The other day my colleague was demonstrating Microsoft CRM 4.0 for us at work in a technology readiness session.  He stated that the workplace for CRM is unfortunately only available for Internet Explorer (IE).  To me this means that I cannot use it since I am running Open Suse Linux 11.0, but, then I remembered about a project that brought IE to Linux.  I used Google to search for it and found the project called IEs4Linux.  This will enable you to run IE6 on your Linux desktop, IE7 is still in development.

To do this you will have to prepare your desktop.  There is very good installation documentation on the download site for any Linux distribution you might be using.  The overall requirement however is the same.  Please note that this “How to” is using Open Suse 11.0 with the Gnome desktop.

On Open Suse 11.0 open the YAST Control Panel

 

Select “Software Management”

What you are looking for in “Package Selection” is the Wine installation.  Enter Wine in the “Filters” edit box and enter.  You will see Wine in bold, click on it and select “Install”.  This will install Wine with all the other dependencies you might need as well.  That is it!

Go to the IEs4Linux web site (http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page)

 

Click on “Download” to go to the download page

 

Specific instructions for different distributions are listed on this page.  Take the time to read through the applicable one for your distribution.  I have not followed their instructions to the letter and instead did my own thing.  I did not use wget as stated on the site.  I copied the location (site) of where the file is and pasted that link into my web browser.

I right click on the latest file and selected “Save Link As” to save the file to my desired directory.

After the download finished I navigated to the folder where I saved the file.  This file is in zipped format, to unzip it I right click on the file and select “Extract Here” since I want to extract the file in my current folder.

If you wanted to you could have selected “Open with File Roller”.  This will open it for you in the File Roller application and from there you could select a different directory to extract the file to.

I selected “Extract Here” and should have a sub directory called ies4linux-2.99.0.1

 

Right click the shell script called ies4linux and select “Open”.  Do this using your own user name, it is not necessary to use the root user to install IEs4Linux.  It is also important that you have a connection to the Internet since the installer is going to download files and install them on your desktop.

Gnome will ask you what you want to do with this shell script

Select “Run in Terminal”

The IEs4Linux installer will now prompt you for some information and when finished you can click on “OK”

The installer starts up and download files from the Internet.  The example shown has already downloaded the files from the Internet.  After the install you should have an icon on you desktop (if you selected it on the installer) same as the logo.

From here onwards you can double click the IE6 icon on your desktop and work as per normal.  I have tried logging on to CRM using Internet Explorer 6 installed on my desktop and could do so with success!

 

This concludes my little how to on IEs4Linux.  I hope this helped and that you are now able to access all those sites and solutions that are IE specific!

Calling all the South African IT people, be it business or students to come to the INSITE 2008 expo from 15 to 17 September 2008 at the Sandton Convention Centre.  The schedule looks hectic and very good.  Microsoft is going to be present at this expo and it looks as if we will see for the first time how Open Source and Microsoft can collaborate.  You have seen a little of it if you read some of my previous blogs.  For those of you that would like more info go the the web page - http://www.insitex.co.za/index.htm

Coming from a business IT (Information Technology) career I can vouch that we need to have the different disciplines in IT  collaborate and work together.  Microsoft has made this one of their priorities, even quoting their business partners as swaying them to collaborate better with the opposition.  It is encouraging that one of the biggest IT companies in the world is willing to stop and listen to their business partners.

I see a great opportunity for everybody in IT, we have a future where finally we will have some sanity prevail in the industry and where we will no longer be required to make a plan or write interfaces to make our client’s different IT environments work together.  I have always said and keep on saying, I do not care what I am running on, be it Linux, Mac or Windows, things must just work together, I want the stuff to work and be interoperable, whatever it takes.

Let us go and listen to the speakers and see what they have to say about interoperability for the future.  I think we live in exciting times where software companies are finally realising that they have to make their products in such a way that more than just their own client/server software can connect and interact with their solutions.  Where open standards rule and everyone can connect in a standard fashion.

I think I am getting carried away here but this is the dream I have for all software in the future.  Regardless of my platform I should be able to use whatever software product I am interested in.

