Visual Source Safe (VSS) to TFS Migration

In modern software development usage of only a source control mechanism would not add value to the software delivery process. However, some organizations still using Visual Source Safe (VSS) to manage their source code, but it is unsupported tool as of now and they should consider moving their code bases to a different tool. As a fully DevOps capable ALM tool TFS is a good choice to move the code from VSS. Let’s look at the steps required to perform such a migration of VSS code, including history.

Finding Active Team Projects Based on Code CheckIns/Commits

When you have many team projects in your TFS instance or in your team services account (VSTS), manually finding out what are the active projects is not going to be an easy task, by looking at each code repository in each of the projects to determine whether project is getting updated with code changes. TFS/VSTS REST API can be used in this scenario to obtain the projects that have any code commits/checkins from a given date using the script available here.

Cloning TFS 2018

How to clone TFS before TSF 2018 is explained in posts, Backing Up and Restoring Databases, Prepare Restored Databases and Configuring the AT. Out of these steps Backing Up and Restoring Databases is valid for TFS 2018. But you do not have to perform the Prepare Restored Databases as it can be done while configuring the Application Tier of the cloned TFS instance. Let’s look at valid steps for cloning TFS 2018.

Resolving “The SDK 'Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web' specified could not be found”

While using .NET Core 2.0 you may run into errors which may not be clear. “The SDK 'Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web' specified could not be found.” is one such error which appears, when trying to load .NET Core 2.0 Web projects, and Let’s understand the reason behind this error to get it resolved.

Deploying Two Deployment Group Targets on Same Machine

Deployment groups are the recommended approach to use with VSTS for setting up release management based automated deployments. Can two team projects of same VSTS account with two deployment groups, have same machine as the target? Was a question in a forum and below steps describe how to achieve it.

Trigger Build Based on Label/Tag – VSTS/TFS

You might want to trigger a build for a team foundation version control (TFVC) Label applied previously or if you are using Git version control for a Tag. Git tags are quite nicely supported in TFS/VSTS web Interface, but Label in TFVC is still only manageable with the  Source Control explorer of Visual Studio. There is a user voice request to enable web experience for TFVC Labels, which you can also vote for . Let’s explore how to trigger build based on Tag or Label with VSTS/TFS.

Configure Search Service for TFS 2018 in a Separate Server to Enable Work Item & Code Search

Work Item Search & Code Search allow TFS users to do advanced and dynamic way of quick searching on code or work items, with drill down etc. To enable Code Search in VSTS you have to install the Marketplace extension for code search, work item search is default enabled for VSTS. You can configure search for on-premises TFS in TFS AT (described here), itself. But if you want to setup search service in a separate box from your TFS AT, you can follow the steps described in this post.

TFS Build Agent Fail on Get Source After Upgrade

TFS on premise requires you to keep your TFS updated as almost in every quarter a new update to the TFS is released as well as a new version every year. For this you might have to do TFS Upgrades. If you have upgraded from TFS 2015 to TFS 2018 you have to remove the version 1.xx build agents and configure version 2.xx build agents. Your existing build might encounter workspace issues and may not be able to get sources downloaded to build, in the build agents after the upgrade of agents done. Let’s look at how we can get this issue resolved.