Here's a quick description of the tool

The TFS Admin Tool allows a TFS administrator to quickly add users to all three platforms utilized by Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services, all through one common interface. The tool also allows administrators to change the current permissions on any of the three tiers, identify any errors, and view all of the users and their permission sets across Team Foundation Server, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services.

Here's a link to the project homepage 

However,  Howard Van Rooijen (of Conchango's Scrum For Team System fame) has managed to put together a template project which creates SOAP endpoints for our core notifications and even performs basic deserialization.

Here's the link. Team Foundation Server Notification Web Services: Visual Studio 2005 Project Template

This is very cool - I'm sure it will be extremely useful.

Mareen Philip forwarded a video to me of the end result - this is what Michael came up with after just four days - full integration with MindManager for requirements gathering synched up with TFS.

You can download the Mindjet Requirements Manager for TFS here and you can download a shockwave video demo here (video is also available inline on the page here)

Michael wrote a blog on his experiences here. It's well worth a look to see both the end results (a very cool extension to Mind Manager) as well as how much potential there is in integration with TFS.

What other ideas do you have for TFS integration solutions?

I'm looking forward to reading what he has to say. He's one of the developers on my team who has been responsible for much of the Work Item Tracking user interface elements of the Team Foundation client pieces.

He's also been working on the Team Foundation power toy for command line interaction with Work Items that I asked you about a week or two ago. I'm not sure when we'll see it launch yet, but he's used a lot of your input during his implementation.

Blog on, Jason!

Will you invest your time in what really matters to you, or will your tombstone ultimately read like this:

Here lies John, who passed away
While answering his email one day.
No friend, no child, no loving mate
Could keep poor John from working late.
With each new mail, he worked like hell
To click ”reply” instead of “del.”
A prompt response he’d always give
But somehow he forgot to live.

Ouch. Sounds horribly like me.

Here's the proof - Etienne and Aaron enjoying a quite revolting looking drink... :-) It tasted good though.

These are just a few of the folks who have been at shiproom every day for the last few months helping get this baby out of the door - thanks to all of you!

Who's who?

From left to right - back row: Dan Kershaw, PM; Mohammad Iqubal, Test Lead; Aldo Donetti; Gregg Boer, PM; Jim Boyle - PM, responsible for running Ship Room; Paulo De Oliveira, PM; Marc Kuperstein, PM Setup; Jeff McKune, Dev Lead

Front Row: Jeff Beehler - Jiminy Cricket of TFS; Bryan MacFarlane - Dev Lead; John Lawrence (me) - Dev Manager; Layne Wiwatowski - Test Lead

You can bet  there will be more celebrations throughout the day...

What would you like it to do? What problems would you use it to solve? Does it sound useful to you?

I'd love to have your input - I want to make sure we're creating something that is useful to you. Feel free to post a comment here, or contact me directly.

Thanks!

David, you were getting 400 emails a day at the peak of the Beta 3 period for Team Foundation Server. I apologise - I was probably the sender of a large number of them...

I know exactly how you feel - in fact if I only received 20 emails an hour I think I'd be happy. I started getting this quantity of email when I first joined the team and rapidly realized I wasn't going to be able to cope using my previous strategies. Thanks to some advice from Chris Shaffer, our Test Manager, I discovered Getting Things Done and managed to get - and keep - things under control.

As a process for managing mail, this worked well - but for in parallel for a few years I have felt like I've been fighting with Outlook. It would take 10-15 minutes to open up and become responsive, and every so often would start giving me errors telling me it couldn't open or display folders because it was out of resources.

Two weeks ago I finally cracked. It reached the point where this was happening all the time. It became more and more difficult to manage my email and get things done - compounded by the fact that these issues had stopped autoarchive and email rules working, so my exchange mailbox reached it's max size and I couldn't even send mail any more. This was the point that my email blood pressure finally cracked - I felt more stress than I've felt in years.

I could no longer manage my email. And no-one knew why. We are lucky here to have a great internal support system - we first assumed that it was my client, but after reproing the issue on 4 machines (and baffling a friend of mine on the Outlook team) finally realized that we'd have to rebuild my exchange store.

After a week of basically being incommunicado, Outlook was back, I caught up - and I am so much happier. Outlook actually really performs quite well indeed and I now realize that for the past several years I've been working with one of my primary tools working at about 20% efficiency. If only I'd discovered this sooner, I wonder how much better my work/life balance might have been.

I just came across this comment from Tim Rowe who was wondering how we reached 600 dogfood users for our November stats.

When it says 'Team foundation', is that 600 people working on JUST the Team Foundation server portion of VS?

That's a massive teams for such a... uh... well, I wouldn't exactly call it a massive project. Nothing I'd expect to see 600 people on anyway.

It would be interesting to know how many of them are actually programmers, and how many have 'other' jobs - eg, testers, architects, managers etc who are commiting 'non-code' files.

Clearly some absolutely crazy restructuring happened here between the weeks of 24/6 and 24/10 (from ~70,000 files up to 600,000 files... on that alone maybe I can retract my first statement).

600 users is not just Team Foundation. We do have a fairly large team working on TFS - but certainly not that big. We share a dogfood server with a number of other teams product groups. Over the past couple of years we've been steadily increasing the number of people, teams and Team Projects hosted on the server.

Way back in the very early days of development, the Work Item Tracking team ("Currituck") were dogfooding work item tracking on their own server, and the Source Control folks in North Carolina ("Hatteras") were dogfooding version control.

We then moved onto a shared dogfood server, and when it was working tolerably well we expanded the use to include other members of the VSTS suite (folks from the Team Architect, Developer and Tester organizations).

Over time we added more teams from across Microsoft. Gutsy folks, who wanted to be at the bleeding edge of software project management tools... Some of these were small projects - others much bigger. All of these added more and more folks to the number of users in the system.

In fact the number of users of the server is higher - the count of 600 is the number of folks with assigned work items - there are more users who connect and run queries, look at bugs - without having them assigned to them.

To address another comment from Tim:

Clearly some absolutely crazy restructuring happened here between the weeks of 24/6 and 24/10 (from ~70,000 files up to 600,000 files... on that alone maybe I can retract my first statement).

Every team also brought more code with them - some smaller code bases, others significantly bigger. However, one of the sources that has boosted the total number of files in the system has been when we've brought in more of the entire developer division source tree into our dogfood server. Sometimes this has happened when we pull in a new branch of large portions of the code base.

Another earlier example of file growth was when Brian first decided he wanted to pull in all of the .Net Framework code into our dogfood server for the first time (to start with we just had the VSTS code on the server). This made a big difference to our file count. Brian called me me up to tell me he was doing it one afternoon during a dry run of a presentation Doug Neumann was going to be giving at PDC. I remember watching the server through the session, initially nervously, but later very happily as I realized we really were going to be able to handle all the checkins...

It's been a great journey - and I'm very grateful to everyone who's been prepared to eat our dogfood for us. It's been painful for them at times, but ultimately we've ended up with a much better product in the end. Dogfooders - thankyou!