Tiago Pascoal

By tspascoal tagged TFS, VSO Enhancer- Leave a comment

A pre announcement for…

On new years eve, I promised myself it was going to a calm year, so I could finished some stuff I had been working. By the first week of the year I had already committed to so much stuff, I immediately knew it was going to be a not so calm one.

In the meanwhile I was proved wrong, it went from not so calm to crazy status.

I still want to do a proper pre “launch”, but since I have so many things going (really cool stuff, that I can’t talk about Smile ), I want to do a pre announcement on something that I have been working on and off for last months.

It is the natural successor of my Task Board Enhancer. It can do everything that task board enhancer can (and a lot more) but for Visual Studio Online (and it can also work against TFS 2013 on premises).

Besides all the features of Task Board Enhancer, it also adds keyboard navigation and adds some tricks to the team home page.

While in Redmond last November, I was moving between buildings for a meeting, when Charles Sterling said “let’s just make a small stop to record an interview”. My meeting was in 15 minutes, so there wasn’t that much time. Adam Cogan did a very quick interview (one shot, no cuts, no editing Smile ) where I explained what VSO Enhancer was and some of the features it has.

You can watch the interview on SSW TV to get a quick idea what VSO Enhancer is.

If you want to test, you can head up to VSO Enhancer and install it.

For now there is only a chrome version, that you can get from the Chrome store. I also have an Internet Explorer version, but it lacks an installer so I haven’t released it yet.

Sorry for not having time to make a more thorough post and hope you find VSO Enhancer useful.

By tspascoal tagged Task Board Enhancer, TFSwith 31 Comments

Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer: version .8.0 released

New release of Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer

This is a very minor release, except for the fact it now brings support for TFS 2013 that so many people have been asking for.

New Features in this release

Requirement Coloring bug fix

The version for TFS 2012, fixes an issue where on non english versions of TFS the color for the (different type) of requirements were all the same.

Mark a blocked work item with a tag

Previous versions allowed you to easily visualized blocked work items. The only way to mark them as blocked, was setting the Blocked field (field with the Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Blocked reference name) to yes. This worked fine, if the process template didn’t had this field, you had to add it, but if you couldn’t change your process template then you couldn’t use this feature.

Now you can add a tag to signal that a work item is blocked. Since TFS supports five languages, I decided that these 5 words (regardless of TFS language you are using) used in a tag would have the same effect as setting the Blocked field value to yes.

English – Blocked
German – Blockiert
Spanish – Bloqueado
French – bloqué
Italian – bloccato

Download

TFS 2012 Update 2 and upwards

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or 3, there is no version for TFS 2012 (RTM or Update 1)

For Update 2 and upwards Download version 11.2.8.0 of the extension

TFS 2013

This version works with TFS 2013 RTM

Download version 12.0.8.0 of the extension

By tspascoal tagged Community- Leave a comment

First NetPonto Community Windows Phone Hackaton (Lisbon)

On the 1st of February, NetPonto community is going to host it’s first hackaton.

The hackaton is focused on Windows Phone and besides the prizes (Nokia Phones. MSDN subscriptions) for the winners will also receive dvlup points.

You can read all the details on NetPonto site

By tspascoal tagged Task Board Enhancer, TFSwith 31 Comments

Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer: version 2.7.9 released

New release of Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or update 3 installed, TFS 2012 (RTM or with Update 1) is no longer supported (you can still use version 0.7.6).

New Features in this release

This version brings some parity of features between the kanban board and the task board. It adds too much needed features to the kanban board.

Kanban Board new features

It now shows on the kanban board the blocked status of a kanban card

And it also adds support for tags on the kanban board

Task Board new features

If you set the preference to show the work item type in the requirements category and if the task board contained more than work item type then the work item type would be displayed. In this version besides seeing the work item type a color will also be shown for better visibility of different work items in the requirement category

If you are using tags and enabled the preferences to show the tags counter, you could see the number of tags a card had associated, in this new version you can also see the tags associated with requirements

Download

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or 3, there is no version for TFS 2012 (RTM or Update 1)

For Update 2 and upwards Download version 2.7.9 of the extension

By tspascoal tagged Task Board Enhancer, TFSwith 7 Comments

Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer: version 2.7.8 released

[Update 16 Oct] I’ve decided to remove this version from the download since it has a few annoying bugs. I will release a fixed version next week]

New release of Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or update 3 installed, TFS 2012 (RTM or with Update 1) is no longer supported (you can still use version 0.7.6).

New Features in this release

This is mainly a bug fixing release. It fixes two bugs and I’ve managed to sneak in a performance improvement.

For some people using Internet Explorer (I couldn’t reproduce it,that is was it took so long to fix) the extension wouldn’t be loaded. One user sent me enough trace information so I finally could figure it out. I hope this is fix is final.

The extension wouldn’t do anything if board was loaded directly in team members view (or reloaded). This has now been fixed (everything would work when switching from backlog items view to team members).

The extension now fetches much less data from the server it is hard to quantify the speed improvement this will bring, since it depends on the number of work items a board has and the amount of data they hold, but on extreme cases I’ve seen a 400x improvement (very extreme cases, but for median values 5-10x speed improvements seems to be the norm).

All these changes only affect the task board, they don’t impact the Kanban board.