We have seen many attempts from the Open Source community to do this i.e. Wine/Crossover, exchange plug-in, IE4Linux etc…  Recently Microsoft with .Net and releasing the standards for .Net to ECMA spawning the Mono project on Linux.  Even the controversial ones to make Office suites work together like ODF and OOXML.  It is all good for us, the end user and we must keep on insisting that software must work anywhere or at least be interoperable.

See you at INSITE08!

Have a look at this.  This utility is called Crossover Linux, it has been around for quite some time and I have used it before.  This is developed by Codeweavers (www.codeweavers.com), other products are Crossover Mac and Crossover Games.

 

Why did I look at this?

At our company we have started to use Microsoft Exchange 2007.  As everybody knows the Web interface changed significantly, so much so that it broke the Evolution exchange plug in, the Linux mail client that I use to interface to Microsoft Exchange.  We had a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server and Evolution had no problem connecting to it, it worked very well. 

Evolution 2.23 will probably (if all goes as planned) have support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 but, that is still in development.  For the time being I am stuck to have to use either the web interface or Crossover Linux that can run Microsoft Outlook.  I opted for Crossover Linux since I can then have meeting notices, new mail notifications popup, creating meetings and booking auditoriums etc… same as Windows users will have and same as I had in Evolution.  This to me is the best solution, I have everything available same as the Microsoft Outlook users.  So for the time being I will keep all my mail on the server until the new version of Evolution exchange plug-in works.

 

Alternatives?

Some alternative options that are available use IMAP, POP and SMTP.  Clients that might be able to handle these are Mozilla Thunderbird and KMail. A MAPI solution is available, it is called Brutus Evolution plug-in and Brutus server and is available from www.42tools.co.za.  Brutus server has to run for the client (Brutus Exchange plug-in) to work, this server seems to  have to run on the Exchange server and I did not want to get into these complications.  So, again on Linux we have many choices to choose from and it is up to you to choose the best one that fits you purpose.

 

But what about a VM?

Many others will tell you that the best way is to run these applications is in a Virtual Machine as it will run much better.  I agree but what if you do not want to buy or use the Microsoft Operating System?  What if all you are interested in is to use only the Microsoft Office products?  Again it is what suits your needs the best.  This is a decision only you can make.

 

The solution I opted for is Wine (Crossover Linux from Codeweavers) and Microsoft Outlook.  This is a paid for (licensed) product from Codeweavers.  I checked on www.codeweavers.com to see if the applications I would like to run is compatible with the latest version of Crossover Linux.

 

Note: You still need a valid licensed copy of Microsoft Office or any other Microsoft applications that you would like to use when you install on Wine / Crossover Linux.

 

Here is what Codeweavers says about wine:

Everything we do at Codeweavers revolves around the Wine Project. Wine is the primary driving technology of our CrossOver Products, and enhancing and supporting the Wine Project is one of our key corporate goals.

Thanks to the support of our customers, we have been able to fund significant work on the Wine Project. Many, many of the capabilities of Wine, including its ability to run many substantial applications have flowed directly from our customers purchase of CrossOver and into Wine. You can see our contributions page for more details on what we have been able to add to Wine.

Thus by purchasing CrossOver, or by engaging us to provide Wine services, you will be helping to provide a much needed source of income to a company that has provided a large range of valuable improvements to one of the most key Open Source Projects - Wine. We are constantly humbled by and appreciative of the support our customers continue to give us. As a result, we hope that Wine will someday reach its potential - making Linux a fully Windows compatible operating environment.

 

Here is what the Wine project says:

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

More information can be read in the articles Why Wine is so important, and Debunking Wine Myths. If you are wondering how well a particular application works in Wine, please examine the Applications Database. For installation instructions and step-by-step help with running Wine, take a look at the User Guide.

Wine is free software. The licensing terms are the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.

 

Why the paid for version from Codeweavers, why not use the free Wine version?

To explain, Codeweavers Crossover Linux is the commercial version of Wine.  If you have a lot of experience with Linux and programming then you can try and make Wine work for you.  If you, like me do not have the patience or time to fiddle around too much, Codeweavers is for you.  What Codeweavers do is to add better front ends and set up tools to Wine with predefined templates for certain applications.  This makes the installation of Windows applications much easier.  Go to their web site to see all the operating systems they support…

 

This is a screen shot of my Linux desktop running Microsoft Outlook.

