Correcting the default check-in action for associated work items in Team Foundation Server

I've found that it's a giant pain in the ass in TFS when associating work items to checkins because the default assocation action is 'Resolve' rather than 'Associate'. When I'm working on features, I like to do bits of functionality in units and check them in to source control in small batches to make my changes more manageable. Unfortunately, many times I've forgotten to change the association action when associating work items with change sets and it's resolved my issue instead of just associating the work item with the change set. This becomes problematic because it skews my records and metrics for how much time is spent working on a task. Fortunately one can change this in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[Version Number]\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior

Quick fix.

Regarding pre-test invocation scripts when deploying to a Test Agent with TFS

So, I learned something interesting about TFS Test Agents today and they way they handle pre-test invocation scripts when running tests on a Test Agent. In Microsoft Test Manager, do the following:

1. Connect to a Team Project
2. Change into 'Lab Center' mode
3. Click on 'Test Settings' in the top bar-ish area. This will open up the Test Settings Manager.
4. Edit or create a new 'Test Settings' item and open it up.
5. In the 'test settings' editor, under the 'Steps' column on the left-hand side, go to 'Advanced' -> 'Scripts'. You're now presented with the scripts page where you can specify scripts to be invoked before and after the execution of your test run.

Now, **here's the important thing** :

The script file(s) you specify in these boxes do not get copied to the Test Agent per se. Instead, their contents get read and merged with an automatically generated script that's created by the Test Agent. The script that actually gets run on the Test Agent will look similar to the following:

REM **************************************************************************** 

REM *  Generated by Microsoft Visual Studio 

REM *  Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 

REM *   

REM **************************************************************************** 

set ResultsDirectory=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1\Results 

set DeploymentDirectory=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1\DEPLOY~1 

set TestRunDirectory=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1 

set TestRunResultsDirectory=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1\Results\00C4EF~1 

set TotalAgents=1 

set AgentWeighting=100 

set AgentLoadDistributor=Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Execution.AgentLoadDistributor 

set AgentId=1 

set TestDir=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1 

set BuildDirectory=\\SOMESERVER\SomeShare\TFSDrops\HRST\CWSTAM~1.SPR\CWSTAM~3.1 

set DataCollectionEnvironmentContext=Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Execution.DataCollectionEnvironmentContext 

set TestLogsDir=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1\Results\00C4EF~1 

set ControllerName=TSTTFSTHR01:6901 

set TestDeploymentDir=C:\Users\Autotest\AppData\Local\VSEQT\QTAgent\23620\00C4EF~1\DEPLOY~1 

set AgentName=00C4EFD8-A65F-4B5E-AD5F-04F93895B543 

REM **************************************************************************** 

REM *  User Commands 

REM *   

REM **************************************************************************** 

echo "My actual user commands from my script file here"

This is important to keep in mind when you're writing the commands in the script to be executed, because no files get copied with the script file you reference in the Test Settings, and there's no mention of where that script file originally came from, so the script is effectively executed without any context except for that which is given to it by the TFS Test Agent in the prefixed lines.

A huge annoyance in Windows 8 store apps

Apparently Bindings are no longer TwoWay by default as they were in WPF. They're now OneWay, which was a huge annoyance and wasted a solid half hour of my time trying to debug my bindings.