Continuous Integration with Team Foundation Server

by Dmitry Kirsanov 12. September 2013 09:00

Team Foundation Server logo

Continuous Integration is extremely important part of software development process, but is also the least used at the same time. Even at relatively big software shops, the continuous integration usually is something, that everyone heard of, but that’s it.

Among all the things you can do to shift the focus of your software developers to what they really have to do instead of what they have to do now, the continuous integration is perhaps the most rewarding. More...

Team Foundation Server 2010 for Developers - part 8 - Test to Development

by Dmitry Kirsanov 14. March 2012 02:30

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010Once your Team Foundation Server is performing automated UI testing on daily basis, it starts to check your code when needed. When Team Foundation Server finds that your software is doing something unexpected, it automatically creates the bug work item. This time we are going to talk about these bugs, how to get most out of them, and how to use that functionality to boost the effectiveness of your software development. More...

Team Foundation Server 2010 for Developers - part 7 - Configuring a Build

by Dmitry Kirsanov 10. March 2012 12:00

Team Foundation Server 2010 logoMicrosoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server has two most important features – the source control and the build automation. Although other features are very important as well, these two are pretty much enough to consider the purchase of the Team Foundation Server.

Today we are going to talk about the Build Management system of Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server. More...

7 Rules of Building High Availability Kiosk Applications

by Dmitry Kirsanov 17. February 2012 11:19

RigasSatiksmeWhat could be easier, for a software developer, than to write a kiosk application? You set the rules, you have only 4 buttons to deal with and users just can’t do anything bad or unexpected. What could be wrong with such solution?

The absence of proactive thinking.

More...

Migrating Team Foundation Server 2010 Project Schema

by Dmitry Kirsanov 15. February 2012 09:36

Team Foundation Server 2010 logoWhat could be more tragic, than to realize that your team cannot into Scrum? Or any other framework, supported by Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server. One day you just wake up with a single most powerful desire – to end this pain, no matter what. And this “what” could be really painful as well, as it could mean migration, and if you are not scared yet – you should be, and I’ll tell you why. More...

Advanced Testing in Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server

by Dmitry Kirsanov 4. January 2012 17:10

Team Foundation Server 2010This is part 4 of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for Developers walkthrough. Last time we were speaking about the unit tests, and that was useful, but very basic foundation of what you can do in terms of Test Driven Development. However, we can conventionally separate testing in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server to 3 levels. So today we are going to talk about the second level – Advanced Testing techniques, such as Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Tests and Load Tests.

If that’s only the middle layer of complex testing in Visual Studio 2010, what’s in the last one, you might ask? There will be test automation using Hyper-V virtualization with Virtual Machine Manager and yes, we will discuss it later as well.

But today we’ll begin with Test Impact Analysis. More...

Test Driven Development in Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server

by Dmitry Kirsanov 27. December 2011 14:50

Team Foundation Server 2010This is the 3rd post in a series of articles about Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for developers. And this time it is about test driven development. Previous one is available here.

 

Test Driven Development is the concept, which dictates creating unit tests before actually writing the code. To help you to understand this, let’s assume that you are writing the calculator program. And that whole calculation process is done by a separate class named Calculator with functions such as “Addition”, “Subtraction”, “Multiplication” and “Division”.

Now, according to Test Driven Development process, you should first create the test project, and write your tests for each of these functions. Since you know what result should be given for what input (like – “2 + 2 = 4”) you can make your tests to assert, that if you are running the Addition function with parameters of 2 and 2, the result is 4. If the result is different or exception occurs – the test is failed. More...

Team Foundation Server 2010 For Developers part 2 - Advanced Source Control

by Dmitry Kirsanov 4. December 2011 11:03

This is my second post about Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server for Software Developers. The previous one is here.

Now that you know how to submit your code to the source control, associate work items and use that information in your daily work, it’s time to learn the rest two things we skipped in the first part. The Branching and the Shelving.

Team Foundation Server is an Agile-oriented platform, and therefore many of it’s concepts supports the existing models of Agile Software Development. One of such models is Source Code Promotion Model, which basically means that your code moves through 3 stages – development, testing and production.

A word of warning: each model of Agile is a double bladed sword. It expects you to meet the conditions which will make this model effective, and if you fail to comply – you’ll get ineffective implementation, which could ruin your software development efforts. In case of Promotion Model, make sure you have a dedicated team of testers – not just developers from other project who came to rescue, but professional testers who are not doing any development. If you don’t have dedicated testers – forget about Promotion Model. More...

Team Foundation Server 2010 for Developers - part 1

by Dmitry Kirsanov 20. November 2011 18:50

As I finished the series of presentations for Quality Assurance specialists on Team Foundation Server 2010 Test Manager, it was obvious to continue with TFS and now do it for the biggest audience of it’s users – for .NET developers.

Microsoft Visual Studio is the most advanced RAD platform made so far. We could argue about the languages and platforms, like .NET vs. J2EE or ASP.NET vs. Ruby, but one thing is for sure – when you are software developer, no matter what language you are using, the Visual Studio is the most advanced and friendly platform  for any level.

Saying that, Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 (that’s the official name of the product) is a very advanced and sophisticated part of Visual Studio, arguably the most advanced product Microsoft created, apart from operating systems.

Systems administrators having hard hours installing it, developers spend hours learning it’s concepts, but then it starts working and software development becomes a pleasant and highly productive process.

Once you’ve started working with TFS, you can’t imagine working without it on any more or less complex team project. It takes the burden of source and version control, the whole agile workflow, sophisticated automated testing, control over policies and a lot more.  That’s definitely a product which costs every penny of it’s price.

All right, enough praises. You should make your own conclusions and for that you should see it in action. While the previous demonstration for QA specialists was convincing enough to use TFS as the platform for automated testing and main environment for testers, now we are going to talk about the main, biggest and greatest part of Team Foundation Server 2010 – the one meant for software developers.

In this first demonstration we are exploring the source control, but as everything is linked in TFS, we also touch working with code and some best practices. In the next part we will explore the source control deeper, before moving further to more complex and wonderful parts of Team Foundation Server 2010.

Team Foundation Server for Software Developers part 1

Team Foundation Server Quality Assurance Lab 8 - Miscellaneous Testing

by Dmitry Kirsanov 14. November 2011 01:02

The last lab on Team Foundation Server Quality Assurance course, this time – about miscellaneous testing techniques you can use.

In this lab you can learn how to create ordered testing, use the test list editor and create exploratory tests.

After completing filming this lab I missed the topic so much, that decided to create another one, now just for software developers (this one was for Software Quality Assurance specialists). It will be about how to use TFS on daily basis and it will be narrated for sure!

TFS Team Foundation Server Quality Assurance Lab 8 - Miscellaneous Testing

Enjoy and don’t forget to switch to HD. This lab is rather old and probably quality suffers a little, new one, that you can see in the previous post, is rather better.