TFS Performance Report Pack

Ever since we have moved our TFS to a virtual machine on Hyper V, we have had complains about the performance of the server. The most critical part of troubleshooting performance problems is to quantify them.

For Team Foundation Server, I found "TFS Performance Report Pack", created by Grant Holiday, an invaluable resource. It is a set of reports that collect data from the TFSActivityLogging database (the database which logs all actions on TFS) and provides a visual view of the response time, number of requests and wait time for source control requests.

Until recently, the Report Pack was available only for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. But recently Jim Saunders from TFS Developer Support Team has produced a version of it for SSRS 2005 as well.

Installation of TFS Performance Report Pack is very simple.

1. Download the zip file from here and extract it to your TFS Application tier server.
2. Browse to your Reporting Services, which for server TFSSERVER would be http://TFSSERVER/Reports
3. Create a Data Source for the database TFSActivityLogging
4. Import each report file individually.
5. For each report, open the properties of the report and select the option "A shared data source". Click on the Browse button and select the data source created in step 3.
   

The reports are self explanatory and Grant Holliday's blog post describe them well.

TFWA

Ever since my baptism with Microsoft Team Founation Server (TFS), I have come across a number of tools, which has made working with TFS must more easier and possible for developers and configuration managers. Some of the "must have" tools for TFS are

• Team Foundation SideKicks
• Microsoft Team Foundation Server PowerTools, and
• MSBuild Extension Pack (if you are using Team Build)

These tools make up for many of the shortcomings in the feature list of TFS so far. Today, I come accross another tool for TFS, which I would like to add to the must haves list for TFS. The tools is called Microsoft Team System Web Access (TFWA) and is available as a free downloaded from Microsoft's website. It provides a web view of your TFS project and is pretty useful where clients cannot have Team Explorer installed on their machines.

The tool was initially developed by DevBiz and was called TeamPlain but was later acquired and made free to download by Microsoft.

The good news is that it is all integrated in TFS2010 and is not needed as a seperate download for TFS.

Bing

I have been playing with the new Microsoft search engine - Bing and its actually not that bad. Do try it out by visiting http://www.bing.com.