Ok, just a quick blog about the new Google Desktop. This is by far the coolest software I've seen in some time. If you haven't taken a look at it yet, do so:
http://www.desktop.google.com/
I'm not sure if this is a limitation of SharePoint, or of Team System, but I'm beginning to believe it will be a major problem. Whenever I create a document through Portfolio Explorer (which allows you to navigate all of the documents that are stored in your Team System SharePoint site) ,I have to do a Save As and navigate back to Team System with
http://myTeamServer/sites/Myproject in order to save the document into SharePoint, even though I created the document from Team System. Likewise, and this is even more annoying, if I OPEN a document from Portfolio Explorer and make changes to it - first, it opens up my Word documents within an IE Shell - why is this? Second, I have no Save button, and when I close the "Browser" Window, it prompts me to save. When I choose to save my changes, I again have to navigate to the SharePoint site using
http://myTeamServer/sites/Myproject. This is a huge pain. Has anybody figured out a way to do this more easily? If I open the documents from SharePoint (via the web browser), then when I hit save, it still brings up a dialog (I don't recall this being normal for SharePoint), but at least it has me in the right directory on the web server. I just posted this to the MSDN Feedback center as a suggestion, so it'll be interesting to see what becomes of it.
Ok, I just found out that the walkthroughs for the new Team System features were updated for the Beta 1 refresh. The trick is they are actually integrated into the help. This was a bit of a pain since I wanted to look at them on machine that didn’t have the Beta installed. But regardless, they are decent – not great, but better than anything else you’ll find at this point. After you install, go to the Contents in your help and the top item is “Visual Studio Team System”. Not everything is under there, but a lot is. For example if you want MSBuild info, go use the index and type in “MSBuild”. The testing section in the contents has a ton of topics, but you’ll notice much of it is placeholders. I’m hoping Scott Dockendorf gets moving on updating his Test-Driven Development talk to use the unit testing in Whidbey. Maybe he can provide some additional walkthroughs.
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/vstsdocs
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/vstswalkthroughprojects
I’ll be giving a presentation on Team System at the Ft. Worth .NET User’s Group on October 20th. For those of you that have seen my previous Team System talks in Plano or Dallas, you should know that this one will have much better demos now that I have the Beta 1 Refresh behaving in a somewhat reasonable fashion. I’ve also talked Brian Moore into helping out with the overview and background stuff, and I’ll be focusing on the demos. So, if you happen to be in driving distance, come check it out: http://www.fwdnug.org.
Here are my notes on installing the Team System bits that are delivered with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh - but first a big thanks to Joel Semeniuk for all his help in getting this working.
For the most part the install directions that come with Team System are good, but they are lacking in many respects. The key one that I struggled with was the Active Directory setup. The installation guide just notes that you need a domain, but provides little guidance after that. Considering that many people are trying to set this up in Virtual PC, that makes it even more difficult. Here are the steps I followed:
- I created the base Windows 2003 image from scratch, and used Windows Update to get it current. I then copied the image and used NEWSID to create a new SID and rename one of the computers (images).
- I used the VPC networking option that binds to the network card, rather than shared or local.
- I created static addresses for all VPCs.
- I had problems when that card was a wireless card.
- I set one of the images up as a Domain Controller, make sure the DNS for the DC points to itself.
- I set up Yukon on the domain controller, I had problems with I tried putting TFS on the DC.
- After putting Yukon on the DC and adding the TFSIdentity account (and adding it to the Domain admins group) I backed up the image so I wouldn't have to start over if something failed.
- I added the 2nd server VPC to the domain and made sure that the DNS points to DC (and no secondary DNS - had problems with that too).
- I added the domain\administrator account directly into the administrator group on the TFS machine.
- I set up TFS on this second machine following the installation guide.
- Note: When installing, if I couldn't access the the DC to look up the TFSIdentity account without difficulty, I found that restarting the VPCs (DC first) seemed to help (I think this may have been because I had my DNS setup up poorly - I had a secondary).
- The client can either be a VPC or a native install. Be sure you follow the directions and get office/project installed with the .NET support first. The key for me was to be have the client as a member of the domain and the DNS configured to point to the DC (this caused me a lot of grief).
I'm still struggling with the Project/VS integration and there seem to be some serious bugs in this area.