with the traditional whiteboard and PostIt notes and are ready to move forward to integrating the process into our Team System environment. One tool we're considering is Conchango's "Scrum for Team System" (http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/en/)
Has anyone tried this tool in a real world scrum process? Was your experience positive or negative? Is the tool worth the licensing fee in your opinion?
We use Scrum For Team System and love it. It really does a good job of merging the TFS and Scrum processes.
We also got the task board (the part you have to pay for) and really like that too.
Even with Scrum for Team System, TFS via visual studio is not good for planning meetings (though it is ok for standups) The task board helps a lot in visualizing the work remaining and in moving it around.
Before we got the Task Board, we would use post it notes for our planning meetings and then enter them in to TFS after. And even though the Task Board is nice, if you don't have at least 2 people working on it in a planning meeting then it is not enough. We have 3 laptops going for a team of 5 + 1 (scrum master) and that works great. If you don't have that then I would still think about doing post it notes.
The task board allows you to refresh and see what the other are entering in. We have one computer hooked up to a projector so that the others can see what is happening. We all then brainstorm like we would on post it notes, but the people on laptops enter the data into TFS.
For us, it works great!
Later Note: If you do choose the Scrum For Team System template then I STRONGLY recommend that you read the Process Guidance. We had to figure out a few thing the hard way before we sat down and read it. Especially on how to handle defects (i.e. when is it a Bug and when it is a Sprint Back Log Item that goes back to "In Progress")
The templates are free. It is only the Task Board Application that cost a modest fee. You can use the templates without the Task Board although I highly recommend using it as wll. I think the biggest advantage for my team has been that the ScrumForTeamSystem tempaltes integrate into VS and provide a seamless feel with the rest of the development environment.
We love the ability to attach the PBI's to check-ins and have them show up on the Daily Build report.
If you are are missing something you need, you can fire up the VS template editortweak the templates to your liking. For us, we added a "Requested By" field and a "Testing Status" field to the PBI template.
The 2 shortcommings that annoyed us were that the "State" of the PBI's were not the same as SBI's (No Ready For Test on the PBI). We do testing/validation at the feature level and not the task level and wanted to track the PBIs status so we had to add our own custom field. The second issue was that there is no report out-of-the-box for a PBI burndown/up at the Sprint level. So you can't see how you are doing at delivering stories, only tasks. You have to make your own.
We don't really use the "Bug" template much (we ship flawless code:) ). No really, there is no such thing as a bug against work in a sprint; so the only time we record a bug is if a client finds an issue in the production code where it didn't work as advertised.
As Vaccano said, it isn't nearly as fast as a whiteboard or post-its in a meeting environment but if you get a couple people really good at using the tool and a couple of laptops you can make it work.
I evaluated several products and the simplicity and price of ScrumForTeamSystem can't be beat.
Like others have said, beware that the Conchango template handles bugs very differently. The idea that unreleased Backlog Items are bug-free is not just a suggestion; there is literally no way to track bugs affecting the current sprint's work. I found that this disadvantage outweighed the advantages.
If you are searching for an online Whiteboard you can have a look at the Scrum tool Agilo. It was build especially for distributed teams which do not have the chance to work on a "real" whiteboard.
For a quick information you can have a look at this video.
The 3.0 version of the template for VS 2010 changes how the tool models Scrum in ways to very effectively support multi-team projects and the typical interactions one will find in larger projects.
Regardless of version, it is currently my default answer for Scrum projects in Microsoft environments. As mentioned, the task board and the (new) ScrumMaster's workbench are incredibly valuable as well!
We build Urban Turtle that extend the Microsoft ALM platform with an intuitive Web interface and simplify your agile project management. By providing a Task Board and a planning board directly in web access you don't have to synchronize anything. The installation is a simple process. 2 minutes to install on the web access server. Nothing to setup on the client desktop.
Don't take my word for cash have a look at what Brian Harry from Microsoft said about the product :
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/10/21/urban-turtle-3-5-released.aspx
Have a look at the website and send me your feedback
urbanturtle.com
Dominic Danis
Product Owner.

How to convince "The Management" to use all aspects of Visual Studio Team System? [closed]

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Currently we have several defect and bug tracking systems, which include Quality Centre and bespoke support systems (both team and company wide). Also we use Microsoft Project - although I haven't seen a task list in months...
But what I find difficult to understand is why our company purchases VSTS and only utilises part of it - we currently use source control, automated overnight builds and team testing functions.
How can our team convince "The Management" to use project task items, defect tracking, reports and process guidance parts of the system? Surely this would save time and money once implemented correctly ?
If you already have the VSTS licenses then why does your team management need to sign off on anything? Start the features amongst your team for small areas and gradually ramp it up. Would you ask management to sign off on which text editor you use?
Management have a basic fear of anything that in any way may disrupt productivity, and rabid adoration for anything that increases productivity at no risk to themselves. Start small and let the results sell themselves.
This is how I've introduced both Unit Testing and Wikis at previous companies. When the results begin to show people quickly want to get involved.
Tell them if they not decide to, then in one hour you start to kill hostages every five minutes 10 at the time...
But more serious do the meeting with management or write some kind of request and show what time consumption it takes to use disintegrated system, and how powerfull and underused newly bought system is, but before do soem analyses if system does really fit all current ne4eds. But be carefull with your words and names,. If it really comes out that company got underused equipmentsoftware which got negative impact on productivity and information flow in company, and it means less of valuable work even heads can fall for this. It all depend how serious is your company in that cases.
Be aware that it would be not quire fluent process to switch frome one soft yo another, people got own habbits and things that they are used to so you will have to do this in some steps which include graduall introducing people to new system

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