Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS – A Lap Around the Contoso University Sample Application

Posted by Graham Smith on January 27, 20164 Comments (click here to comment)

In the previous post in this series on Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS we configured a sample application for Git in Visual Studio 2015. This post continues with that configuration and also examines some of the more interesting parts of Contoso University before firing it up and taking it for a spin.

Build and Update NuGets

Picking up from where we left off last time in Visual Studio, Team Explorer -- Home should be displaying ContosoUniversity.sln in the Solutions section. Double-click this to open Contoso University and navigate to Solution Explorer. The first thing to do is to hit F6 to build the solution. NuGet packages should be restored and the five projects should build. It's worth checking Team Explorer -- Changes at this point to make sure .gitignore is doing its job properly -- if it is there should be no changes as far as version control is concerned.

For non-production applications I usually like to keep bang up-to-date with the latest NuGets so in Solution Explorer right click the solution and choose Manage NuGet Packages for Solution. Click on the Updates link and allow the manager to do its thing. If any updates are found click to Select all packages and then Update:

visual-studio-manage-packages-for-solution

Commit (and sync if you like) these changes (see the previous post for a reminder of the workflow for this) and check the solution still builds.

Test the Unit Tests

The solution contains a couple of unit tests as well as some UI tests. In order to just establish that the unit tests work at this stage open Test Explorer (Test > Windows > Test Explorer) and then click on the down arrow next to Playlist : All Tests. Choose Open Playlist File, open ...\ContosoUniversity.Web.UnitTests\UnitTests.playlist and run the tests which should pass, albeit with very poor coverage (Tests > Analyze Code Coverage > All Tests).

Code Analysis

Code analysis (a feature formerly known as FxCop) is enabled for every project and reports on any rule violations. I've set projects to use the Microsoft Managed Recommended Rules (note though that rule sets don't exist for SQL Server database Projects and in the case of ContosoUniversity.Database everything is selected) however the code as it exists in GitHub doesn't violate any of those rules. To see this feature in action right-click the ContosoUniversity.Web project and choose Properties. On the Code Analysis tab change the rule set to Microsoft All Rules and build the solution. The Error List window should appear and there should be quite a few warnings -- 85 at the time of writing this post. Reverse the change and the solution should once again build without warnings.

SQL Server Data Tools -- A Better Way to Manage Database Changes

There are several ways to manage the schema changes for an application's database and whilst every technique undoubtedly has its place the one I recommend for most scenarios is the declarative approach. The simple explanation is that code files declare how you want the database to look and then a separate ‘engine' has the task of figuring out a script which will make a blank or existing database match the declaration. It's not a magic bullet since it doesn't cope with all scenarios out-of-the-box however there is usually a way to code around the trickier situations. I explained how I converted Contoso University from an Entity Framework Code Migrations way of managing database changes to a declarative one using SQL Server Data Tools here. If you are new to SSDT and want to learn about it I have a Getting Started post here.

As far as Visual Studio solutions are concerned, the declarative approach using SSDT is delivered by way of SQL Server Database Projects. In Contoso University this is the ContosoUniversity.Database project. This contains CREATE scripts for tables and stored procedures as well as for permissions and security. Not only does it contain scripts that represent the database schema, it also contains scripts that can insert reference data in to a newly created database. The significance of this becomes apparent when you realise that a database project can be used to create a database in LocalDB, which can be made fully functioning by inserting reference data. In many cases this could remove the need for a ‘dev' environment, as the local workstation is the dev environment, database and all. This eliminates the problem of config files containing connection strings specific to developers (and the check-in problems that this can cause) because the connection string for LocalDB is generic. This way of working has the potential to wave goodbye to situations where getting an application working on a development machine requires a lengthy setup script and usually some magic.

To see this in action, within the ContosoUniversity.Database project right-click CU-DEV.publish.xml and choose Publish. In the Publish Database CU-DEV.publish.xml dialog click on Publish:

visual-studio-publish-database-to-localdb

Now make sure that the ContosoUniversity.Web project is set as the startup project (if not in bold right-click and choose Set as StartUp Project) and hit F5 to run the application. A fully functioning ContosoUniversity should spring to life. Navigating to (for example) Departments should allow you to perform all CRUD activities. How's that for simplicity?

