Pratice what you preach. My advice is to add unittests with codecoverage to your (daily) build and make sure it’s above the threshold. To pratice this I installed Tfs Express this weekend.

The installation was straight forward next-next-finish. But then the first problem: error tf30172 on create new project. So I tried to log in to the webinterface. Not possible with an account without password. I created a password and logged in. Set the Create new projects right to allow and tried again. No success. Some internet search explained this as an version clash, I was using Visual Studio 2010. Installed Team Explorer 2012 and was able to create the project.

My project contains some unittests I want to run during the build. Added them to the builddefinition, but code coverage was not executed. The log showed an XML validation error: XSD violation: The ‘enabled’ attribute is not declared.

Another internet search pointed in the direction of another version clash. I cannot convert to Visual Studio 2012 on my production machine. This train comes to a stop.

Solution here by installation of Visual Studio 2012

On the techdays I got an invite key to tfspreview.com the Team Foundation Service in the cloud. As this is an SAAS solution there was no installation, only registration. There is a webinterface for adding projects, managing rights and everything I wanted. After installing a small add-on to log in from Team Explorer 2010 with my live-id, I could create a builddefinition. With unittests and code coverage being done in the cloud. This is how it should be.

Tfspreview is – as the name sugests – preview software and free. Things could go wrong. And when the pricing models get published your projectmanager might want to go back on premises again. Which is equal good, it only takes more time setting up. But for now I’m choosing the easy way of SAAS.