 

This is a follow up from the previous blog where I illustrated Team Foundation Server integration using Teamprise Eclipse plug-in (http://henkdp.livejournal.com/2719.html).

 

This session will show how the Teamprise Explorer works, integrating with Team Foundation Server (TFS).  All of this was done for the Team Foundation Server integration at the Microsoft MVP InteropAbility event at Microsoft South Africa on 10 June 2008. Willy-Peter Schaub and myself presented TFS integration. To demonstrate how TFS integrates with non Microsoft environments.

Following is the third part of out demonstration at the event. To see part one, where Willy demonstrates how Visual Studio 2008 integrates with TFS visit his blog at http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/06/18/mvp-interop-session-1-integrated-development-environment-using-tfs-2008-teamprise-and-java-demo-1-script.aspx, to see part two (Teamprise Eclipse plug-in) follow the link provided at the top.

Teamprise, our integration champion!

For the Integration demonstration we used software developed by Teamprise. Teamprise is a division of SourceGear, a US based company that specialises in enterprise solutions for companies using TFS. Teamprise paid for (licensed) products are:

1. Teamprise plug-in for Eclipse
2. Teamprise Explorer
3. Teamprise command line

A set of free add-on utilities are available and must be installed on the TFS:

1. Build extensions – to help with creating build projects for Java on TFS
2. Ant extensions – to leverage the capabilities of TFS using Ant scripts
3. Custom Check-In SDK – to create your own custom check-in policies

To fully appreciate these products have a look at the datasheet (http://www.teamprise.com/products/teamprise_datasheet.pdf) and the whitepaper (http://www.teamprise.com/products/teamprise_whitepaper.pdf)

Supported platforms are:

1. Linux GTK (x86 and x86_64)
2. Mac OS X (Universal)
3. Microsoft Windows (x86)
4. Sun Solaris 8 / 9 / 10 GTK (SPARC)
5. AIX 5.1 / 5.2 / 5.3 GTK (PowerPC)
6. HP UX 11.0 / 11i Motif (HP PA-RISC)
7. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2005 / 2008

As seen from this list the guys at Teamprise are very proud and serious about their cross platform ability. Well done to all at Teamprise! Have a look at their website, www.teamprise.com for all the documentation and information you will need to make integration work on your TFS.

A quick summary of how we prepared our TFS for Teamprise integration.

Download the following software:

1. Apache-ant-1.7.0 (ant-current-bin.zip)
2. Java (jdk-6u6-windows-i586-p.exe)
3. Teamprise Build Extensions (TeampriseBuildExtensions-1.0.0.199R.msi)

In addition to this we also had to add two environment variables on TFS

1. ANT_HOME (points to your installation of Apache-ant-1.7.0)
2. JAVA_HOME (points to your installation of Java)

Note that this is really only a brief description of what we had to do on TFS. Read documentation provided by Teamprise for a more comprehensive instruction set.

Demonstration

We created a repository on TFS – BlackHole. This is used as our demonstration repository. Willy created this as part one of the demonstration

1. Small C# console application
2. Build project for the C# application
3. Work Item for me to add a new project to team project BlackHole
4. Created a shelveset for me to unshelve and work with

The rest of the demonstration would be on the Teamprise Explorer

Demonstration Laptop.

My demonstration laptop, to prove TFS integration, is an OpenSuse 10.3 Linux distribution using the Gnome desktop. Installed on this laptop we have Eclipse with the Teamprise plug-in and the Teamprise Explorer.

Note:  I have not installed the Teamprise command line utility.

For most of the part I will try to follow the format of the previous (Eclipse plug-in) blog.

The demonstration (at last!)

I started of demonstrating Teamprise Explorer. Briefly what I concentrated on first was to show

• Starting up Teamprise Explorer not connected
• Connecting to TFS
• Connecting to a team project (BlackHole)
• Adding a Check-In policy

I have Teamprise Explorer with no connection to TFS.

 

Establish a connection to TFS by completing the credentials

 

Teamprise after connection credentials are authenticated to TFS

Since we are working with projects we would like to connect to the same Blackhole team project that we connected to in the previous blog (Part 2)

Right click the server URL and select “Add Existing Team Project”

If multiple projects are available they will be displayed, select the appropriate team project, BlackHole and click OK

 

 

Teamprise Explorer will display the selected project with all relevant folders i.e. Documents, Reports, Work Items, Builds and Source Control.

 

Check in policies are usually specified for developers to adhere to and Teamprise Explorer have the ability to add check in policies

Right click the team project and select “Check-In Policies”

Click Add to add a Check-In policy

For this exercise Willy created a “Work Item Policy” for us to use

The “Work Item Policy” will be displayed in the dialogue box (checked), click OK to continue, the Check-In policy is now set for the team project

We have so far covered

• Opening and connecting Teamprise Explorer
• Adding Check-In policies for the team project

 

Source Control

Let us start to add some source to the team project BlackHole using Teamprise Explorer

Right click team project BlackHole in the Source Control window and select “Add to Source Control”

Click “Add Folder…” to add folders to Source Control

Select the “Simple_BasicHttp_Service” folder and click OK

In the “Add to Source Control” dialogue all the files in the folder and sub folders are displayed.  Click OK to accept the files (note that no exclusions were specified).

All the files that was accepted in the “Add to Source Control” dialogue is now displayed under the “Pending Changes” tab

A Check-In policy was specified for checking source into TFS.  A work item was created by Willy for this purpose.  Click the “Work Item” tab and check the work item

The final step is to check the changes from “Pending Changes” into TFS.  Click the “Check In” button

 

Click OK to confirm checking in the items

The folder is checked into TFS

Willy created a Shelveset in part one of the demonstration (see http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/06/18/mvp-interop-session-1-integrated-development-environment-using-tfs-2008-teamprise-and-java-demo-1-script.aspx).  Shelving and unshelving are very useful when you only want to store your unfinished changes but not wanting to impact on any builds that might happen on TFS.  Unshelve the Shelveset created by Willy using Teamprise

Click the menu (down arrow) and select “Unshelve”

An Unshelve dialogue will give options on unshelving previously shelved Shelvesets

We know that Willy shelved a Shelveset, enter Willy in the “Owner Name” and click Find, the Shelveset shelved by Willy is displayed.  Click “Unshelve” to unshelve this set

The source program shelved by Willy now appears in the “Pending Changes” Source Control tab.  Since Willy created the shelveset we are uncertain about the changes

Right click on the source file select “Compare” and since we would like to see what the differences are compared to what is on the server, select “With Latest Version”

A new tab openes and the difference between the local (unshelved) copy and the latest version on the server is shown.  For the purpose of the demonstration we accepted that the changes that Willy made is correct and checked it into TFS

The changes Willy made is in TFS but no build was done for it

Expand “Builds” in the left pane and right click the “Deathstar” build, select “Queue New Build”

The “Queue Build” dialogue will appear, click on Queue to initiate a build  (the build “Deathstar” was set up by Willy for us)

A new tab “Build Explore – Deathstar” will open showing the queued build

When the build is successful a green tick will appear

 

Double click on the successful build to expand and show more information about the build.  The changes made by Willy built successfully

Sometimes it is necessary to have a look at the history of source

Right click the source and select “History” from the list

The history of the source is displayed

To view the properties of source, right click on the source and select “Properties” from the list

Source properties are displayed.  Click OK to close the dialogue

Checking out source is a main part of any Source Control function

When checking out source from TFS four options are available, they are

• Unchanged – keep any existing lock
• None – Allow shared checkout
• Check Out – Prevent other users from checking out and checking in
• Check In – Allow other users from check out but prevent them from checkin in

 

We have covered Source Control showing how to

• add folders to Source Control
• check the folder in using a work item for the Check-In policy
• unshelving changes made by Willy
• comparing changes to the latest version on TFS
• checking the changes in
• using Build Deathstar to build the changes made by Willy
• Inspecting the results of the Deathstar build
• Look at the history of source
• Look at the properties of source
• Checking out source

 

Source control is not all that Teamprise Explorer is about.  All the other functions are covered as well, let us explore the remaining functionality

Documents

In the left pane expand Documents and then expand “Process Guidance”

Click and open ProcessGuidance.html

Teamprise Explorer opens the document in the default viewer, in this case, Firefox 3 on Linux.  All other documents can be explored this way

Reports

In the left pane expand Reports

Double click on Builds and a report of all builds done with hyperlinks are displayed.  Many more reports can be obtained in this fashion

Work Items

In the left pane expand Work Items and select My Work Items

A list of my current work items are displayed

To view the details of the work item double click on it and inspect the results, work items can be updated using Teamprise Explorer

Builds

In Teamprise we cannot create build definitions.  The Teamprise suite of products are developed to make it easy to create build files for Java projects using the Ant build file.  Build files cannot be created for C# projects but the already created build definitions and agents can be modified by Teamprise

All Build Definitions are displayed under Builds

Right click on Builds and select “Manage Build Agents”

Select “AgentOrange” in the “Manage Build Agents” dialogue and click Edit

The “Build Agent Properties” dialogue is displayed and changes to the agent can be made using this.  Click OK to confirm the changes

Right click on Deathstar build definition and select “Edit Build Definition”

The “Build Definition” dialogue is displayed and consists of several parts of which General is the first and this is where the name of the build definition with a description (if any) is entered

Next up is the Workspace, change this if necessary

Then the project file.  This indicates where the build project file is stored in TFS, also this will indicate whether a build project file was found or not, if not we are in trouble since we cannot create this file in Teamprise Explorer

The retention policy specifies how builds will be retained

“Build Definition” is used to specify what agent will be used to build this definition as well as where the builds will be dropped, this can be a different location to the TFS

Triggers specify under what conditions a new build will be triggered

This conclude the demonstration in which we have explored the main components of Teamprise Explorer.

In my next blog (let’s call it Part 4) I will cover the web interface available for TFS, Teamplain, and show what is possible using only a web browser (in our case Firefox 3) with TFS.

I was tasked with showing Team Foundation Server (TFS) integration at the Microsoft MVP InteropAbility event at Microsoft South Africa on 10 June 2008. Willy-Peter Schaub and myself will talk about TFS integration. To demonstrate how TFS integrates with non Microsoft environments.

Following is the second part of out demonstration at the event. To see part one, where Willy demonstrates how Visual Studio 2008 integrates with TFS visit his blog at http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/06/18/mvp-interop-session-1-integrated-development-environment-using-tfs-2008-teamprise-and-java-demo-1-script.aspx

 

 

Teamprise, our integration champion! 

For the Integration demonstration we used software developed by Teamprise. Teamprise is a division of SourceGear, a US based company that specialises in enterprise solutions for companies using TFS. Teamprise paid for (licensed) products are:

1. Teamprise plug-in for Eclips
2. Teamprise Explorer
3. Teamprise command line

A set of free add-on utilities are available and must be installed on the TFS:

1. Build extensions – to help with creating build projects for Java on TFS
2. Ant extensions – to leverage the capabilities of TFS using Ant scripts
3. Custom Check-In SDK – to create your own custom check-in policies

To fully appreciate these products have a look at the datasheet (http://www.teamprise.com/products/teamprise_datasheet.pdf) and the whitepaper (http://www.teamprise.com/products/teamprise_whitepaper.pdf)

Supported platforms are:

1. Linux GTK (x86 and x86_64)
2. Mac OS X (Universal)
3. Microsoft Windows (x86)
4. Sun Solaris 8 / 9 / 10 GTK (SPARC)
5. AIX 5.1 / 5.2 / 5.3 GTK (PowerPC)
6. HP UX 11.0 / 11i Motif (HP PA-RISC)
7. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2005 / 2008

As seen from this list the guys at Teamprise are very proud and serious about their cross platform ability. Well done to all at Teamprise! Have a look at their website, www.teamprise.com for all the documentation and information you will need to make integration work on your TFS.

 

A quick summary of how we prepared our TFS for Teamprise integration.

Download the following software:

1. Apache-ant-1.7.0 (ant-current-bin.zip)
2. Java (jdk-6u6-windows-i586-p.exe)
3. Teamprise Build Extensions (TeampriseBuildExtensions-1.0.0.199R.msi)

In addition to this we also had to add two environment variables on TFS

1. ANT_HOME (points to your installation of Apache-ant-1.7.0)
2. JAVA_HOME (points to your installation of Java)

Note that this is really only a brief description of what we had to do on TFS. Read documentation provided by Teamprise for a more comprehensive instruction set.

 

Demonstration

We created a repository on TFS – Blackhole. This is used as our demonstration repository. Willy created this as part one of the demonstration

1. small C# console application
2. Build project for the C# application
3. Work Item for me to add my Java project to TFS
4. Created a shelveset

The rest of the demonstration would be on the Teamprise Eclise plug-in

 

Demonstration Laptop.

My demonstration laptop, to prove TFS integration, is an OpenSuse 10.3 Linux distribution using the Gnome desktop. Installed on this laptop we have Eclipse with the Teamprise plug-in and the Teamprise Explorer. Note that I have not installed the Teamprise command line utility.

 

The demonstration (at last!)

I started of demonstrating the Eclipse Teamprise plug-in. Briefly what I concentrated on first was to show

• Check-in policy
• Adding a TFS project to Eclipse
• Adding a Java project to TFS
• Create a build project for Java
• Build the project

First I switch the workspace to where I want Eclipse to work on my home directory. I select File -> Switch Workspace and change it to /home/henk/team.

I have a clean Eclipse with no connection to TFS.

To see Teamprise Explorer use the menu at the top and click Window -> Open perspective -> Other. This will produce a dialogue box with:

Click TFS Explorer, it will display the view but disconnected.

To connect and import our repository we will go to the Package Explorer and import our TFS repository. Top menu, click Window -> Open View -> Other and click on Package Explorer. Inside the Package Explorer space, right click and click on Import

Select Other->Teamprise

Enter sign on credentials and remember to enter proxy information if necessary

Click Next to continue

Add a workspace (note this is the workspace on TFS)

Click Next to continue

Select the repository that will be used, for our demonstration we created the repository Blackhole. I selected Blackhole and click Next

You have now imported the repository from your Team Foundation Server. When you look at the Package Explorer you should have everything that is already added to the Blackhole project

The Team Explorer will also be connected to TFS

As can be seen from this example Team Explorer are not connected to our repository yet, but this can be fixed easily by right click on http://TFSRTM08:8080 and select Blackhole from the “Add Existing Team Project” dialogue box

Now a quick note on Check-in policies, check in policies are not kept on TFS. This is part of the Visual Studio 2008 Team System. If a Check-in policy is set in VSTS 2008 it will not automatically be picked up by Eclipse, you will have to apply the same policies in your project. To do this we right click the Blackhole project and select “Check-in Policies...” where a dialogue box will prompt us to add a policy. Click Add and select a policy from the list

For this demonstration I would like to add the “Work Item Policy”, so that for every source check-in done a work item must be associated with it. This exercise will make more sense once we reach the point where we are going to check in our Java project

After selecting the Blackhole project and adding the check-in policy you should be able to view the Blackhole project i.e. Work Items, Documents, Reports, Builds and Source Control

To recap on what we have done up to now in Eclipse using Team Explorer plug-in from Teamprise

• We have started Eclipse and changed the workspace to /home/henk/team
• We have imported the Blackhole project
• We have connected to the Blackhole project in Team Explorer
• We have set the Check-in policy to force an associated work item when a check-in of source is done

What we would like to do now is to add our own Java project to TFS and create our own TFS build project using the ant build file that is part of our Java project

In Team Explorer, double click on Source Control. This will open the Source Control window in Eclipse

Right click in the Source Control window on Blackhole and select “Add to Version Control...”