Tour Stops Here

That's it for our tour of Contoso University. Although there are automated UI tests in the solution I'm purposefully not covering them here as they are very much an advanced topic and I'm also planning some changes. That said, if you have FireFox installed on your development machine you can probably make them run. See my post in a previous blog series here.

In the next post we look at getting a basic CI build up-an-running. Happy coding until then!

Cheers -- Graham

Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS – Configuring a Sample Application for Git in Visual Studio 2015

Posted by Graham Smith on January 21, 2016No Comments (click here to comment)

In this instalment of my blog post series on Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS we configure a sample application to work with Git in Visual Studio 2015 and perform our first commit. This post assumes that nothing has changed since the last post in the series.

Configure Git in Visual Studio 2015

In order to start working with Git in Visual Studio there are some essential and non-essential settings to configure. From the Team Explorer -- Home page choose Settings > Git > Global Settings. Visual Studio will have filled in as many settings as possible and the panel will look similar to this:

visual-studio-git-settings

Complete the form as you see fit. The one change I make is to trim Repos from the Default Repository Location (to try and reduce max filepath issues) and then from Windows Explorer create the Source folder with child folders named GitHub, TFS and VSTS. This way I can keep repositories from the different Git hosts separate and avoid name clashes if I have a repository named the same in different hosts.

Clone the Repository

In the previous post we created ContosoUniversity (the name of the sample application we'll be working with) repositories in both TFS and VSTS. Before we go any further we need to clone the ContosoUniversity repository to our development workstation.

If you are working with TFS we finished-up last time with the Team Explorer -- Home page advising that we must clone the repository. However, at the time of writing Visual Studio 2015.1 seemed to have bug (TFS only) where it was still remembering the PRM repository that we deleted and wasn't allowing the ContosoUniversity repository to be cloned. Frustratingly, after going down several blind avenues the only way I found to fix this was to temporarily recreate the PRM repository from the Web Portal. With this done clicking on the Manage Connections icon on the Team Explorer toolbar now shows the ContosoUniversity repository:

visual-studio-display-repository-for-cloning

Double-click the repository which will return you to the Team Explorer home page with links to clone the repository. Clicking one of these links now shows the Clone Repository details with the correct remote settings:

visual-studio-clone-repository-correct-settings

Make sure you change the local settings to the correct folder structure (if you are following my convention this will be ...\Source\TFS\ContosoUniversity) and click on Clone. Finally, return to the Web Portal and delete the PRM repository.

The procedure for cloning the ContosoUniversity repository if you are working with VSTS is similar but without the bug. However in the previous post we hadn't got as far as connecting VSTS to Visual Studio. The procedure for doing this is the same as for TFS however when you get to the Add Team Foundation Server dialog you need to supply the URI for your VSTS subscription rather than the TFS instance name:

visual-studio-add-team-foundation-server-for-vsts

With your VSTS subscription added you will eventually end up back at the Team Explorer -- Home page where you can clone the repository as for TFS but with a local path of ...\Source\VSTS\ContosoUniversity.

Add the Contoso University Sample Application

The Contoso University sample application I use is an ASP.NET MVC application backed by a a SQL Server database. It's origins are the MVC Getting Started area of Microsoft's www.asp.net site however I've made a few changes in particular to how the database side of things is managed. I'll be explaining a bit more about all this in a later post but for now you can download the source code from my GitHub repository here using the Download ZIP button. Once downloaded unblock the file and extract the contents.

One of they key things about version control -- and Git in particular -- is that you want to avoid polluting it with files that are not actually part of the application (such as Visual Studio settings files) or files that can be recreated from the source code (such as binaries). There can be lots of this stuff but handily Git provides a solution by way of the .gitignore file and Microsoft adds icing to the cake by providing a version specifically tailored to Visual Studio. Although the sample code from my GitHub repository contains a .gitignore I've observed odd behaviours if this file isn't part of the repository before an existing Visual Studio solution is added so my technique is to add it first. From Team Explorer -- Home navigate to Settings > Git > Repository Settings. From there click on the Add links to add an ignore file and an attributes file:

