Jim Lamb has posted a great summary about things you can do to improve build performance in TFS 2008.

Many of the things mentioned are described in the excellent book on MSBuild and Team Build "Inside The Microsoft Build Engine Using MSBuild And Team Foundation Build". If you haven't looked at it yet make sure you do!

And beware of the TargetNotLogged fix may not have been applied correctly as described in my previous post.

With SP1 of Team Foundation Server a some performance issues related to Team Build were resolved and we saw some good improvements on the over-all build times. One fix relating to the size of the build log did not get corrected but that has now been fixed in the KB958845 hotfix as Aaron Hallberg describes in this post.

One thing I discoved was that SP1 didn't always replace the "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" file, I guess because the timestamp didn't match what the installer expected. As a result the issues with the build logger wasn't resolved at all. But with some help I resolved this by replacing the current file with the one from SP1 and it all worked beautifully.

If you have applied SP1 and the hotfix and still see "Project 'project' is building project 'dependent project' for targets 'GetTargetPath'" etc in your build log, open your "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" file and check that it contains the line <TargetsNotLogged Condition=" '$(TargetsNotLogged)' == '' ">GetTargetPath;GetNativeManifest;GetCopyToOutputDirectoryItems</TargetsNotLogged>. If not, get a correctly updated file from another machine running Team Build with SP1 (like for instance the evaluation VPC Microsoft distributes) and copy that over you own file.

When we finally got these issues sorted out we got nice results. One build was improved from a build time of 2h30 minutes before SP1 down to below 40 minutes. The size of the build log went from 5500 lines to 550!

The Team System site at MSDN has been updated with a new look and fresh content. Cleaner and more to the point is my impression so far. I also like the picture gallery of some of the people in the VSTS team, it's nice to have a face to the person behind the blog!

Take a look at the new site here.

This year there's a new developer's conference in town, the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2009! The event takes place in Gothenburg March 24. It's a pretty comprehensive one-day conference covering five different tracks. There are many well-known speakers (such as Kent Beck, Neal Ford, Robert Folkesson and Patrik Löwendahl to name a few) so I'm sure this will be a day well spent.

I'll be there to give a talk about how to improve software quality using build automation and automated testing. 

For more information about visit the conference site at http://www.scandevconf.se/

I got the new book on MSBuild and Team Build, "Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build", last week and I've just gone through it. The book is written by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew, two authorites on the subjects. I've used Hashmi's "Deploying .NET Applications: Learning MSBuild and ClickOnce" as a reference for MSBuild until now, but the new book will definately be the new resource for everyone wanting to know the ins-and-outs of MSBuild and Team Build.

The book covers MSBuild and Team Build first with the basics and then with deep-dives that cover topics that are hard to find in one place. There are also a couple of scenario-oriented chapters, "cookbooks", which adds real-world applications to the story.

A great book and I will use it a lot!

This time we'll do version control again! If you have thought about using Team System and TFS for version control this will be a good start, come and get all the basics and get the opportunity to ask tricky questions! If you're using TFS and want to know more about branching or how to version control database objects then this session is for you too. And if you're looking for a first look at some cool features in Team System 2010 then we'll show that as well.

The dates and locations:

• Malmö 3/2
• Göteborg 4/2
• Stockholm 5/2

This year Microsoft Sweden is putting together a major conference for developers and IT-pros. March 17-18 TechDays will come to Västerås! With 90 sessions there will something for everyone, tracks cover content like news in .NET, Team System 2010, Virtualization, Windows 7, ...

I've got the opportunity to talk and my topic will be Team System and version control best-practices. We'll look at practices for code features such as managing multiple releases or build automation and we'll also look at how the version control system ties together with other useful features in TFS. And we'll peek a bit on what new enhancements VS 2010 will bring in this area!

Have a look at http://www.microsoft.se/techdays for information and registration.

I got a great New-Year's surprise yesterday - an e-mail telling me that I've been honored with the Team System MVP award. What a great start of this new year! It's great to be part of this community, the VSTS space is very open and friendly. I'm often amazed by how willing people are to share their knowledge, not to mention how open the Microsoft product teams are with what they are doing and how they do it. Amazing!

As a result of the MVP award I got thinking about in what ways I can contribute to the community this year and here's the list I came up with:

• Blog more about my experiences from working with Team System. Off the top of my head are subjects like TFS extensibility (more code samples) and automated testing.
• Seminars and conferences. I've got the opportunity to talk at seminars and conferences the coming months. I'll post some references to that later.
• Code projects. Since TFS and VSTS are so extensible there's room for good add-ons. I've worked on a couple of projects on Codeplex and I have some ideas I hope I'll be able to realize this year.
• User-groups. We've got a quite active .NET user-group going and I hope there's interest for some VSTS talks there.

It's going to be a great year with VSTS and I'm really looking forward to getting to know more of my fellow MVPs.

A friend of mine, Joachim Rossberg, recently completed his work with a new book on Team System and ALM. As far as I know this is the first VSTS book with focus on ALM and how to optimize processes using Team System.

The book covers ALM at a general level but also maps it well to how Visual Studio Team System can support the ideas of ALM. There's also some nice discussions of ALM practices and how to perform ALM assessments.

Find more info on the book here: