Grant Holliday

Welcome to the second edition of OzTFS Weekly News. After I launched this newsletter last week Rob was quick to link and I’ve only received positive feedback about it.

This newsletter available from my blog feed, or on a separate blog feed:

   http://feeds.feedburner.com/oztfs/

What you can expect to see here is a weekly blog post that summarises the discussions from the list. It will be a great way for busy people to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on the list without the daily chatter.

Don’t forget you can always subscribe to the mailing list yourself, or read the archives on the web.

Subscribers

TFS (beta) Service Pack Released

The biggest news this week around TFS was the release of a beta of Service Pack 1. All the Microsoft guys blogged about it including Brian, Ed, Rob, Buck and even Soma (the DevDiv corporate VP). Be sure to read the SP1 Readme and Known Issues before installing on anything close to production. They’re expecting that the RTM version of SP1 won’t be out for 3–4 months. Brian also gave us a raw dump of all the work items that went into TFS SP1. A great insight into the product!

How to get it

Head on over to http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio and request access. Then they send you an email saying that you’ve been approved, then if you follow that link it shows you the ‘request access’ page. The key step here is to click ‘Sign In’, then you’ll get the actual download links for the TFS SP1 (~41mb)  and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (~372mb).

Is there an upgrade path from SP1 beta to SP1 RTM?

As Brian mentions in the comments on his blog: “Yes, you should be able to uninstall Beta1 and install RTM.”

Are TFS 2005 clients compatible with TFS 2005 SP1 servers and vice versa?

“Yes, the client and server are completely compatible in both directions. That means that you can upgrade the server software independently of your clients.” This is good news! 

Discussions this week

The main topics of discussion this week were around:

• Connecting to multiple TFS servers simultaneously – Basically it’s not possible, but a workaround is to open two instances of Team Explorer.
• TFS Training Material – People are starting to ask how to get up to speed on TFS.
• Keyword Expansion not supported – A quick discussion around $Author and $Date and how to vote for it on MS Connect.
• CAL Pricing – Keith seemed to think that $499 was a bit steep for non-developers.
• Bernardo is still working on his strongly typed WorkItem Object Mapper
• Copying Team Projects from one server to another – Scott is wondering if anybody else has done this and there was no easy answer.

VSTSTechBrekkie – Brisbane 6th/13th/20th/27th October

Anthony is running a free community series on VSTS in Brisbane. All the details can be found at www.vststechbrekkie.com.

TFS Jobs

Since I got a total of 0 people interested in advertising TFS jobs, I’ll put this idea on the backburner for a while.

That’s all for this week. All feedback is welcome. What else do you want me to include?

G.