visual-studio-ignore-and-attributes-files

Switch back to Team Explorer -- Home and click on Changes. These two files should appear under Included Changes. Supply a commit message and from the Commit dropdown choose Commit and Sync:

visual-studio-sync-ignore-and-attributes-files

Now switch back to Windows Explorer and the extracted Contoso University, and drill down to the folder that contains ContosoUniversity.sln. Delete .gitattributes and .gitignore and then copy the contents of this folder to ...\Source\TFS\ContosoUniversity or ...\Source\VSTS\ContosoUniversity depending on which system you are using. You should end up with ContosoUniversity.sln in the same folder as .gitattributes and .gitignore.

Back over to Visual Studio and the Team Explorer -- Changes panel and you should see that there are Untracked Files:

visual-studio-changes-untracked-files

Click on Add All and then Commit and Sync these changes as per the procedure described above.

That's it for this post. Next time we open up the Contoso University solution and get it configured to run.

Cheers -- Graham

Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS – Creating a Team Project and Git Repository

Posted by Graham Smith on January 12, 2016No Comments (click here to comment)

In the previous post in this blog series on Continuous Delivery with TFS / VSTS we looked at how to commission either TFS or VSTS. In this seventh post in the series we continue from where we left off by creating a Team Project and then within that team project the Git repository that will hold the source code of our sample application. Before we do all that though we'll want to commission a developer workstation in Azure.

Commission a Developer Workstation

Although it's possible to connect an on premises developer workstation to either VSTS (straightforward) or our TFS instance (a bit trickier) to keep things realistic I prefer to create a Windows 10 VM in Azure that is part of the domain. Use the following guide to set up such a workstation:

  • If you are manually creating a VM in the portal it's not wholly clear where to find Windows 10 images. Just search for 10 though and they will appear at the top of the list. I chose Windows 10 Enterprise (x64) -- make sure you select to create in Resource Manager. (Although you can choose an image with Visual Studio already installed I prefer not to so I can have complete control.)
  • I created my VM as a Standard DS3 on premium storage in my PRM-CORE resource group, called PRM-CORE-DEV. Make sure you choose the domain's virtual network and the premium storage account.
  • With the VM created log in and join the domain in the normal way. Install any Windows Updates but note that since this in an Enterprise edition of Windows you will be stuck with the windows version that the image was created with. For me this was version 10.0 (build 10240) even though the latest version is 1511 (build 10586) (run winver at a command prompt to get your version). I've burned quite a few hours trying to upgrade 10.0 to 1511 (using the 1511 ISO) with no joy -- I think this is because Azure doesn't support in-place upgrades.
  • Install the best version of Visual Studio 2015 available to you (for me it's the Enterprise edition) and configure as required. I prefer to register with a licence key as well as logging in with my MSDN account from Help > Register Product.
  • Install any updates from Tools > Extensions and Updates.
Create a Team Project

The procedure for creating a Team Project differs depending on whether you are using VSTS or TFS. If you are using VSTS simply navigate to the Web Portal home page of your subscription and select New:

vsts-new-team-project

This will bring up the Create New Team Project window where you can specify your chosen settings (I'm creating a project called PRM using the Scrum process template and using Git version control):

vsts-create-new-team-project

Click on Create project which will do as it suggests. That button then turns in to a Navigate to project button.

If on the other hand you are using TFS you need to create a team project from within Visual Studio since a TFS project may have other setup work to perform for SSRS and SharePoint that doesn't apply to VSTS. The first step is to connect to TFS by navigating to Team Explorer and choosing the green Manage Connections button on the toolbar. This will display a Manage Connections link which in tun will bring up a popup menu allowing you to Connect to Team Project:

visual-studio-manage-connections

This brings up the Connect to Team Foundation Server dialog where you need to click the Servers button:

visual-studio-connect-to-team-foundation-server

This will bring up the Add/Remove Team Foundation Server dialog where you need to click the Add button:

visual-studio-add-remove-team-foundation-server

Finally we get to the Add Team Foundation Server dialog where we can add details of our TFS instance:

visual-studio-add-team-foundation-server

As long as you are using the standard path, port number and protocol you can simply type the server name and the dialog will build and display the URI in the Preview box. Click OK and work your way back down to the Connect to Team Foundation Server dialog where you can now connect to your TFS instance:

visual-studio-connect-to-team-foundation-server-instance

Ignore the message about Configure your workspace mappings (I chose Don't prompt again) and instead click on Home > Projects and My Teams > New Team Project:

visual-studio-new-team-project

This brings up a wizard to create a new team project. As with VSTS, I created a project called PRM using the Scrum process template and using Git version control. The finishing point of this process is a Team Explorer view that advises that You must clone the repository to open solutions for this project. Don't be tempted since there is another step we need to take!

