If that is not enough for you, Mickey is running a competition over at Team System Rocks where you could win a years MSDN Premium Subscription with Visual Studio Team Suite.

Don't forget that you can subscribe to the show using the RSS Feed in iTunes or Zune. You can also listen to the show direct.

For feedback or suggestions for future shows please contact us at radiotfs@gmail.com or leave a comment over at the Radio TFS web site.

The biggest new feature in 3.1 is support for working offline in both our Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse and our Teamprise Explorer clients. Offline support is a big advantage for TFS users who have unreliable network connections - particularly telecommuters and road warriors, who might want to get some work done wherever they are, be it a coffeeshop or an airplane.

If you're an Eclipse user and wish to go offline from your Team Foundation Server (or if your network unfortunately takes you offline), just go to the Team menu and select "Work Offline". You'll be disconnected from TFS, yet you'll still be able to perform all the file operations like you expect -- you can add, edit, move and delete files just like if you were online. When your network connection returns, you can choose the "Return Online" menu option and pend all those changes to the server.

Working offline in Teamprise Explorer is even simpler, you don't need to specifically enter offline mode. Simply make whatever changes you wish in your workspace, and click "Return Online" from the Source Control context menu. Explorer will synchronize your local workspace with the server and pend any changes you made while you were offline.

The Command Line Client has had offline support since version 3.0, so that's nothing new, but it does get some cool features aside from that. We've added an XML output option for many commands so that you can parse the results easily from a script. The "brief" and even "detailed" formats tend to truncate output for easy interactive viewing, but this can be troublesome for scripts. The new XML output should be perfect for getting all the information out of Team Foundation Server.

Those are a few of the bigger features, but there are many more. And seeing as this is still a point release, there are a lot of bug fixes, too. If you want to see all the details, check out the 3.1 release notes.

We've spent a lot of time on 3.1, and we think you'll enjoy it, even if you're not the type of person to upgrade for "just a point release".

This is a maintenance release free to everyone with a valid Teamprise 3.0 license and includes several bug fixes along with a few new features.  For the proper release notes, take a look here.  However I just wanted to point out a few highlights.

Improved Offline Support

With-out doubt, the biggest new feature in Teamprise 3.1 for most people will be the improved offline support. If you right click on a project in the Eclipse IDE, you are now presented with a "Go Offline" option which allows you to tell Teamprise not to bother trying to talk to TFS for a while (previously you had to restart Eclipse for Teamprise to ask you if you wanted to go offline, and only then after it had tried *really* hard to connect).

While offline, you can still perform all the file operations like you expect -- you can add, edit, move and delete files just like if you were online.

When you want to come back online (say when you have stepped back out of the plane, bus, meeting room), you can right click on the project and say "Return Online" and Teamprise will do it's best to detect what changes have happened while you were away, giving you the option to pend those changes.

There is even "return online" capability in the stand-alone client Teamprise Explorer which is very neat and makes working with tools that are not TFS aware a little easier too.  The actual algorithm used by the return online feature is more sophisticated than just checking for read/write status in your local workspace, we also do some magic and compare checksums of the file contents etc.  Fellow Teamprise blogger Ed Thomson was the lead developer for the offline work and he has some more details on his blog.

TFS 2008 SP1 New Feature Support

Service Pack 1 of Team Foundation Server 2008 is hopefully due out soon, and with it come lots of lovely new features. We took advantage in the timing of our 3.1 release to update Teamprise to support some of the new server capabilities so that they are available to our customers as soon as TFS 2008 SP1 arrives.  These include:

• Last check-in date/time column (see my previous post about this feature)
• Support for work item meta-data filtering option (note that this option is already being used on some of the CodePlex servers so if you use Teamprise to talk to the work item functionality in CodePlex then you probably want to upgrade to Teamprise 3.1, after all the price is right :-) ).
• tf branch -checkin command, the fastest way to create large branches and perform the check-in at the same time.

