Use IIS redirect for TFS

By default the TFS setup creates on your IIS Default Web Site an application named TFS. In most setups I’ve seen so far, the used IIS is only used by TFS so why not use HTTP Redirect for your TFS application?

The typical scenario looks somehow like this:

TFS is installed on a virtual machine, inside Default Web Site, nothing else installed on Default Web Site.
DNS-Name is something similar to https://tfs.<domain>.com
TFS webaccess Url is similar to https://tfs.<domain>.com/tfs
If you browse https://tfs.<domain>.com you’ll get an 403 error, not authenticated.

Would be fine if the default domain would redirect to the TFS application like this:

On your Default Web Site go to Http Redirect:

In the screenshot below you can see how the redirect should be configured

MSBuild–Visual Studio project template

Based on the ide of Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi’s blog post about “Hijacking the Visual Studio Build Process” I’ve created a small Visual Studio project template for custom MSBuild based projects which you can find in the Visual Studio gallery.

Why should I care about it?

• Build/Rebuild/Clean inside visual studio without switching to the command line
• Easier to maintain files inside a project than inside “solution files”
• IntelliSense
• Source control integration
• Visual Studio editor experience
• …

The first screenshot is showing you how the project experience will look like. You can see the green + sign which indicates that this project was added to source control but not yet committed/checked-in.

The second screenshot shows you how IntelliSense can look like, I’m using ReSharper so maybe on your machine it can look a little bit different. 

VSGallery: MSBuild Empty Project Template

Override the TFS Team Build OutDir – Part 2

I’ve already written about the MSBuild workaround using the property switch:

/p:GenerateProjectSpecificOutputFolder=true

You can read more about this here

But what is better than a workaround?

Windows 8.1 + OneNote – fix shortcut for screen clippings

With Windows 8.1 update, Microsoft added the new shortcut for Win + S to “search everywhere” (with bing, maybe we should call it: bing it).

In the past this screenshot was used by Microsoft Office OneNote to take screen clippings. Sometime it really takes lot’s of time to fix a bug like this …

But there is a workaround –> regedit for Win + A alternative

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\OneNote\Options\Other]
"ScreenCLippingShortcutKey"=dword:00000041

Source: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2013/06/27/try-windows-8-1-preview-and-bring-back-your-favorite-shortcut-key.aspx

5 minutes to cleanup your context menu from overloaded git commands …

How many git tools have you installed? Is your context menu overloaded like on the screenshot to the right? Git for Windows, Git Extensions, tortoisegit and other tools are creating lots of redundant command menu entries. Most of the time you won’t need multiple ways of doing a fetch or a command or even want to do all the stuff from the commandline. Take time to cleanup unnecessary stuff from your developer machine and because there will be the nice side effect of faster opening context menus.

But how, lets continue here …

Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git?

Are you new to git our recently started working with git command-line?

Try it out inside your browser: http://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1

Learn how to master branches here: http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/

Visual Studio/TFS 2013 Patches

With the new version of Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation 2013 Microsoft has delivered lots of new features. Unfortunately they have also introduced some new bugs with their last minute changes however they have managed to provide some quick fixes for some of them.

Last update: 14.11.2013

08.11.2013	Updated Team Foundation Server 2013 download addressing web and installation path issues Fixed: Red error box when using Code (version control) in the web UI Fixed: Unable to install into a custom path	Updated install media
08.11.2013	Visual Studio and Team Explorer 2013 no longer require IE 10 for installation But check the KB article for known issues when not using IE10	Updated install media
13.11.2013	Patch for issue with Visual Studio 2013 Queue Build dialog	Hotfix