TFS 2015 Migration to different service provider - tfs-2015

I am looking at performing a TFS 2015 migration from one site (i.e. service provider) to another. 
The 2 sites are completely different companies and therefore different domains and hardware. 
This TFS has been used for work items and source control. 
I see that Microsoft has the following articles that seem to be related to this: 
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/setup-admin/tfs/admin/move-clone-hardware 
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/setup-admin/tfs/admin/move-across-domains 
I have a ton of questions then as I try to sort this one out including: 
Is what I am trying to do reasonable... first follow the instructions in the 1st link and then follow the instructions in the 2nd link? I ask this since it would appear to me that what I am attempting is actually not really covered by these documents. 
For example, in my scenario there may be no mapping from one user to another for a user that has checked in code. So, does this approach handle this ok? 
When I searched stack overflow I see that the closest question to mine is this one which refers to a migration tool on CodePlex that is no longer supported: 
TFS to TFS Migration Tool - domain issues 
Thanks in advance!

Yes, it's reasonable. What you want to do is both changing domains and physical servers which called environment-based move and hardware-based move.
You should not try to combine an environment-based move with a hardware-based move. First complete the hardware move, and then change the environment. Detail steps just follow the tutorials above in your question.

Related

Crm2013/15 Online and queries on huge data volumes

I'm working on a couple of million records, as soon as I try to run an advanced find, and put as a criteria a linked entity, the advanced find goes in timeout.
Create custom views on this allows me to filter properly? Anyone knows the proper way of using the advanced find this way? Are there limitations on the out of the box CRM that i should be aware of?
In CRM 2013 - it is possible to add indexes for specific fields by adding the columns to the quick find view for the entity.
You will need to wait for the Indexing Management Job to run (which is run every 24 hours by default) - see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/darrenliu/archive/2014/04/02/crm-2013-maintenance-jobs.aspx.
In previous version of CRM, it was necessary to add the indexes directly to the database - this may be necessary for more complex queries.
was too early to post an answer. The problem that I encountered was related to the OOB advanced find. Looking for example for an account with some related contacts (a really plain search with a linked entity) i had a SQL timeout. Everything was OOB so I was a little bit clueless and I opened a case to Microsoft. They found a bug, if i was changing the sorting the advanced find started to work again. They are still investigating. So wasn't a setting problem but a crm bug.

Migrate from youtrack to jira

After using youtrack for quite a while my organization is considering a move to JIRA (because of many reasons). However JIRA doesn't seem to include a youtrack importer/migration out of the box (though there seems to be plenty of importers/migrations the other way around).
Has anyone migrated from youtrack to JIRA and have any experience in this?
Edit:
To anyone who might have this problem later, my final solution ended up something like this:
transfer all "basic" data by hand (user accounts, basic project setup etc)
write a small C# program using the atlassian sdk and the youtrack sdk that transfers from one to the other (creating empty placeholder issues if issues was missing due to someone deleting them in youtrack in order to keep numbering).
This approach worked good enough and I managed to transfer pretty much all data without any loss of any very important data (though of course all timestamps are messed up now, but we saw that as an acceptable loss).
Important to know is that youtrack handles issues moved from one project to another a bit counter-intuitive (they still show up in their first project even when they're moved away from there, but they have an issue id from their new project - a slight wtf when I ran into that the first time).
Also, while the atlassian sdk did allow me to "spoof" the creator of an issue (that is, being logged in as used A and creating an issue while telling the system that it's actually user B who is creating this issue) it does not allow you to do this with comments. So in order to transfer those properly I had to actually loop through the comments and log in with the corresponding new user and post the comments.
Also, attachments from youtrack was a bit annoying to download, so I ended up having to download those "by hand". :/
But all in all, it was relatively pain-free. Some assembly required, some final touch-ups required, but it was all done within a couple of days.
I had the same problem. After a discussion with JIM (Jira Importer) developer, I used YouTrack Rest API and Python script to make JSON files. Then I used JIM JSON import.
With this solution you can import almost all fields from YT - the standard one and files with description, links between issues and projects and so on...
I don't know if I can push it to GitHub, I have to ask my boss - I did it during my work hours.... But of course you can ask me if you want.
The easiest approach is probably to export the data from youtrack into CSV and use the JIRA CSV importer. You may have to modify some of the data to fit the expected format for the CSV importer

Noob Guidance on a Parallel Task Workflow (without Visual Studio)

