Comments on: Tell me what you don’t like about TFS 2010

By: Jim Burt

Jim Burt — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:17:00 +0000

Other bug trackers allow you to enter in release notes when you resolve the bug. Then you can generate a report to display all of the release notes. However, I don’t see any way to do that out of the box with TFS 2010.

By: Jim Burt

Jim Burt — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:47:00 +0000

Queries aren’t automatically pointed to the new iteration name when renaming an iteration. You have to manually go through each query and point it to the new iteration which takes a lot of time.

By: outsource development

outsource development — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:03:00 +0000

Nice information, many thanks to the author. It is incomprehensible to me now, but in general, the usefulness and significance is overwhelming. Thanks again and good luck.

By: Clement Yip

Clement Yip — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:38:00 +0000

One of my biggest pain point: No ability to change process template of a project, without affecting source code in version control. This is a design deficiency. Source code should always be preserved with 100% history/fidelity, regardless of whether we change process template.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:27:00 +0000

Source Control is awfull, Working with shared libraries is too complicated. Documentation on it is poor. It’s far too easy to end up with circular references. You really shouldn’t have to read a manual in order to use source control. After reading through the documentation you still find you have no idea what it had done half the time. It’s just too unpredictable.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:27:00 +0000

By: Stabiplan

Stabiplan — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:30:00 +0000

Multi-solution builds, distributed over multiple agents (we have a large application with multiple solutions, we had to stop our migration to TFS team build because of out-of-the-box support for this).

By: Geist

Geist — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I read that as ‘recall that TFS functionality is broken IN the following major areas’…

By: KJ

KJ — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:25:14 +0000

1) Build. I hate it in 2010. I absolutely hate it.
2) Lack of migration information for converting 2008 scripts to 2010

First of all, I’m a CM person and not necessarily a developer. I learned XML for MSBuild/TFS 2008 and that worked fine. In 2010, not only do I need to learn Windows Workflow, but also an additional language if I want to customize any build script.

There are tons of tutorials on how to “create” a build script and how to use Windows Workflow, but these are not at all practical from my point of view. I have not yet found any decent help on:

1) Which language should I learn to customize MSBuild? VB.NET or C#? Most of the tutorial on the web are in C#, but when customizing a build definition TFS is reads, “Enter a VB expression”. So which is it? No one has addressed the pros and cons of which language to learn if one knows neither. If one is not a developer, how would one know which direction to go?

2) How the heck do you translate things like $(WorkspaceName), $(BuildDefinitionName), etc., to TFS 2010? This syntax will not work when creating a build definition. How the heck do you get this information? I have not seen any decent information on this, thus I’m pulling my hair out trying to get what I believe is very basic information.

3) Common code – how is this done in TFS 2010? No one is talking about this. We have two target files – DEVCommon.targets and Common.targets, where the majority of our common code lives. This allows for each build script to be very streamlined. How is this handled in 2010 using the workflow? Where can this information be found?

4) I realize that Visual Studio / .NET started out as strictly a development tool. However, as TFS has progressed it’s become an ALM tool. Yet with each new release of TFS the entire suite is becoming more developer centric, meaning one must have a sound coding skills to be able to tweak it. As mentioned, I’m a CM / Release Management person and lack solid skills in theses areas. The TFS suite is getting more difficult to use because of this. And as most non-developers will probably attest, the last group / person you want doing CM / RM related tasks is a developer.

5) No CM / RM Training. The TFS Admin class is rather useless unless you are completely new to TFS. There are NO training classes specifically related to MSBuild, or how to effectively do CM / RM with the TFS suite of products. Again – developer centric. There’s a lot of people who want to take advantage of the rest of the suite but you’re making it near impossible due to lack of non-developer training for TFS.

I am frustrated beyond description. I’m not above learning languages or anything else to do my work. But Microsoft is excluding too many other folks to accommodate developers, and I feel this is a shame. And there’s almost no decent, usable training if one is not a developer.

By: Ryan Overton

Ryan Overton — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:28:29 +0000

To get TFS 2010 to publish upon build, add the following to the build definition. Go to the “Process” section. Open the “Advanced” section. In the “MSBuild Arguments” field add
/t:Publish /p:PublishDir=\\YourServer\FolderToPublishTo

That should perform the publish required for a ClickOnce App. Now that being said, I have found that TFS does not increment the publish version. So, every version published from TFS will have the same version number unless manually changed in the project properties beforehand. And because the version number never changes, it doesn’t know to re-download the version. To force that you have to clear the application cache on the user’s machine.