If you have used Visual Studio 2017 to connect to a Team Services instance, or you follow the Microsoft ALM blog you will have noticed that with Visual Studio 2017: Work items now open in the web from Visual Studio ’15’! While the official post shows why that change was made and what advantages the web form brings, I wanted to quickly point out some small things that were done to make this behavior more usable. You can follow along by downloading Visual Studio 2017 and connecting to your Team Services or Team Foundation Server 2017 instance. Running Queries from Visual Studio There is still the full work item query tree available in Visual Studio, including favorites: You can also still create and run new[…]
Miriam’s blog (in German) about what we do when we are not working at MSFT: Da wir so nah wohnen, dachten wir, fliegen wir mal nach Hawai’i. Im Mai war es endlich soweit – 10 Tage auf Kaua’i, eine der kleineren Insel des Staates Hawai’i im Norden. Da sonst nicht so viel passiert ist im Mai, hier ein ausführlicher Bericht! via Sommerurlaub auf Kauai in Hawaii — 10hourflight
In the last post we ended up with a list of tags a user added last to a work item. The next step is now to keep an MRU list with tags from earlier sessions and update it when new tags are added. Every time the user adds tags to a work item we want to merge these new tags with the (persisted) list of tags. We will keep a maximum of N tags and need to either only add tags to the list (if |tags| < N), or and and remove (if |tags| > N), or just reorder the tags in the list, so that the most recently used tags appear first in the final dropdown menu. Keeping MRU[…]
I often find myself adding the same tags over and over to work items. Example: While we use features to group our user stories, it is often convenient to also add a tag per feature, since these can show up on the cards on the different boards, making it easy to see what belongs to which feature: So let’s say I’m working on a feature called “Tag Extension”. Our feature is broken down into a few user stories and and we have applied a tag “Tag Extension” to all of them: Then we add another story using the add panel on the backlog. It’s parented to the feature but it’s missing the tag applied to the other ones: While I[…]
Last year Visual Studio Team Services (formerly known as Visual Studio Online) released support for extensions. There are some great samples on GitHub and a growing number of finished extensions in the marketplace. One of my published extensions is Estimate, a planning poker implementation for VSTS. Extending VSTS is really easy, there is documentation and some great examples at the official GitHub repository. Since I work on the Agile planning tools and work item tracking, I would like to show with a few simple examples how you can add functionality to your backlogs, boards, and queries. To make it really easy I’ve published a small seed project that contributes a single menu item to the work item context menu and which will[…]
Quick update: a few weeks ago I left Germany and Microsoft Consulting Services and moved to the US. I’m now a developer on the Visual Studio Online team in Redmond, WA.
If you stumble across the following error message with Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC: 1>[…]\Package.appxmanifest(19,64): error APPX3210: App manifest references the image ‘Assets/Icon150.png’ which does not have a candidate in main app package. have a look a at the manifest file. In my case I had been using forward slashes in some of the asset paths. While this used to work before update 2 it now leads to an error. So to fix this I had to replace this: <m2:DefaultTile Square310x310Logo="Assets\Icon310.png" Wide310x150Logo="Assets/Icon150.png"> with this: <m2:DefaultTile Square310x310Logo="Assets\Icon310.png" Wide310x150Logo="Assets\Icon150.png"> and the error went away.
Recently my Windows Search started to misbehave. It consumed large amounts of memory and CPU time. In addition, the index (in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data) grew to several gigabytes. To workaround that, I tried to reduce the indexed locations (Win + W, “change how windows searches”) and rebuild the index. So I changed the locations to only index Documents and hit “Rebuild”: While this fixed the issues mentioned before, something new occurred. Suddenly, every time I tried to search for something in the search charm the computer began to freeze, keystrokes were not accepted at all or with a severe delay. The troubleshooter did not produce any meaningful results and rebuilding the index did not help either. It turned out, the solution is[…]
Recently I’ve had a problem where a deployed WebApi service did not accept the DELETE verb (locally, using IISExpress it worked). The solution was to remove the WebDAV module and handler for the specific site. So extend the web.config of the WebApi project with: <system.webServer> <modules> <remove name="WebDAVModule" /> </modules> <handlers> <remove name="WebDAV" /> </handlers> </system.webServer> Then it worked just fine.
Without much description here are two books I’ve recently read and which I can recommend: 1) REMOTE Tip: Don’t read it while standing in a fully crowed train commuting to a customer. 2) The Dip A bit older but nevertheless a worthwhile read: