Setting Quality Profile via VSTS/TFS Build for SonarQube

Sonar analysis helps to identify the technical debt in the source code of your project. Running it integrated with VSTS or TFS builds add more value by automating the quality checks with sonar server. You can define your own custom Quality Profile to analyze your source code with selected set of rules. Let’s look at how you can specify the Quality Profile with the TFS/VSTS build task, that can be used to automate scanning of your code, when using the SonarQube extension in the visual studio marketplace.

Code Review with Git in Team Services

Code Review plays important part in software development as it helps to identify issues that may be overlooked. Reviews on code improve overall quality of the delivered software, and reviews are done in different ways by the teams, at times using pair programming, peer review and formal inspection of code by team leads etc. Team Services Git  version control now facilitates Code Review, via pull requests.

Business Rules for Work Items in Team Services

For inherited process model in VSTS, you can use Custom Rules to define rules that can clear the value of a field, copy a value into a field, and apply values based on dependencies between different fields' etc. You can define actions against conditions using custom rules. This provide you the flexibility in VSTS to go beyond the level of setting a default value or making a field required. To customize work items in an existing team project of Hosted XML model for VSTS, or on-premises TFS, you have to customize, downloaded process template or individual work item XML files (using witadmin tool) respectively. Differences between process models are described here.

TFS DB Restore–DB Set to Suspect

When you have configured backups with TFS admin console and restore them in case of a need, you are expecting, your TFS databases to restore without any issues. But you might run into this situation if you just, missed simple thing to check. For example the target server SQL version, should exactly match to the source or your production TFS, SQL version. Let’s have a look at learning experience I went through due to a slight mistake, which taught me how much vigilant you need to be when you are doing the, administrative work with TFS.

Changing Work Item Icons – TFS vs VSTS

It is now possible to change the work item icons  in on premises TFS  2017.2 and in VSTS. This is a cool feature allowing you to, recognize the type of work item at a glance. However there is a significant difference  between TFS and VSTS how you apply this change. Let’s explore how we can change icon for existing and any new tem projects in both TFS 2017.2 (works just same in TFS 2018 RC1) and in VSTS.

Add Reporting Services to an Existing Team Project in TFS 2018 RC1

From TFS 2015 it was possible to create Team Projects for on premises TFS, using the web interface. But when you create a team project from web interface it does not create Reporting Services or SharePoint integrations. With TFS 2018, SharePoint server integration has been removed and if you want to integrate with SharePoint, setup your SharePoint site using the SharePoint’s own interface. However, Reporting Services is still in use with TFS 2018, and integration to Reporting Services gets created when a Team Project created via Visual Studio (you can use VS 2017 to create a Team Project in TFS 2018 RC1). A Team Project created with web interface will not have a Reporting Services integrated and let’s look at how to create that integration using command line.

Download Offline Installer for VS 2017

There is no ISO available to download for VS2017. You can view why Microsoft did not make ISO available, is discussed in here. However if you want to download VS 2017 to perform an offline installation you can follow the steps described below.

• Download the relevant VS installation .exe (for example vs_enterprise__984310617.1489458965.exe).
• Copy it to your local hard drive folder let’s say E:\Install
• Create a folder to download installation files say E:\Install\VS2017 (can be in a different path such as D:\VS2017)
• Open command prompt as administrator and change the directory to where your downloaded .exe is available
• Execute the command below

TFS 2018 RC1 – Installation in Windows Server 2012

TFS 2018 RC1 is now available and you can download it from https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/. Release note here explains the new features you can expect in TFS 2018. Below features are going to be removed from TFS with this version.

• SharePoint Extensions
• XAML Builds
• Team Rooms
• Lab Center and automated testing flows in Microsoft Test Manager support

Requirements for TFS 2018 can be found here.  Let’s look at the installation experience with TFS 2018 RC1 on Windows 2012 Server with SQL 2016 SP1.