Random thoughts about development on the Microsoft platform
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TFS
Recently we've been getting the following error for our TFS build agents which caused all our builds to fail
The error reported is "The job has been abandoned because agent <agent name> did not renew the lock. Ensure agent is running, not sleeping, and has not lost communication with the service."
Investigating the _diag folder of the build agent itself reveals the actual error.
Here at SSW, we've been transitioning all our new projects onto Team Foundation Service. It’s been a pleasure to work with in all aspects of the application lifecycle. It’s main features are:
Below is a video of how Microsoft use Team Foundation Service to run their internal scrum teams. It provides great insight into how the tool works, but also shows you how a standup meeting should run. The key takeaways for me are:
http://tv.ssw.com/1279/daily-scrum-at-microsoft Everybody knows the 3 essential questions.... lets go well beyond that. See the TFS Agile Team do a Daily Scrum What did they do right? ...and wrong? What do you do better? Please tweet me @AdamCogan and give me feedback @AdamCogan www.adamcogan.com Based on tips from the SSW Rule: Do you have daily stand-up meetings (aka a Scrum)?
Check out Methodology - Do you do Daily Scrums (aka stand-up meetings)? for more details about how SSW runs scrums
I’m currently working at a client that requires some source code to compile in Unix - as their major systems are Unix based with new development being done in .NET. The great thing about the project is that they have are trying to consolidate everything into TFS as the single source of truth (it’s mostly there).
To get the unix stuff going I’ve customized the DefaultTemplate.xaml and added an extra InvokeProcess that calls a PowerShell script to copy files to Unix using Pscp (for secure remote copy), compile code using Plink (allows remote command execution over SSH) and finally copy the Unix binaries back to the build server.
The PowerShell script takes in a number of arguments like remote server details, remote paths, usernames etc. So obviously we don’t want these being set via the arguments property for the InvokeProcess activity because:
What you should do instead is to define new Arguments for your template.
The Team Foundation Server Power Tools allow you to edit templates online or offline. In the online mode, changes you make are instantly visible when you save the changes so be careful. I would advise creating a dummy Team Project to do the customizations on first before rolling the changes out to actual Team Projects. The offline mode works by saving the work item definitions locally as XML and making changes to the XML file. You will need to import the XML to the Team Project to deploy the changes.
So let’s take a look at adding a the following fields to Product Backlog Item WIT of the Scrum 1.0 template:
Note: I know Actual/Estimates aren’t part of Scrum, but the higher-ups like to track it. It’s “Scrum-But” :)
1. Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Types | Open WIT From Server
One of the best features of Team Foundation Server 2010 is the ability to customize and create your own Process Templates, Work Items and Fields. The first thing you’ll need is to install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. This will give you a menu under Tools | Process Editor to customize the templates
From here you can start modifying the Work Item Types (WIT) in existing Team Projects or create new WITs.
The most frequent requests I get from TFS users is to:
I will cover doing each in a series of posts.
