Selfelected

Microsoft team foundation bug management

A minute ago I reported two bugs for a project and noticed that the GUI for bug reporting in TFS inside Visual studio still sucks.  It sucked 5? years ago.  It still does.

It was a flashback because I 1) didn’t remember exactly how user unfriendly the form is with edit fields all over, hard (partly impossible!) to navigate with keyboard and bad overview.  There wasn’t a clue 5 years ago that a bug had an attachment.  There still isn’t.  2) didn’t remember how awfully slow it was.  Reporting bugs might inflict some stress to me because there is so much I want to tell but text and images are so limited and I want to get it all out before it flees my mind.

Now I can see that the overview of bugs is still lousy.  I have read that it has improved but from what?  To Microsoft’s defense I must say that they have done a good effort but it all smells like one-department-for-testing with dedicated-testers and one-department-for-developers and so on.  To me development, testing, operations, architecture is all the same.

So even though I like the symbiosis of TFS and VS and the whole test rig with virtual machines one can buy from Microsoft I won’t sell the bug management tool to any client that isn’t already deep into it.
The licensing model, as I remember it last time I checked, also bothers me but that is for another article.

Running two version managers against one solution

Since I have been having problems with reaching my company’s TFS server from home I started with SVN.  One could say I use SVN as an offline SCM.

#1: Don’t use Visual studio for both version managers in the same solution.

Visual studio takes for granted one solution is against one SCM.  Swapping TFS and SVN messes everything up.

#1.1: Use Visualstudio with TFS and SVN with explorer.

I don’t think there is a TFS tool for explorer so the other way around is not possible.  This means I checkin TFS from Visual studio and commit SVN from explorer.

#2: Stuctural changes take time.  And possibly ruins the history.

I don’t try to keep the SCMs in sync but instead have the TFS as main repository.  I make sure folder moves etc. are done properly in TFS and then just reset (get everything – commit whatever it looks like) in SVN.

With these caveats sorted out it works nice.