Ozzie.eu

Having a personal Windows Azure account all setup, I began developing a blank site for the purpose of being a “test tube” for my self taught dabblings on Razor, Twitter Bootstrap and other subjects of interest to me.

The initial setup was:

• Provisioning the Azure Web Site;
• Getting the Bootstrap starter page and its custom stylesheet;
• Adding the files to a new Project on the TFS default collection.

Afterwards, I submitted a first check-in to TFS service just for the sake of testing the whole of the development tools. I got the error: “No files were checked-in”.

After a few exploitations, I realized the Webmatrix development tool failed to create the TFS project. I had to create the project manually on the TFS Web console and afterwards it worked fine.

Still, it’s kind of a let down to find this bug on such an early stage of development. 

After having the setup needed to start developing code, keep track of it’s changes and deploy the resulting application, all resorting to Microsoft Cloud resources, it’s time to start building the proof of concept.
So, open up Web Matrix and from the startup screen choose “New > Template Gallery”:

On the template selection, choose “Personal Site” and give it a name of your liking:

You can create a site on Windows Azure where you’ll later deploy the web site on, if you skip this you can do it later at deploy time:

After the template has completed the installation and configuration steps, you can start by adding it to source control, using the “Use TFS” on the source control section of the ribbon:

Insert your Team Foundation Service URL and press connect. Afterwards choose the project where you’d like to keep version control of you web application:

Check in all the files of the initial version of your site (basically as-is from the template installation):

Afterwards, you might want to check on the TFS Web portal if the changeset has been successfully checked in:

Continue to edit the personal site, following Microsoft’s instructions on how to place your personal data into to web pages. Test it on the local machine, here’s how mine looks like:

If all is well, check in your changes to TFS once again. Next, let’s publish the site onto Windows Azure:

Pick the site you created upon starting, or create one now:

Confirm the publishing operation, if all goes well you’re done:

The site is live on Microsoft’s cloud platform. The URL of my testing site is: http://ozziepersonalsite.azurewebsites.net/
Happy coding!

Microsoft has been very persuasive pushing Windows Azure as a cloud hosting alternative. It’s a broad range of services that one can use to support many kinds of scenarios: web applications, mobile apps, databases, content distribution networks and more.

I will finally get around to test drive Windows Azure for Web application development. I’ll be using the following tools and services from Microsoft:

• Web Matrix 3 (still in beta at the time of this post): a free, lightweight, cloud-connected web development tool.
• Team Foundation Service: Your source code and work items are stored in the cloud. Plan projects, collaborate with your team, and manage your code online from anywhere.
• Windows Azure: Microsoft’s cloud platform.

To use the free TFS service you have to register your Microsoft account here. This free service includes:

• Up to 5 users
• Unlimited number of projects
• Version control (TFVC or Git)
• Work item tracking
• Agile planning tools
• Feedback management
• Build (still in preview)
• Test management (still in preview)

For a free trial of Windows Azure services, you also have to register your Microsoft account here. Your free trial contains:

• virtual machines & cloud services / 750 compute hours per month
• SQL server / 750 hours of web, standard, or enterprise
• web sites / 10 web sites
• mobile services / 10 mobile services
• relational database / 1 SQL database
• SQL reporting / 100 hours per month
• storage / 70 GB with 50,000,000 storage transactions
• backup / 20 GB
• data transfer / unlimited inbound & 25GB outbound
• media services encoding / 50 GB (input & output combined)
• cdn / 20 GB outbound with 500,000 transactions
• cache / 128 MB
• service bus / 1,500 relay hours and 500,000 messages

To download and install Web Matrix you don’t need any extra registration. Be aware that version 3 is the one used here to take advantage of the Azure and TFS integration.

In conclusion, the working setup for the Azure test-drive will be:

• Team Foundation Service for source code version control;
• windows Azure account to deploy applications and services on;
• Downloaded and installed Web Matrix to build a Web application, add it to Source Control and deploy it from there.

On a daily basis, developers use versioning control software like Microsoft's Team Foundation Server. A problem that arises from time to time is a pending checkin from a user that has left the company, or worse yet, a computer that is missing either because it was damaged or taken away.
On TFS, to solve these issues, you can use the TF.EXE command line tool. To use it you should open a command prompt window:

After opening the command prompt, you need to have identified the following information:

• Name of the computer where the workspace used to be hosted;
• Windows username used to logon to Team Foundation Server;
• The TFS Web URL

Having to use a unified versioning control system across the enterprise, the choice fell upon Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010.It’s strong bet because it not only supports the versioning control, but has integrated tools to handle what is called the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).
However, the not-Microsoft technology teams are faced with the challenge of finding the right integration between their development tools and TFS Source Control. One of those tools is Oracle’s JDeveloper.
You can find on the Web tutorials like this or this on how to install the JDeveloper plugin to integrate with TFS. The corresponding video is shown below:
However, it does not follow through a simple, yet required configuration in order for the plugin to work properly. You have to include to directory where the command line tool (TF.EXE) of Team Foundation client is installed. In my case, having a 32-bit Visual Studio 2010 installation, it’s on this  folder:
It also doesn’t inform you of an important software requirement: you must have TFS 2010 Anywhere or Visual Studio 2010 installed. The plugin doesn’t bring the client.
If you’re missing any of these two requirements, installing the TFS client or including the path to the “TF” command line utility, the options will appear grayed out.

Given the lack of a straightforward answer on the Web, here is mine. To get Visual Studio 2008 to connect to Team Foundation Server 2010 and integrate with the source control follow these steps:

1. Download and install Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer
2. Download and install  Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 
3. Download and install  Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 

Having successfully executed all previous installations, open Visual Studio 2008, go to menu "Tools > Connect to Team Foundation Server":

Add your TFS server's address in the form "http://[IP address or FQDN]:[port]/tfs".
It should be all set up!

Using corporate servers on a security aware organization implies that the IT governance policies enforce a network distributed and update antivirus software.
The bad news are that if a fine tuning and folder rule out policy is not in place, the database servers and application server will have their performance seriously compromised. The On-access scan feature will perform its own DoS attack on the hosts.
According to the server role, the adequate folder need to be ruled out from the malware scanning engine.On this specific post, you can find a lead on what folders should be ruled out on a Microsoft Team Foundation Server.
On the database server (MS-SQL) you should obviously rule out the path to the data volumes (.mdf and .ldf files) supporting the TFS.
On the actual TFS server, the following folder should be ruled out:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010