Moving TFS 2005 Collection to TFS 2013.3 – Plan, Execution & Lessons Learnt

Many organizations still use old platforms and they are reluctant to move to new platform with fear of failure in doing the move. But hanging onto older products would not give any benefit as well as it would eventually fail to meet the demands of the modern business and software development requirements. Visual Studio Team System 2005 (TFS 2005) is such old tool, but still people using it for the production work. Let’s have a look at steps taken to move a TFS 2005  as a collection into TFS 2013.3 (again this is not the latest version, but this client demand was to get it to 2013.3), and the thing to keep an eye on to avoid any issues in the move.

TLS 1.2, PowerShell and Dynamics CRM with VSTS Release Management

PowerShell often used in tasks in VSTS release management. When accessing services authenticated via AAD (Azure Active Directory) it might require to use TLS 1.2 protocol, if it is configured to be required in AAD setup. Setting up the machine as per instructions here to allow TLS 1.2 may not work with PowerShell. In case you are accessing Dynamics CRM online with PowerShell using Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell in VSTS release management you might see this issue as  “[error]Get-CrmConnection : The pipeline has been stopped.”

Trigger Release from PS in TFS 2015.2

Can you trigger a release in TFS 2015.2 from another release definition execution? Was the request from one of the teams. To fulfill this requirement, if you are using VSTS or TFS2017,  you can use the extension “VSTS Trigger” available in marketplace. But this is not usable in TFS 2015.2 as it does not have the Personal Access Token feature. The PowerShell script described in this post will let you trigger a release from another release.

Mistake in .sln Can Cause NuGet Restore Task in Build to Fail and Hide the Real Issue

NuGet packages are very commonly used in VS Development. Using build VSTS task NuGet Restore is general practice of downloading packages while doing the automated builds. Today suddenly a team ran into the same issue described here https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/97737/error-da-toolnuget400x64nugetexe-failed-with-retur.html. Let’s have a look at the real issue caused this error in this particular teams’ instance and how it was found and resolved.

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.