Create a Repository with a Name of our Choosing

As things stand both VSTS and TFS have initialised the newly minted PRM team projects with a Git repository named PRM. In some cases this may be what you want (where the team project name is the same as the application for example) however that's not the case here since our application is called Contoso University. We'll be taking a closer look at Contoso University in the next post in this series but for now we just need to create a repository with that name. (In later posts we'll be creating other repositories in the PRM team project to hold different Visual Studio solutions.)

The procedure is the same for both VSTS and TFS. Start by navigating to the Web Portal home page for either VSTS or TFS and choose Browse under Recent projects & teams. Navigate to your team project and click on the Code link:

vsts-navigate-to-code-tab

This takes you to the Code tab which will entice you to Add some code!. Resist and instead click on the down arrow next to the PRM repository and then click on New repository:

vsts-create-new-repository

In the window that appears create a new Git repository called ContosoUniversity (no space).

In the interests of keeping things tidy we should delete the PRM repository so click the down arrow next to (the now selected) ContosoUniversity repository and choose Manage repositories. This takes you to the Version Control tab of the DefaultCollection‘s Control Panel. In the Repositories panel click on the down arrow next to the PRM repository and choose Delete repository:

vsts-delete-repository

And that's it! We're all set up for the next post in this series where we start working with the Contoso University sample application.

Cheers -- Graham

Version Control PowerShell Scripts with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services

Posted by Graham Smith on January 6, 20163 Comments (click here to comment)

It's a new year and whilst I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions I do try and use this time of year to have a bit of a tidy-up of my working environments and adopt some better ways of working. Despite being a developer who's used version control for years to manage application source code one thing I've been guilty of for some time now is not version controlling my PowerShell code scripts. Shock, horror I know -- but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. In this post I'll be sharing how I solved this, but first let's take a quick look at the problem.

The Problem

Unless you are a heavyweight PowerShell user and have adopted a specialist editing tool, chances are that you are using the PowerShell ISE (Integrated Script Editor) that comes with Windows for editing and running your scripts. Whilst it's a reasonably capable editor it doesn't have integration points to any version control technologies. Consequently, if you want version control and you want to continue using the ISE you'll need to manage version control from outside the ISE -- which in my book isn't the seamless experience I'm used to. No matter, if you can live without a seamless experience the next question in this scenario is what version control technologies can be used? Probably quite a few, but since Git is the hot topic of the day how about GitHub -- the hosted version of Git that's free for public repositories? Ideal since it's hosted for you and there's the rather nice GitHub Desktop to make things slightly less seamless. Hang on though -- if you are like me you probably have all sorts of stuff in your PowerShells that you don't want being publicly available on GitHub. Not passwords or anything like that, just inner workings that I'd rather keep private. Okay, so not GitHub. How about running your own version of Git server? Nah...

A Solution

If you are a Visual Studio developer then tools you are already likely using offer one solution to this problem. And if you aren't a Visual Studio developer then the same tools can still be used -- very possibly for free. As you've probably already guessed from the blog title, the tools I'm suggesting are Visual Studio (2015, for the script editing experience) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, for version control). Whoa -- Visual Studio supports PowerShell as a language? Since when did that happen? Since Adam Driscoll created the PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio extension is since when.

The aim of this post is to explain how to use Visual Studio and VSTS to version control PowerShell scripts rather than understand how to start using those tools, so if you need a primer then good starting points are here for Visual Studio and here for VSTS. The great thing is that both these tools are free for small teams. If you want to learn about PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio I have a Getting Started blog post with a collection of useful links here. In my implementation below I'm using Git as the version control technology, so please amend accordingly if you are using TFVC.