Click “Add Folder”, we will add /home/henk/team/Blackhole/BillingService to our repository. I have already copied my BillingService Java project directory into /home/henk/team/Blackhole, all I need to do is browse to BillingService and add the folder, this will show all files in the directory. Click “OK” to continue

The following files will now be shown under the Pending Changes , Source Files window

We will have to check these source files into our TFS Blackhole repository, but first we have to associate a work item with this check in (remember we changed the Check-in policy earlier to only allow check-in with an associated work item). To do this click the “Work Items” tab under “Pending Changes” and select the check box for the work item

Click the “Check In” button

All source files are now committed into TFS and Source Control should have the new Java project

We have a Java project in TFS, the next step is to create our TFS Build project to build our Java project on TFS. We will go to the left pane and right click Builds, select “New Build Definition...” Have a look at the new window

This is the Build Definition window to create a Build Project file. My Build definition name is JavaBuilder

Accept defaults for the workspace and move on to “Project File”. Have a look at the screen below. Keep the Version Control folder as is. Note that there is currently no TFSBuild.proj file for this build definition.

The MSBuild project file creation wizard will help us to create the MSBuild.proj file. Click the “Create” button

It is immediately clear that an Ant build file is necessary to create the MSBuild.proj file from. Click “Next” to continue and browse in the next window to your ant build file

After locating the ant build file click Finish

Now a build file is present

Nothing hanged on the retention policy

Fill in where you want your builds to be staged, I have chosen my TFS TFSRTM08 in folder Drops

Nothing on triggers are changed for this demo but take some time to have a look at the build trigger options available, it is comprehensive

All necessary information is captured and we will click OK to continue. The new build definition should be visible in the Team Explorer window under Builds.

We would like to start a build using this new build definition. Right click on JavaBuilder and select “Queue New Build..”. This should open an new window showing the queue new build.

All the defaults should be fine, click “Queue”

After a short while the build should finish successfully

To have a look at the detail of the build right click on the build and select Open. This should open a new tab with the build details, in this you will be able to see what was done and if you had any tests defined in the ant file it will show in here as well

A link to the build log file is also provided and can be opened if more information is required or if the build failed and more information is required to debug why the build failed

To recap on what we have done up to now

• Added a Java project to TFS
• Created a TFS build project using Java project ant file
• Queued the new build file
• Built the Java project
• Look at detail about the build

 

Shelving/Unshelving

One of the great things of TFS is the ability to shelve or unshelve changes. We are all developers and many a time it has happened to us that, when we are busy on some changes for one project, we are called of to look to a more urgent change somewhere else. What to do? In TFS it is as easy as shelving the change and later on to unshelve it when you are able to continue with the project.

In Eclipse we can unshelve a change (and if you have permission to unshelve another users shelved changes) by clicking on the menu icon

Select the Unshelve option from the drop down list

The following dialogue box is displayed

No Shelve sets exist for Henk, but earlier in the demonstration Willy created a shelve set using VSTS 2008. Change owner name and click “Find”

Select Willy's shelveset and click Unshelve. The Blackhole shelveset is now on your local machine and if you compare the program.cs on the local machine to the program.cs that is on TFS the differences are shown

The differences are on the local machine (where the shelveset resides) and the version in TFS

Similarly a shelveset can be created using the Teamprise Eclipse plug-in

 

Work Items

Working with work items is possible using Teamprise Eclipse plug-in

Double click on “My Work Items” and a list of all user work items are displayed.

For the demonstration only one Work Item was created as shown in the screen

When double clicking on the work item more details are available and update to the work item is possible

 

Documents

To view the Process Guidance document double click on it

The Process Guidance document is a html file and will be opened in the default web browser, any document opened will be opened by the default associated program e.g. .doc will be opened in Linux using OpenOffice Writer

 

Reports

To see a report on all Builds double click on it

A report is show with hyperlinks to all the builds done so far by user henk. To view more detail on the build double click the hyperlink to see the detail

This really in a nutshell is a small demonstration on what the Teamprise Eclipse plug-in for TFS can do for you. It is a really exciting product that allows organisations using and wanting to use TFS to, if they are using Java or Java on non Microsoft platforms, to have the ability to integrate seamless with TFS.

 

 

Lessons learned

1. The server dude is suppose to carry the server, everybody else will forget it
2. The server dude is your friend, especially if you have to rebuild a TFS VM five minutes before the demonstration starts
3. Keep on smiling boys, wave and smile, when things go south (lesson from Madagascar)
4. You cannot have enough stress balls
5. Stressing in front of a crowd is about equal to 15km of running fast, you sweat the same

 

In my next blog I will be looking at Teamprise Explorer and Teamplain web interface time permitting!