Introducing the TFS SDK for Java
June 6, 2011
We recently introduced the TFS SDK for Java, to allow Java developers to target applications to Team Foundation Server. One of the great features of an SDK for Java is that it allows cross-platform access to TFS. As you might know, I'm the resident Mac guy on the TFS team, so I wanted to whip up a little demo for how you might use this on Mac OS. This little sample shows how to pop up a Growl notification every time a new work item is created that falls within a specific query. Obviously it's fairly simplistic, but hopefully it's a good starting point for thinking about what you might be able to do with the new SDK.
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Team Explorer Überall
April 8, 2011
One of the interesting things about working for Microsoft instead of a tiny little startup company is that they actually expect us to do all the things that people expect out of a software company. For example: Microsoft actually ships localized software! Which means that if you're in Germany, you actually get dialogs and buttons and other widgets in German. I suppose this is something that those crazy Germans have come to expect, but it was quite a revelation to this programmer who grew up in the redneckier parts of Illinois and thinks that the French road signs in Canada are quite exotic. When it was suggested to us that we'd need to ship a localized version of Team Explorer Everywhere, I laughed. Several years of strings piling on top of each other and we're supposed to extract those and get them translated? Ouch. Fortunately, when we were brought into Microsoft, our team was beefed up with some very smart people who don't laugh at hard problems. And so we present to you language packs available for download in German, French and Japanese.
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TFS Austin User Group
April 5, 2011
A very special thanks to the TFS Austin User Group for providing me time today to present on TFS for Heterogeneous Environments.
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Professional Team Foundation Server 2010
March 30, 2011
My good friend and coworker, Martin Woodward just announced his new book, Professional Team Foundation Server 2010, written with Ed Blankenship, Grant Holliday, and Brian Keller. I've been fortunate enough to see some of the content in the advance copy of the book and I'm very impressed."
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Team Explorer Everywhere Midwest Tour
March 20, 2011
I'm very excited to announce that I've been invited to a number of speaking engagements throughout the Midwest this spring. I'll be doing both ALM user groups and smaller sessions. One of the great things about the small sessions is that I'm able to dive a lot deeper into Q\&A than is possible at a users group due to looser time constraints. So if you're interesting in learning more about cross-platform Team Foundation Server and Team Explorer Everywhere, please stop by and say hi...
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Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 (Beta)
November 5, 2010
Yesterday we released the beta of the first service pack of Team Explorer Everywhere, and while a service pack is just supposed to be a roll-up of bugfixes, we managed to sneak in some great new features.
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Team Explorer Everywhere 2010
April 29, 2010
We've finally announced the release of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 and now that we're finally done, I can say without any hesitance that this is the proudest I've ever been to have shipped a product. Yes, we've added a lot of new features, but I'm much more proud of the huge increase in quality... that almost didn't happen.
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Introducing "Eaglestone"
March 5, 2010
Here we are a brief four months into the Microsoft's acquisition of Teamprise, and already we're announcing our first beta release!
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Welcome to Microsoft
November 9, 2009
For the last several years, I've worked for a little company named Teamprise. And before that, I worked for a little company called SourceGear that gave birth to Teamprise. And, surprisingly, today I woke up and I work for a little company called Microsoft. That's right, Microsoft has acquired Teamprise in order to provide our Eclipse and cross-platform tools even better support. While this may come as a surprise to many of our customers, it's obviously something that we've been quietly working on for several months in conjunction with developing Teamprise Client Suite 4.0, and it's something that we're all very excited about. Microsoft has hired the Teamprise development staff (myself included, of course) as well as adding some great new developers and testers to our team. On a personal note, I'll be relocating to Microsoft's office in Research Triangle Park, NC. I'm certainly sad to be leaving Chicago, but I'm looking forward to be getting back into an office without a four hour commute. We've all been working exceptionally hard to bring a very high-quality next release of the Teamprise Client Suite, and we've still got a lot of work to do, but we're very pleased to be bringing it to you right alongside the next release of TFS.
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Application Compatibility with TFS 2005 and TFS 2008
August 5, 2009
Although I usually blog about cross-platform aspects of Team Foundation Server, sometimes you run into interesting issues when writing third-party apps strictly against Microsoft's TFS SDK. I thought I'd mention one of the problems we ran into writing Remote Accelerator - working with both the TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 client assemblies. When writing code against the TFS SDK, you need to specify the version of the SDK to bind to: for TFS 2005, this you bind to version 8.0; for TFS 2008, you bind to version 9.0. In theory, you're expected to compile one version of your tool to talk to TFS 2005 and another to talk to TFS 2008. But if you happen to be calling simple methods that have identical signatures between the versions, you can use a little loader trickery to bind against both. When compiling your application, link against the version 9.0 SDK. When those aren't found -- when the target platform only has the TFS 2005 client installed -- .NET will fire a library resolve event, giving you a second chance to load the DLLs. Then you can simply load the 2005 libraries and keep running your application. When your application starts, hook up an AssemblyResolve event handler: Your ResolveAssembly method should look like this: And with a few lines of code, you've got an application that works with either TFS 2005 or TFS 2008.
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