Implementing the Solution

Now we know that our PowerShell scripts are going to be version controlled by VSTS the next thing to decide is where in VSTS you want them to reside. VSTS is based around team projects, and the key decision is whether you want your scripts located together in one team project or whether you want scripts to live in different team projects -- perhaps because they naturally belong there. It's horses for courses so I'll show both ways.

If you want your scripts to live in associated team projects then you'll want to create a dedicated Git repository to hold the Visual Studio solution. Navigate to the team project in VSTS and then to the Code tab. Click on the down arrow next to the currently selected repository and in the popup that appears click on New repository:

vsts-create-new-git-repo

A Create a new repository dialogue will appear -- I created a new Git repository called PowerShellScripts. You can ignore the Add some code! call to action as we'll address this from Visual Studio.

Alternatively, if you want to go down the route of having all your scripts in one team project then you can simply create a new team project based on Git -- called PowerShellScripts for example. The newly created project will contain a repository of the same name putting you in the same position as above.

The next step is to switch to Visual Studio and ensure you have the PowerShell Tolls for Visual Studio 2015 extension installed. It's possible you do since it can be installed as part of the Visual Studio installation routine, although I can't remember whether it's selected be default. To check if it's installed navigate to Tools > Extensions and Updates > Installed > All and scroll down:

visual-studio-extensions-and-updates-powershell-tools

If you don't see the extension you can install it from Online > Visual Studio Gallery.

With that done it's time to connect to the team project. Still within Visual Studio, from Team Explorer choose the green Plug icon on the menu bar and then Manage Connections, and then Connect to Team Project:

visual-studio-manage-connections

This brings up the Connect to Team Foundation Server dialog which (via the Servers button) allows you to register your VSTS subscription as a ‘server' (the format is https://yoursubscriptionname.visualstudio.com). Once connected you will be able to select your Team Project.

Next up is cloning the repository that will hold the Visual Studio solution. If you are using a dedicated team project with just one Git repository you can just click the Home icon on the Team Explorer menu bar to get the cloning link on the Home panel:

visual-studio-clone-this-repository

If you have created an additional repository in an existing team project you will need to expand the list of repositories and double-click the one you previously created:

visual-studio-select-repository

This will take you directly to the cloning link on the Home panel -- no need to click the Home icon. Whichever way you get there, clicking the link opens up the settings to clone the repository to your local machine. If you are happy with the settings click Clone and you're done.

Solutions, Projects and Files

At the moment we are connected to a blank local repository, and the almost final push is to get our PowerShell scripts added. These will be contained in Visual Studio Projects that in turn are contained in a Visual Studio Solution. I'm a bit fussy about how I organise my projects and solutions -- I'll show you my way but feel free to do whatever makes you happy.

At the bottom of the Home tab click the New link, which brings up the New Project dialog. Navigate to Installed > Templates > Other Project Types > Visual Studio Solutions. I want to create a Blank Solution that is the same name as the repository, but I don't want a folder of the same name to be created which Visual Studio gives me no choice about. A sneaky trick is to provide the Name but delete the folder (of the same name) from the Location text box:

visual-studio-create-blank-solution

Take that Visual Studio! PowerShellScripts.sln now appears in the Solutions list of the Home tab and I can double-click it to open it, although you will need to manually switch to the Solution Explorer window to see the opened solution:

visual-studio-solution-explorer

The solution has no projects so right-click it and choose Add > New Project from the popup menu. This is the same dialog as above and you need to navigate to Installed > Templates > Other Languages > PowerShell and select PowerShell Script Project. At this point it's worth having a think about how you want to organise things. You could have all your scripts in one project, but since a solution can contain many projects you'll probably want to group related scripts in to their own project. I have a few scripts that deal with authorisation to Azure so I gave my first project the name Authorisation.Azure. Additional projects I might need are things like DSC.Azure and ARM.Azure. It's up to you and it can all be changed later of course.

The new project is created with a blank Script.ps1 file -- I usually delete this. There are several ways to get your scripts in -- probably the easiest is to move your existing ps1 scripts in to the project's folder in Windows Explorer, make sure they have the file names you want and then back in Visual Studio right-click the project and choose Add > Existing Item. You should see your script files and be able to select them all for inclusion in the project.

Don't Forget about Version Control!

We're now at the point where we can start to version control our PowerShell scripts. This is a whole topic in itself however you can get much of what you need to know from my Git with Visual Studio 2015 and TFS 2015 blog post and if you want to know more about Git I have a Getting Started post here. For now though the next steps are as follows:

  • In Team Explorer click on the home button then click Changes. Everything we added should be listed under Included Changes, plus a couple of Git helper files.
  • Add a commit comment and then from the Commit dropdown choose Commit and Sync:
    visual-studio-team-explorer-changes
  • This has the effect of committing your changes to the local repository and then syncing them with VSTS. You can confirm that from VSTS by navigating to the Code tab and selecting the repository. You should see the newly added files!

Broadly speaking the previous steps are the ones you'll use to check in any new changes that you make, either newly added files or amendments to scripts. Of course the beauty of Git is that if for whatever reason you don't have access to VSTS you can continue to work locally, committing your changes just to the local repository as frequently as makes sense. When you next have access to VSTS you can sync all the changes as a batch.

Finally, don't loose sight of the fact that as well as well as providing version control capabilities Visual Studio allows you to run and debug your scripts courtesy of the PowerShell Tolls for Visual Studio 2015 extension. Do be sure to check out my blog post that contains links to help you get working with this great tool.

Cheers -- Graham

Git with Visual Studio 2015 and TFS 2015

Posted by Graham Smith on September 8, 20154 Comments (click here to comment)

If you work in an organisation that has a longstanding investment in TFS chances are that you haven't done much with Git. This is because when you create a new team project in TFS you have to choose the version control system you want to use and once chosen that's it -- no changing your mind. (This was correct when I first started writing this post but things are changing as I mention later.) If your projects were created a few years ago either Git wasn't an option back then since it only became available in early 2013 or you may have thought it was just too new and shiny to consider for use with TFS, and very likely these projects use Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC).

That has all changed now and Git is firmly embedded in TFS. In fact Git seems to be firmly embedded everywhere, not least at Microsoft where open source projects are being hosted on GitHub and internal teams are using Git via Visual Studio and TFS. Keen to understand what all the fuss is about I've been learning about and using Git over the past few months and the recent release of Visual Studio 2015 and TFS 2015 seemed like a good time to share some of my experiences. As always when learning something new I recommend taking some time to do some training and to that end I have a Getting Started blog post here where I've compiled what I think are the most useful resources for Visual Studio developers.

The Bigger Picture

Before getting in to the tooling I want to take a step back and say a few words about the big picture because if you want to start using Git and already have a team project based on TFVC you have some thinking to do. When I first started writing this post moving to Git would have meant creating a new Team Project based on Git and either starting from scratch or importing history and / or work items from the TFVC-based project. There are some resources that offer help in this regard and I've compiled a short list to help anyone contemplating a migration understand what's involved:

I haven't tried to perform a migration and with luck I won't have to, since Microsoft recently announced support for creating a Git repo in a TFVC project. It looks like this will ship with TFS 2015.1 although quite what we'll get in practice remains to be seen. If you want to know more there is some commentary here.

Trying this at Home

For this post I used TFS 2015.RTM and Visual Studio 2015.RTM. If you don't have access to TFS 2015 then you can follow along using VSO since features in TFS tend to appear first in VSO, although some of the screenshots in this post may be slightly different. If you are new to VSO I have a Getting Started post here, however be aware that a key difference compared with TFS is that you create a new team project in the VSO web portal.

Whilst writing this post I encountered what seemed to be a bug in Visual Studio and in my description of how I fixed it I talk about dropping to the command line. For this you'll need to have Git installed and the easiest route is probably to get it from Chocolatey. The Install and Configure Git video in this MVA series has a step-by-step walkthrough.