Command Line Client Improvements

In this release we are making publicly available a bunch of improvement and new features that we added to our command line client after some great feedback from one particular customer who has un-questionably the largest and most demanding Team Foundation Server install base on the planet. In particular we have added the "-format:xml" option for most commands in addition to the usual -format:brief and -format:detailed.  The -format:xml option will output data from the command line client in a format easily XML parseable without truncating output which makes it much easier to use and parse command line output in scripting scenarios.  However, there have been many more improvements so check out the release notes for more information.

64-bit support on Windows.

Not really worth calling out separately only to say that Teamprise is now the world's first commercially available x64 TFS client for Windows :-)

While we are a Java application, as mentioned before, we have a bit of JNI code to do the stuff not possible from all the JRE versions that we support (such as native authentication on Windows or making a file writable).  Also we use SWT to give us a native look and feel on all platforms and SWT works by using lots of JNI to do the presentation calls.  This meant that if you tried to run Teamprise under a x64 Java runtime we died pretty quickly.  We've had x64 support available for other platforms for a while (including Linux), but with Windows x64 support coming in Eclipse 3.4 we took the opportunity to compile our JNI code over to the Win32 x64 architecture and it works great.

On a personal note, during this activity I had to fix some bits in the core Eclipse 3.4 codebase (specifically PDE for people that are interested) and the small patches that I submitted have been applied into the main Eclipse project which is a nice feeling. Eclipse is a poster-child of open source projects and it is with some pride that I can tell people I have contributed code into it. It's also nice that as Teamprise is a commercial company that uses a lot of the Eclipse code and is an Eclipse Foundation member, we are able to do our bit and contribute something back for the benefit of all.

As you can see, we've been busy. We've hopefully cleared some adoption blockers for some of our customers, done quite a few bug fixes and performance improvements and thrown in some new features along the way.  While the headline grabbing features of interest to most people are probably the offline support and the 64-bit support, I'm very proud of this as a solid "point" release and I would encourage everyone with a valid 3.0 license to upgrade.

"The Online Services group at Thomson Reuters is responsible for the storage and retrieval of online assets. Of the 220-member team, approximately 150 are development engineers or quality engineers. Although the team does some programming using the Microsoft® .NET Framework, the group primarily develops in Java on computers that run a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Linux 64, UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows®. About 90 percent of the programmers in Online Services work in Eclipse or Rational Application Developer (RAD), and up to 50 percent of the testers work in Eclipse. All of the team’s build computers run UNIX or Linux."

Anyway, thanks to Mac and the people at Thomson Reuters for agreeing to share their experiences.  Hopefully other organizations considering Team Foundation Server to manage the whole software development process will find the case study interesting.

To read the case study in full, see Microsoft Case Studies: Thomson Reuters Unify Development Processes with Team Foundation Server and Teamprise.  I've also got a PDF version available here.

One out of the many new features introduced in TFS 2008 SP1 is the "Last Check-in" column in the source control explorer. It is a handy little thing that I think a lot of people will find useful. 

However just a couple of warnings for you for behaviour that you might not expect at first.

1. The date shown for folders is the date that the folder was added, not the last date that any contents of that folder where checked in.  That means you cannot use it to drill down onto the most recently changes files - to find that out you should still do a "View History" on the parent folder and look at the changesets.
2. If you are using a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 client (or Teamprise 3.1 for that matter when it is released) and you point it at a server prior to TFS 2008 SP1 (i.e. TFS 2005 or the RTM release of TFS 2008) then you do not get any data in this column because the server doesn't send back that data to the client.

Otherwise it works pretty much as you expect.  Most useful is that you can obviously sort the column to find the recently changed files in a big list of files.

We'll be giving demos of the new Teamprise 3 and all it's great new features. Hope to see you there!

Brian is a Nabaztag smart rabbit.  He reads out details of check-ins and builds.  If a build has failed then his ears go down to show how sad he feels, but if you fix the build his ears will soon pick up again.

