Archives
-
Team System Class Designer
VS.NET 2005 Team System ships with a number of designers, and you should pay particular attention to the Class Designer. Like all Class Designers, this canvas lets you visualize the structure of classes and types in your project generating source code as you go. In fact, don’t think of this tool like round trip engineering since changes you make to your code are instantly reflected in the diagram and visa versa. Why do you want to use the class designer? Well, you can use it to document or understand existing code (trying to figure out someone elses code bugs me sometimes), you could use it to help take what’s in your head to your screen – and you can also do fancy things like refactoring your code. What I really like about this particular designer is that it is tied to the CLR where a lot of other designers are strictly UML based. This designer is even language specific – for example, if I’m in a VB.NET project I get Public, Private, and Friend access levels… in a C# project I get public, private, and internal. Nice. I simply love the fact that I can toggle between code and picture seamlessly (did I mention I love making pretty pictures?). I can also create enumerations, abstract classes, structures, delegates, and modules… and the Class Details window ROCKS I might add.
-
Team System Distributed System Designers
Lately I have been playing around with the Distributed System Designers in VSTS. Distributed System Designers are cooked into VS.NET 2005 and is comprised of 4 different designer surfaces; Application Connection Designer, Logical Datacenter Designer, System Designer, and Deployment Designer. I can’t help grinning while using them. I love drawing pretty pictures – I love it even more when those pretty pictures come alive and do something useful for me. I intend to write a whole whack of comments about these designers in posts to come – but generally speaking they represent yet more powerful tools that will help my projects be successful technically. They excite me because I think these tools will become as useful as SQL Server’s diagram tool – we always found ourselves creating our models on that surface and as you know the table diagram designer went out and actually created the physical implementation under the hood for you. Now, there were some DBA’s who were very hesitant on using that design surface because they were set in their ways (which is cool – don’t get me wrong) – and because of this I have always thought that the tool was under utilized. I find the TS designers fairly intuitive – however, I’m positive that it will take getting used to on real-life projects. I’ve used them very successfully so far to create and connect my skeleton projects together. I haven’t, however, had the chance to take it through a full lifecycle on a real project.
-
Team System Lists
I’m just playing with the lists (aka work items) provided in Team System. There are add-ins for Excel and Project that allows you to access these lists… I started to dig to try to find out where these lists are stored – and in fact, their all in SQL 2005 on the data tier primarily in a DB called CurrituckDB (Actually, there are a bunch of databases involved – still shifting through them). It seems to me that there is really one “list” with a WHACK of fields… different “views” of the list represent different list types. For example, the Risk view of the list would only show you the fields that are relevant to risks. Issues, the same – but its all coming from one place – and all really being stored in one place – making it easy to extend.
-
Beta 1 Refresh of Team System
In one of my last posts I made a comment about working with Beta products. Rob Caron reminded me that the Beta 1 refresh of Team System is in fact not a Beta release and that the Beta will actually be out early next year. Excellent point!
-
Visual Studio Team System Source Control Problem...
VSTS’s more robust source control solution seems nice…. I’ve already customized it a bit to require additional information to be recorded when you attempt to check something in. What I can’t figure out, however, is how to open a solution from source control… With VS.NET 2005 you simply go “Open from Source Control” under File ->Source Control. That’s not there in VS.NET 2005. If you go to Open a project – you can see that there is now a Microsoft Source Safe option, but when you go and add a new VSS Database – you can’t specify a TS database. Not sure if I’m missing something obvious.
-
Successfully Installed Visual Studio Team System - I think...
Well, I think I’ve managed to successfully install VSTS. I have it configured on three different VPC’s – one to house SQL, on to be my application server, and one to act as my client. Realistically, I guess I could have used only 2 VPC’s and configured the my host machine with VS.NET + the TS features – but I wanted to self contain everything as much as possible. I made a back up of my freshly installed images expecting that I’ll be reverting to its successful installation point at some time in the future.