Missing Feature in TFS Project Templates

While reading this post from Willy-Peter Schaub it crossed my mind that I forgot to post about a feature I think is missing in Team System Project Templates.

I recently tailored the Project Template from Conchango to serve as our ’standard approach’ for each Team Project we create. After some fiddling around I got everything the way we wanted except for the creation of a couple of folders in source control. Apparently there is no way of doing this automatically so we ended up doing this manually each and every time. Willy-Peter’s blog shows that we are not the only ones handling it this way. If you ask me, the Team System guys really missed out on this one…

TechEd 2007 – Barcelona here I come (maybe)

I’ve been to TechEd the past two years, once to Rotterdam and once to Barcelona. And I must admit I liked it very much on both occasions. Good technical content and the ability to talk to several MVP’s and Microsoft employees made this so much interesting than attending e.g. DevDays. So I was looking forward to attend TechEd this year too. I suppose it came as no surprise at all that Murphy showed up and only one team member was allowed to go while two applied for the trip.

And then, out of the blue, when I least expected it, Microsoft Belux offered a free ticket leaving only travel and expenses to be paid by my employer. So today I filed my request once again, hoping my manager will approve it this time. Only time will tell… Thx for offering Microsoft Belux!

Update 4/9/07

mission accomplished, cya in barca

Scrum Eventing Service woes (continued)

After receiving a response to my question on the Scrum for Team System Forum I investigated our problems somewhat further and noticed we were still running the Eventing Service from version 1.1, although I was convinced we did the upgrade to 1.2 as soon as it became available. Obviously I thought this was the very thing causing all this trouble.

As stated before in my previous post we recently moved the Eventing Service to its own Application Pool. We did this to make sure it wouldn’t crash our TFS server any more. When we tried to do the same thing with version 1.2 it no longer worked and Event Viewer showed this message: “GC handle cannot be shared among different application domains”. So we moved it back to the Application Pool belonging to TFS itself. The first couple of hours everything seemed just fine. The next morning however we had to recycle the Application Pool once again. I decided to stop the Eventing Service right there and then.

The next day I wrote a Windows Service which is currently running on our Continuous Integration Server and updates all Product Backlog Items once an hour by running the ScrumConsistencyChecker for every Scrum Project hosted on the TFS Server. It manages to do this in about 15 minutes for the 20 projects we currently host and this without any impact on the TFS Server. Which is, by the way, running just fine without the Eventing Service and hasn’t required any recycling since.