I upgraded my demo environment from 2013 Preview to 2013 RC. Everything looked good until I got to the builds. I had configured a couple of default builds – the 2013 default template is actually stored in the TFS database (not in source control like the old Default xaml files) unless you actually download it for customizing.

Some of the code I’ve written before has made it into the TFS Build Extensions latest release. They are my “Include Merges (and associated work items) in a build” and “Fail code based on Code Coverage” activities.

I have installed TFS 2013 RC. I upgraded my TFS Express (that I use for mucking around with code) from TFS 2012.3 and everything went smoothly. I then opened up Web Access and was pleased to see one of the best features yet for TFS work items: lightweight charts.

Update 2013-09-12: I’ve updated the extension to work with VS 2013 RC (since there were some breaking changes from Preview).

One of my favourite reports in TFS is the Backlog Overview (Scrum) or User Story Overview (Agile). So after installing and playing with TFS 2013 Preview, I went to see what the report looks like.

Update 2012-09-04: Brian Keller posted a fix that seems to work for this problem (so you can run the InRelease build without connecting to a physical external network).

Are you (as a developer) inundated with frequent status updates? Requests like: “How far are you?” “What did you do today?” “Where are we?” Or are you a project manager that requests frequent status updates? Then this post is for you.

I’ve written about why builds are absolutely essential in modern application development (Part 1) and what why Team Build is a great build engine (Part 2). However, if you don’t include unit tests in your builds, it’s like brushing your teeth without toothpaste – there’s a lot of movement, but it’s not the most effective way to do things. In this post, I want to put forward a few thoughts about why you absolutely need to be unit testing.

Note: This post is NOT about TFS and Project Server integration – this is for adding, editing and deleting work items using MS Project.

Update 2013-08-30: The extension is now available for VS 2013.