Bryon Brewer

So I went to the Visual Studio Team System user group meeting a couple nights ago here in Dallas.  It’s actually really great to have a group of smart people here in Dallas that have a lot of expertise and passion about VSTS / Team Foundation Server.  If you are interested in learning more about VSTS, visit http://www.dallasvsts.com/ for meeting times/locations.  The group meetings every month.

Ed Blankenship (VSTS Microsoft MVP) did a presentation on the new October release of Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools and the new features coming in VSTS 2010.  The new testing tools coming out with VSTS are really amazing — it’s a huge focus for this release.  VSTS testing tools have always lacked in the UI functional testing area.  The new release includes a tool called Camano (codename) that is specifically designed for testers to easily record UI tests, reports bugs, and save later for regression testing.

It is a pretty common need to change the URL of your Team Foundation 2008 Server.  For example, you may want to create an alias or other easy-to-remember URL for your team to access TFS.  TFS 2008 has made this task much easier.  To accomplish:

1. On your application tier server, run the following command:
   TFSAdminUtil ActivateAT tfs.mycompany.com
2. On the application tier server, modify the registry (run regedit.exe):
   Path: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\ReportServer\80\Sites
   Registry keys: Change BaseReportURL and ReportService keys to the new URL to use.
3. Finally, you need to setup SharePoint to use the new Url.  In SharePoint Central Administration, under Operations, click “Alternate Access Mappings”
4. Add the new URL.  You can add an internal URL for the Default zone to apply across all zone.  You can also edit the public URL to respond to the new URL.

Based on my experience, this will update the URL in all places it needs to be updated.