Monday, September 30, 2013

New Release of TFS Scorecard for TFS 2012.2


The TFS Scorecard is one of my oldest projects, starting back at the tfs2005 days and based on Microsoft TFS dogfooding queries. With each new TFS version there has been a new release of the TFS Scorecard, adopting to changes in TFS and adding features.

Dependency on the TFS database schema

The TFS Scorecard is based on the Microsoft TFS dogfooding queries against the TFS Collection database, and therefore has a dependency on the TFS database schema. As you might know the TFS database schema is not public and subject to change with every release. Historical those schema changes has been limited to the major version upgrades every second year, and Microsoft has provided us with new updated dogfooding queries for each release.

TFS2012 Update 2 schema changes

With the new release cadence of TFS releasing new features with quarterly updates, the speed of the schema changes has picked up also. Although not all schema changes affects the dogfooding queries, but the TFS 2012.2 update did. Not much, but enough to break TFS Scorecard report.
TFS Scorecard 2012.2 released
After an update on the queries was published, I’ve implemented it and pushed a new release compatible with the TFS 2012.2 release. You can find the release at http://tfsscorecard.codeplex.com
Note that the new release only works with TFS 2012.2 or later versions, if your running TFS 2012 RTM download the old TFS 2012 RTM release

New Features in the TFS Scorecard 2012.2
Apart from fixing the dogfooding queries, I’ve also managed to do some work on the Activity logging part. One of the major things is that I redone the translation of the logs to user friendly names in the report. Hopefully it will make the report easier to read for you.  I also introduced some structure to group different tools and releases together. Making it easier to spot both who on VS 2008, 2010 and 2012 and at the same time be able to drill down to the different 2012.x updates.

Future directions of the TFS ScorecardA lot have happened since 2005, new report and visualization tools, clouds and new access methods for consuming data, and the new release cadence of TFS. It got me thinking about the future for the TFS Scorecard. Perhaps it would be time to split the TFS Scorecard report into independent peace’s and even moving some of the pieces to other technical solutions. Nothing is decided yet, so If you have any thoughts or ideas on this, I would appreciate the feedback.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Minor update: Tfs Admin Toolkit 1.3.1

I just uploaded a minor update to the TFS Admin Toolkit, addressing some user feedback and fixing some minor bugs. The biggest thing would be support for multiple filename masks!

You can find the new version at Visual Studio Gallery http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/96a425aa-9ef0-4a92-b874-217d544a74bf