On Monday October 11 I had a grate session in the ALM User Group in Israel.

In my session we have seen a Test Case Lifecycle: Create a Test Case –> Run Manual Test Case –> Run Semi-Automated Test Case (Automatic run with no validations) –> Run as a GUI Test (Coded UI Test) with full validation.

The second session was about Web Tests by Asaf Vishna, he showed us the Basic Functionality of the Web Test and in the second part of the session he showed How To Record a Web Test with Fiddler and how to Test WCF with the Web Test.

In my opinion he made a clear and simple demonstrations and a very good explanation on the WCF Testing.

My Presentation can be downloaded from Here

Have Fun!!!

This post is the Second post out of Five that builds the TFS 2010 Alerts User Guide. See the first post: “TFS 2010 Alerts User Guide – Introduction”

On this post I will show how to set the mail server.

The first thing you will need to do in order to user the Alerts mechanism is to set an SMTP server that the TFS will use.

Follow these steps to set the SMTP: 

Step 1: Log in to the Server with a user that has TFS Administration rights

Step 2: Launch the “Team Foundation Administration Console”

 Step 3: Go to the “Application Tier”

Step 4: Click the “Alert Settings”

Step 5: Type your SMTP Server

Step 6: Type an Email address, you can type a fake email address it doesn’t need to be a real one. I usually use: TFSAdmin@DomainName.com

The result will be:

That is all, you are now ready to start using the Email Alerts.

Have Fun!!!

In September 2010 we have received a new TFS 2010 Power Tools.

One of the main features released with this Power Tools was a Backup and Restore wizards for the TFS 2010 Administrator Console, that functionality lets us create a Backup Plan for the TFS easily and with no special knowledge with the Maintenance Plans of SQL Server.

Brian Harry has reported some issues with this functionality and some workarounds for these issues in his post: “Known Issues with the Backup/Restore Power Tool”

Brian said that all issues will be fixed in the next Power Tools Version target for January 2011.

I have copied all the issues from his post…

Have Fun!!!

#1: The backup plan wizard cannot find Reporting Services databases when the report server is using an FQDN

Workaround:

1. From the wizard, on the External Databases page, uncheck Include Reporting databases
2. Configure the backup plan without RS databases and close the wizard.
3. Open this file "SYSTEM DRIVE:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Team Foundation\Server Configuration\ConfigPT.xml" and add the Reporting node below as follows right after the </TfsWarehouse> closing node that’s already in the file.

  <Reporting>

    <Database Name="ReportServer">SQL_INSTANCE_NAME</Database>

    <Database Name="ReportServerTempDb">SQL_INSTANCE_NAME</Database>

  </Reporting>

Then modify what you’ve pasted in as follows:

SQL_INSTANCE_NAME should be replaced with the instance name for the Reporting Services database server.  If it is the default instance (which is the default for an RS install), you can just put in the server name of the SQL Server that holds the RS databases.  If you have modified SQL to use a named instance then replace SQL_INSTANCE_NAME with servername\instancename for the Reporting Services database instance.

“ReportServer” and “ReportServerTempDb” should be replaced with the correct reporting database names – these are the SQL defaults but if you changed them in SQL, you will need to change them here.

#2: The configuration fails with the message "Value does not fall within the expected range".

The problem is that the wizard cannot set the interval for the transactional backups schedule in the wizard's advanced option using Windows Scheduled Tasks v1.  We’ve seen this issue on Windows Server 2003 – 2008 and 2008 R2 work fine.

Workaround:

Create a nightly full backup using the wizard and then schedule the transactional and differential backups manually through windows scheduled tasks. The commands you need your scheduled tasks to run are

TFSConfigPT.exe TfsTransactionalBackup

and

TFSConfigPT.exe TfsDifferentialBackup

#3: Backup retention duration can’t be set to less than 30 days

Workaround:

Open this file "SYSTEM DRIVE:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Team Foundation\Server Configuration\ ConfigPT.xml"  and modify the node RetentionDays

#4: Cannot cancel the backup task from the console once it starts

No workaround.

#5: You receive the error "Invalid value specified for AFTER parameter." when restoring the transactional backups

Workaround:

Set the dateformat in sql to year/months/days format by executing this command:

set dateformat ymd

This issue is addressed in this kb article

#6: The wizard does not backup the report server encryption key and it does not backup TFS analysis services.

Workaround:

Backup the RS encryption key manually – you only need to do it once.  It doesn’t change.  The TFS documentation on backing up and restoring explains how to do this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms400729(v=VS.100).aspx

#7: Backups timeout after 10 minutes

The backup of any given database will timeout after 10 minutes (obviously we didn’t test this on very big databases :().  This is probably the most serious issue in this list.  There is no work around because 10 minutes is the default SQL connection timeout and our code doesn’t override it.  You can be sure we’ll fix this for the next release (maybe 24 hours would be safer :)).

Workaround:

No workaround.