This is going to be my first workflow, and I could use a little guidance.
I have a list I'm using for requests when a user needs their profile changed (eg: change of office location). The change has to be done in AD, PeopleSoft, and another database. Right now, I have it set up so requesters submit an item to a list, and Alerts go out to the different people responsible for making the updates in AD, PeopleSoft, etc. However, there has been enough frustration with missed emails and the like that I've been asked to track via workflow.
So essentially, I need to track a request that goes out to multiple users who will then need to confirm that the task has been completed. I found !(http://officeimg.vo.msecnd.net/en-us/files/989/238/ZA102615287.jpg), which is a very good representation of what I want to do, but does a very confusing job of explaining how to do it: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/all-about-approval-workflows-HA102771433.aspx
Can someone point me to the workflow type that I need and the steps to implement? OOB/SPDesigner please, I don't have VS on my machine.
Thanks,
Scott
I will start by saying that implementing parallel tasks in a single workflow is hard.
What you can do is customise the OOB approval workflow (the one mentioned in the article) to suit your needs. This will give you an insight on how Sharepoint Workflows work and are designed.
It will look confusing at start (very confusing) since like i said is a complex workflow to setup, until you start to understand how it works.
make sure you make a copy of the approval workflow before modifying it so you can still use it if needed.

Website data retrieval

An recent article has prompted me to pick up a project I have been working on for a while. I want to create a web service front end for a number of sites to allow automated completion of forms and data retrieval from the results, and other areas of the site. I have acheived a degree of success using Selenium and custom code however I am looking to extend this to a stage where adding additional sites is a trivial task (maybe one which doesn't require a developer even).
The Kapow web data server looks to achieve a lot of this however I am told it is quite expensive (currently awaiting a quote). Has anyone had experience with this, or can suggest any alternatives (Open Source ideally)?
Disclaimer: I realise the potential legality issues around automating data retrieval from 3rd party websites - this tool is designed to be used in a price comparison system and all of the websites integrated with it will be done with the express permission of the owners. Where the sites provide an API this will clearly be the favoured approach.
Thanks
Realised it's been a while since I posted this, however should anyone come across it, I have had lots of success in using the WSO2 framework (particularly the mashup server) for this. For data mining tasks I have also used a Java library that this wraps - webharvest - which has achieved everything I needed

Best IT/back-office system hacks? [closed]

