Team Build Tasks

How to automatically assign all the build failure workItems to a dedicated person?

I'v been looking for the right property in the .proj Team Build file and found out that you only need to adapt the WorkItemFieldValues property. This property specifies a list of field names and values for the created work item. The values you enter must be separated by a semicolon.

To automatically assign all the build failure workItem to me, I modified the WorkItemFieldValues property and added the Assigned To field name :

Assigned To=Gheysens Pieter;

Team Foundation Server Permissions

Lately I've been playing a bit with security rights and permissions in Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS really has a very powerful access control model, allowing individual users and/or groups only the specific capabilities/rights they need to.

In Team Foundation Server authorization for user actions are determined by permissions. There are 3 authorization settings possible for permissions :

• Deny (explicit)
• Allow (explicit)
• Unset (implicit)

Deny is the most powerful permission setting in TFS. When a user belongs to two groups and one group has for a particular function a permission set to Allow and the other to Deny, then the user will not be able to perform that function. The only exception to the rule is if the user is a member of the Project Administrators group or the Team Foundation Administrators group. By default, most permissions in TFS are not set to either Deny or Allow, but are left Unset, which implicitly denies both users and groups.

One small note to close this post about permissions in TFS : permissions only allow you to control user actions on items and not on a particular version of an item. Branching an item to another location will give you the option to set a different security policy.

More information about Permissions in TFS on MSDN

Composite UI Application Block

This week I bought the book Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory from the .NET Professor David Platt. Wanting to put his words into practice I tried to install the Composite UI Application Block and the Smart Client Software Factory on my Vista computer.

• Error installing the CAB_CS.msi
  
  
  
  I solved this error by running the command line tool as an administrator and starting the msi from there : msiexec /i "CAB_CS.msi".
• Error (error code 2869) installing the Smart Client Software Factory
  
  
  
  This time the Administrator trick did not solve the error at once. I also had to re-install the Guidance Automation Extensions and the Guidance Automation Toolkit.

Installations on Vista : not as painless as it should be ... remember to run software installations always as an administrator!

UPDATE : When you have only Visual Studio 2008 (beta 2) on your pc, you will receive installation error messages when installing the Smart Client Software Factory. Follow the instructions here to get the job done!