Getting Started

The first step to working with Git in TFS is to create a new Team Project based on Git. In Visual Studio connect to the Team Collection where you want to create the new project and in Team Explorer navigate to Home and then click on Home (or use the down arrow button) to display the Home menu. The ability to create a New Team Project is available under Projects and My Teams:

visual-studio-create-new-team-project

Navigate through the wizard and ensure you choose Git at the Specify Source Control Settings page:

visual-studio-create-new-team-project-specify-git

With the new project created (I called mine ContosoUniversity and used the Scrum process template) you will need to clone the repository before you can do much else. Team Explorer helpfully prompts you to do this:

visual-studio-clone repository

Some people like to clone to a folder created off the root of a drive (possibly to avoid maximum path length issues?) but I accepted the offered default of C:\Users\Graham.ALM\Source\Repos\ContosoUniversity. If you examine the folder that is created you'll see that it is empty, although in reality there is a hidden .git folder. I don't like placing code files in my repo until it contains the .gitignore and .gitattributes files and Visual Studio has a neat feature for adding these. In Team Explorer navigate to Home and then choose Settings. In the lower Git panel choose Repository Settings. This pane allows you to add the the .gitignore and .gitattributes files as well as alter other aspects of the repo (not all details shown):

visual-studio-add gitignore-and-gitattributes-files

The great thing about the .gitignore file that Visual Studio adds is that it's tuned for Visual Studio development. It's the small things...

This is a good time perform a commit, so choose Changes from the Team Explorer menu bar and notice that you are requested to Configure your user name and email address before committing changes. Defaults are taken from the current TFS connection -- edit as required, optionally choose to Enable download of author images from 3rd party source and click Update. Now head back to Changes, enter a commit message and click Commit.

visual-studio-initial-commit

Bear in mind that at the moment we have only committed locally and the TFS knows nothing about the changes. Before pushing any changes to TFS let's get a Visual Studio solution added. I used my ContosoUniversity solution which you can download here. After unblocking and unzipping it copy the contents of the folder that contains the solution file and project folders to the root of your repo. Switching back to Visual Studio and the Team Explorer Home panel and you should see that the Contoso University solution file is listed under Solutions:

visual-studio-team-explorer-solutions

Now navigate to the Changes panel and notice that there are Untracked Files:

visual-studio-team-explorer-changes-untracked-files

Click on Add All to move these files to Included Changes, add a suitable comment and Commit the change. Back at the Home panel you can now open the solution. If you are opening the solution on a machine with only Visual Studio 2015 installed you might get a warning about LocalDB versions. You can ignore this but if you want to run the application do update the connection strings in CU-DEV.publish.xml in ContoUniversity.Database and Web.config in ContosoUniversity.Web with (localdb)\MSSQLLocalDB as per this post.

Whilst editing CU-DEV.publish.xml you will likely see that it is being ignored by Git. We do want this file to be included in version control as it's how new developers can quickly publish the database to LocalDB. Right-clicking the file shows Add Ignored File to Source Control which looks promising so let's try that. Navigating to Team Explorer -- Changes you'll see that there is a change and you can add a commit message and commit the change. Except you can't, or at least I couldn't:

visual-studio-team-explorer-changes-nothing-to-commit

The situation here seems to be a standoff between .gitignore which is indicating that CU-DEV.publish.xml should be ignored and Visual Studio which is honoring our desire to add the file. The fix was to drop to the command line and to open a command prompt at the root of the repo and run git add ContosoUniversity.Database\CU-DEV.publish.xml -f. This forces the file to be added against .gitignore's wishes. Presumably the problem is that Visual Studio is not using the -f switch. One to report...

The final task for this section is to publish the local changes to TFS. If you want proof that no code has been pushed to TFS yet you can open the project in the TFS Web Portal and navigate to the Code tab. You'll see something like this:

tfs-web-portal-code-new-repo

In Visual Studio Team Explorer -- Synchronization you use the Push link to publish Outgoing Commits to TFS:

visual-studio-team-explorer-synchronization-push

I've not shown it here but refreshing the Code tab of the TFS Web Portal will now display your code along with the latest comment for each file and folder.