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
Lots of people have things that their systems do for them or for their teams. Source control post-commit hooks are a standard example: have an automated build system that checks out the latest source, compiles, tests, and packages it is a back-office hack that most of us probably use.
What other cool things have you done?
We had one developer in our team who wasn't familiar with the concept of a subversion conflict. He deduced that if he simply deleted all that weird stuff in his code and clicked resolve that everything was ok (i.e. knocking out all the other changes in the file....)
Regardless to say, after the 5th time this occurred, and the 5th time that I had to explain why that defect that I just closed was reoccuring, I wrote a script.
It would diff for the changes to a file to see whether the consecutive checkin deleted all the previous changes and that they were done by the nameless developer.
It would then send an email to the boss with a description of what happened, and how much work was lost during the checkin.
There was no 7th occurrence.
We have a traffic-light that shows whether our daily build succeeds, has failed tests or simply doesn't build.
Also, we have a light bar that lights up for a few seconds whenever we receive an upload from a customer.
We aren't staffed 24x7 but we have critical processes that run throughout the night. We created an in-house alerts system to notify us of serious system issues, failed mission-critical processes, etc. It uses text-to-speech to create a descriptive message and then connects to our automated dialer to call the appropriate people with the message.
Working at a web design company I configured our dev server so we could see a working copy of a project in real time by a sub domain name. So if your name was joe and you were working on project jetfuel you would go to joe.jetfuel.test-example.com and you could see your changes instantly without committing.
This was a simple hack that used sub domain names as a partial directory structure. Our htdocs path looked like this htdocs/tag/project. We had a script (a php app that you would access by setup.test-example.com) that would create a new tag name for you and checkout whatever version you wanted and call the deploy script for that project. If it succeeded it would forward you to the new sub domain. You could then work on this new copy by a samba share.
This worked really well for us since we always deployed to the same linux build and our projects had simple database requirements.
Our original reason for doing this was because our developers worked on all kinds of different platforms. Besides fixing this platform problem this was awesome for viewing changes and testing. We had all kinds of tags ranging from peoples names, trunk versions, test tags, all the way to prototypes like jquery-menu-hack.jetfuel.test-example.com
Now that I look back I wonder how much easier it would have been to run virtual machines.
We had a dev working on a classic ASP site that didn't believe in source control. The code went from his machine straight to the production box. This lead to issues with lost changes or the inability to revert back to a stable version. Since CruiseControl.Net has the ability to monitor a directory, I added a project that actually checked in files whenever they were copied to production. Completely backward from CC.Net's original intent, but we didn't lose any more code.
Put in a pre-commit hook that checks the bug comment refers to an open bug, assigned to the user doing the checkin. (SCMBug can do this).
Then to make life REALLY interesting, spell check the comments!!
The commit comment, and the one in the code. (spell is my buddy)
Run the code through a code formatter set to compayn standard; and diff it to the original: if it's not in company offical format: reject the commit.
Do a coverage test with the unit test build.
Email all mistakes/errors caused to the development team.
I left OUT the name of the developer. They know they did it.
Not exactly hacks, but a couple of must-haves for IT dev work:
If you're using subversion, you've got to use CommitMonitor. (http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/CommitMonitor) It lets you monitor svn repositories for new commits & then review the new commits. Great if you're wanting to stay on top of what your team is doing. Particularly if you have a couple of juniors that need to be watched. ;)
Rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/) is also invaluable - we have complete backup snapshots of our entire filesystem every four hours going back 2 years, and every day beyond that. It's like a data cube for your filesystem! The peace of mind this gives is pure bliss. :)
Hardly a hack, but back in the day, on our speedy VAX 11/730, our overnight process would print the file "BLAMMO.TXT" on the printer if something went amiss. Every morning, the first stop was the printer when coming in.
Back in the dotCom days about 9 years ago, I had to hack a failover system between two different locations. We had a funky setup with a powerbuilder front end website, and powerbuilder managment tool. Data was stored in MSSQL 7.0. The webservers used IPX to communicate to the SQL Servers (don't ask). Anyway, I was responsbile for coming up with a failover plan.
I ended up hacking together some linux boxes, and had them run our external DNS. One at each location. We had a remote site w/ webserver, and sql server I got SQL transaction replication working over a 128k ISDN IPX connection (of all things). Then built a monitoring tool at our production site to send packets out to various upstream network handoffs. If we experienced more than 20% outage the primary site, the monitoring tool ran a perl script on the Debian box to change DNS and point to our 2ndary. Our secondary had a heartbeat w/ our primary DNS, and monitoring station. It would duplicate records unless it lost both connections then it would roll over to pointing DNS to backup location.
The primary site would shut down the SQL server at the primary location to break replication. Automated site to site failover using 128k ISDN IPX connection :)
Back at my previous job, we had to audit many tables for data changes (inserts, updates and deletes). Our support crew had to be able to search through this data to find changes that users made.
The temporary solution that had become semi-permanent was to store each non-select query. However this was a large system, that the table would grow by about 1.5GB a day.
The solution I came up with was to create a script that for all tables in an external list, created the appropriate triggers that audit each table, row, column, before and after, when and by whom and store it in our new audit table. This table grew by about 10% the size of the older version and stored much more usable data. It enabled us to create a UI to search and view every change made to our data, without requiring any knowledge of SQL for our support team or business users.
This is at a lesser level, but I am fairly proud of a make file I wrote for compiling code for my research. It only needs to be given your source and header file names that can take care of the rest all by itself (though it does make the one assumption that you will not be compiling any header files into objects, only source files get compiled). The other downsides are the fact that it relies on the GNU make program's second expansion feature, so I don't know if it works on other make programs. Additionally the compiler used needs to support something similar to gcc's -MM feature. Here is hoping that no one laughs at it.
-include prereqs.mk
HEADERS=$(SRC_DIR)/gs_lib.h $(SRC_DIR)/gs_structs.h
SOURCES=$(SRC_DIR)/main.cpp $(SRC_DIR)/gs_lib.cpp
OBJECTS=$(patsubst $(SRC_DIR)/%.cpp,$(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,$(SOURCES))
release: FLAGS=$(GEN_FLAGS)$(OPT_FLAGS)
release: $(OBJECTS) prereqs.mk
$(CXX) $(FLAGS) $(LINKER_FLAGS) $(OUTPUT_FLAG) $(EXECUTABLE) $(OBJECTS)
prereqs.mk: $(SOURCES) $(HEADERS)
$(CXX) $(DIR_FLAGS) $(MAKE_FLAG) $(SOURCES) | sed 's,\([abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_]*\).o:,\1= \\\n,' > $#
.SECONDEXPANSION:
$(OBJECTS): $$($$(patsubst $(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,%,$$#))
$(CXX) $(FLAGS) $(NO_LINK_FLAG) $(OUTPUT_FLAG) $# $(patsubst $(OBJ_DIR)/%.o,$(SRC_DIR)/%.cpp,$#)
Obviously I dropped the definition of a number of variables, but I think it gets the idea across.
Since my coding tools and style are compatible with the requirements of this script I like to use it. All I need to do to add (a) new piece(s) of source code is add its name(s) to the appropriate variable and the rest is taken care of.
We have Twitter accounts for many projects which tweet things like commit messages, notices from builds, failed unit tests, deployments, bug tracking activity - any kind of event associated with the project. Running a client like Twitter Gwibber (which displays a pop-up for each new status) is a great way to stay in touch with the activity on the projects you are interested. Using Twitter is good as you can take advantage of all the 3rd party apps - such as the iPhone clients.
Add commit-hook check for VRML/3d-model files with absolute path to textures/images. f:/maya/my-textures/newproject/xxxx.png just doesn't belong on the server.
Back in the 1993, when source control systems were really expensive and unwieldy, the company I worked about had an in-house source control built as 4DOS scripts. It wasn't as sofisticated as most current source control systems, for example it didn't have branching or integrates, but it did the basic job of supporting revisions history, checkout/checkin and rudimentary conflict resolution.