A couple of weeks ago I was doing a road-show where I did demos of TFS 2012 and it’s capabilities. I do a 4 hour demo that shows an end-to-end scenario, showing capabilities such as requirements management and elicitation, work management, developer tools, quality tools, testing tools, automated builds, lab management and reporting all using TFS. I visited 9 different companies, and most of them asked, “Why should we do builds?” This is something I want to address – you need to be doing builds, and you need to understand why they are so key to successful and effective software development. Builds are no longer an optional extra!

Windows Store applications are slowly becoming more popular. If you’re going to do any Windows Store development, you’ll need to shift a few paradigms in how you code – and how you test. There are hundreds of webcasts and blogs detailing Windows Store programming, but I want to explore testing Windows Store apps.

Late last year I uploaded my first VS Gallery contribution – Colin’s ALM Corner Checkin Policies. One of the policies in this pack is a Code Review Checkin Policy. I blogged about it in this post.

I had a customer who mailed me about their builds failing. The error message was

Series Links:

I’ve often had the question from my customers – “I’ve got a bunch of Requirements. Some of them are Active, but all their Child Tasks are Closed. Can TFS automatically close the Parent items? Or can I at least query these Requirements out?”

In Test Case Manager, you can open a test run that has failed and set the Failure and Resolution types for the failure.

The logical next step after you start unit testing your code is to analyse code coverage. You can do this easily in TFS by enabling Code Coverage in the test settings of the default build template. But what about failing builds (or checkins) based on low code coverage?

Update 2013-07-24 : This activity is now part of Community TFS Build Extensions.

On January 11, Brian Harry blogged about some bugs in the TFS 2012 upgrade process (as well as the link to the KB patch for fixing the bugs). I was upgrading a customer in December last year and we hit one of the “symptoms” that was fixed with the patch.