Pull Request Workflow

One aspect of the Git integration with Visual Studio and TFS that I particularly like is the pull request workflow since it lends itself very well for code reviews. To evaluate this for yourself the first step is to set up a branch policy to ensure that the pull request workflow cannot be circumvented. From the TFS Web Portal make sure you are somewhere in your team project and open the Control Panel (cog icon on the right of the blue bar). Navigate to the Version Control tab and then in the Git repositories panel expand the tree until the required branch is highlighted -- master in my case. Now click on Branch Policies in the right-hand panel and as a minimum check Require code reviews using pull request. You'll probably also want to check Allow users to approve their own changes if you are only using one account for the evaluation.

tfs-web-portal-branch-policies

As you can see from the screenshot there are more options and you can find details here. I'm keeping things simple and with the changes saved it's time to head back to Visual Studio to see what's different. As a quick test, make a simple change to a file and commit to master (remember this is just your local copy). Now try and push the change to TFS. You should get an Errors encountered during push. See the Output window for details. message. In the Output window you should see a The following errors were reported during push: refs/heads/master, TF402455: Pushes to this branch are not permitted; you must use pull requests to commit changes. message.

The starting point to create a pull request is to create a branch from master. In Team Explorer -- Branches right click master and select New Local Branch From. In the panel that is now displayed type a name for the branch and click Create Branch.

This new branch is now shown in bold and is considered checked out. Make another simple change to a file and commit it and then in Team Explorer -- Synchronization click Publish to publish the branch and push both the change that was just made to the new branch and the earlier change to master.

The workflow now switches back to TFS Web Portal and in either Code > Explorer or Code > Pull Requests there should be a button to Create Pull Request:

tfs-web-portal-create-pull-request

Slightly confusingly this button doesn't do what it says but rather displays the Pull Requests panel with options to configure aspects of this pull request. In particular there is a more options link that does give you more options:

tfs-web-portal-configure-pull-request

The changes you can make are all fairly obvious although I didn't make any. (Do note the existence of the New Pull Request link which allows you to configure your own pull request.) From this panel the Create Pull Request link does what you expect it to do.

The pull request as created above will sit in the Assigned to the team list of pull requests:

tfs-web-portal-pull-request-assigned-to-team

When a particular pull request is selected the panel allows comments to be made as a Discussion, right in the Files that have changed or against Commits. It's quite a busy window and there's a lot going on since it's also the place where Reviewers are selected and can indicate their approval decision:

tfs-web-portal-pull-request-comments-and-review-approvals

In my case above there were no merge conflicts so once I'd marked my approval I could click the Complete pull request button. This then morphs in to a Delete source branch button to allow you to get rid of the source branch which for most teams is probably the right thing to do since you want these to be short lived.

Back in Visual Studio and your local repo, master hasn't got the latest changes and the short-lived branch created for the pull request is still hanging around. To fix all this up, in Team Explorer -- Branches double-click master so it's checked-out. Then navigate to Team Explorer -- Synchronization and use the Pull link to bring the changes to down to master. Finally back in Team Explorer -- Branches right-click the short-lived branch and delete it.

Tour Finishes Here

That's as far as I'm planning to cover in this post but obviously there's lots more I could have covered -- resolving merge conflicts for example. Whilst I like the pull request workflow a colleague pointed out that it could lead to Scrum team members working in silos and a presentation at this year's Agile on the Beach conference made the point that pull request workflows can have a negative effect on effective continuous integration. Whilst important and valid points these are probably people and process problems and if they are going to happen with Git they are probably already happening with TFVC shelvesets.

Cheers -- Graham

Getting Started with Git for Visual Studio Developers

Posted by Graham Smith on September 8, 2015No Comments (click here to comment)

If you are just getting started with learning Git it's important to distinguish between Git the actual version control technology and services that use Git such as GitHub and TFS / VSO / Visual Studio. The resources below are the ones I think will provide a good starting point for the Visual Studio developer wishing to use Git in conjunction with repositories hosted in GitHub, TFS or VSO.

The integration of Git with TFS / Visual Studio dates back to early 2013 and in mid 2015 now feels particularly mature. Additionally there is the fairly recent announcement of the GitHub extension for Visual Studio 2015. Despite all the great integration with Visual Studio it's worth remembering that sometimes you may need to drop down to the command line to perform some Git operations. This is where having spent some time learning the Git basics will pay off. The MVA jump start course above covers Git basics and a web search will provide numerous other sources.

Cheers -- Graham