I've had Brian for about a year now waiting to do this project, but when I tried it in the past I always found the response times from the rabbit to be too slow.  However earlier this year, the Nabaztag developers updated the code running the rabbits so that they are now using the XMPP (Jabber) protocol to receive updates and the service now seems pretty good.

Brian is now sitting on my desk chattering away and letting me know what is happening in TFS.  If you want to find out more about how he works and see him in action then take a look at the video. If your company blocks YouTube but you have Silverlight installed then you can view a higher quality version of the video courtesy of the Windows Live Streaming service.  I'll go through the code behind Brian in a later post if there is any interest, but it is pretty much a standard TFS event listener that then sends text to the rabbit using the Nabaztag API.

If you're in the greater Chicagoland area next week, I've been invited to the Chicago VSTS User Group to give a tour of the new version of Teamprise. If you're interested in how Team System can play nice with Java developers, I suggest you stop by and check it out:

The meeting begins at 5:30 PM at the Microsoft Chicago (Loop) Offices:
77 W Wacker Dr, Suite 2300

Please RSVP if you're going to attend.

Even if you can't make it next week, be sure to check out the Chicago VSTS User Group, or another user group near you. It's a great resource if you're a VSTS or Team Foundation Server user!

Teamprise will be exhibiting at the Chicago launch event tomorrow, March 11. We're in booth 47 - stop by and say hi if you're attending.

Even better -- our very own Martin Woodward will be presenting at the Dublin launch event tomorrow. Be sure to check him out if you're attending out there.

Otherwise, there are still plenty of events in a city near you - be sure to go check out what's new in TFS 2008!

Teamprise was invited to present at this month's Chicago VSTS Users Group to discuss using TFS from within the Eclipse IDE and from non-Microsoft platforms. I'm excited to make a fool of myself speaking in public (and excited to learn that a VSTS Users Group exists in Chicago.)

I'll be speaking with David Dugan who's a Senior Consultant for Sogeti. David will be discussing accessing TFS from older versions of Visual Studio.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Inevitably, someone else like me with an overblown competitive streak will come along and build a still smaller TFS proxy. Being as I'm a jerk, I've decided to hit a point that nobody else will match: this is the first TFS proxy server to run on a Mac.

When I say "run on a Mac", I don't mean that I've got a VM running Windows and Microsoft's TFS proxy server. That's too easy -- we've got a pint-sized TFS proxy actually running in MacOS X, thanks to Teamprise's new Java SDK for Team Foundation Server.

Fortunately, writing against the Teamprise SDK is easy. I didn't keep strict track, but I think that writing this little proxy server took about 10 hours, which probably broke down like:

• 4 hours: figuring out the Jetty servlet framework (for hosting the proxy)
• 2 hours: figuring out the hsqldb database framework (for caching)
• 1 hour: lost to cigarette breaks
• 2 hours: various other slacking
• 1 hour: getting the files out of Team Foundation Server through our SDK

As you can see, our new SDK will let you very quickly one-up your coworkers. Isn't that really what software's all about?

If you're at TechEd, and want to see the (new) world's smallest TFS proxy, or the world's first TFS proxy on a Mac, swing by and say hi. Teamprise is at booth 1333.

We're very excited about the next version of TFS, as it includes several big performance enhancements, as well as some interesting new features such as support for working offline. My coworker, Ben Pryor has written significantly about using Teamprise with Visual Studio 2008, which is very helpful if you're curious.

Teamprise is exhibiting at Microsoft TechEd 2007 this week. Come visit us at booth 1333 and say hello. We'd love to talk to you about what we're doing with Visual Studio 2008.

But you don't need to be registered for JavaOne to visit us! I have a limited number of exhibit-only passes to JavaOne.

If you're in the Bay Area this week and you're interested integrating Team Foundation Server's version control and work item tracking into Eclipse, or you're interested in accessing Team System from cross-platform clients, come check us out at the Moscone Center.

Just send me an email and we can get the passes to you!