Artifacts from Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 include work items, reports, and team queries, so the team can use them to track information, analyze progress, and make decisions.

This way all team members can easily track and update the project status. They can also be updated about all changes made and about progress of the other team members. Through the big range of work items, the team is allowed to track, monitor, and report the development progress of a product and its features.

All the artifacts can be accessed either from the team project node in Team Explorer or on the team project portal. 

The other benefit is the big range of reports which offers a capability to monitor team progress and velocity during the whole project. This is a great way to track how quickly the team has completed work or how much work remains in a product backlog or in a sprint backlog. It can also predict how much backlog effort your team can exert in future sprints if the team composition and sprint duration stay constant.

Using the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 template make tracking project progress easier and also gives our team a great opportunity to improve leading projects in future and predict the possible problems.

More info about Scrum 1.0 template for TFS can be found on MSDN.

FxCop analyzes the compiled object code, not the original source code, and searches for more than 200 different possible coding standards violations.

Sometimes it is needed to automatically remove FxCop related “SuppressMessage” attributes when they are no longer needed.

If you’re using Visual Studio Team System, then FxCop is completely integrated and when you exclude messages it automatically applies the new SuppressMessage attributes to the appropriate location in code.

If you’re using Visual Studio Professional edition, then you have to use the external FxCop.

It turns out you have to enable your project to recognize the SuppressMessage attribute by FIRST adding a condition compilation symbol.

To include this symbol do the following:

For C# projects:
- In Solution Explorer, right-click your project and choose Properties
- In the Properties window, choose the Build tab
- In the Conditional compilation symbols text box enter CODE_ANALYSIS

The next step you have to do is to right-click the error message in FxCop UI and select “Copy As” – “SuppressMessage” (or “Module-level SupressMessage”). Then you can simply paste the attribute into your code at the appropriate location.

-’Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITesting.UITestControlProperties’ is inaccessible due to its protection level.
- The name ‘HtmlProperties’ does not exist in the current context
- The name ‘UITestControlProperties’ does not exist in the current context
- The name ‘WinProperties’ does not exist in the current context

However, you can upgrade your project with an automatic upgrade script to move your automation:

1. Launch the Visual Studio Command Prompt from Start Menu > All Programs> Microsoft Visual Studio 2010> Visual Studio Tools
2. Run the script

   UITestUpgrade.exe < folder to upgrade>

   - The upgrade tool will fix all the changes listed below.
   - All the folders under the specified folder(s) is searched recursively and all projects under it upgraded.
   - If a project is under source control, the upgrade tool will do check out and make changes.
   - Tool will create backup folder with all contents of the specified folder

They are results of the hosting process feature that was introduced for the first time with VS2005.

Hosting process file, with extension .vshosts.exe, serves main three purposes:

• Improving debugging performance
• Enabling partial trust debugging
• Enabling design time expression evaluation

There are more files created with the vshost file for the Visual Studio project:

• .pdb or the Programm DataBase that contains debug symbols
• .vshost.exe.manifest that contains mostly dependencies on libraries

Also, notice that these files shouldn’t be deployed with the application you finished or run directly.

It’s possible to disable generation vshost files under project settings -> Debug options -> Enable the Visual Studio hosting process checkbox.

You can find more information about the advanced debugging features in a MSDN article.

Since the beginning of time, code documentation existed only inside the code itself in the form of the in-line comments. However, modern programming languages introduced syntax for the in-line code comments (XML documentation syntax) and brought the capability of generating the external humanly-readable code documentation from these comments.

Visual Studio has a fully integrated support for the XML documentation. In order to use it inside your .NET project you need to enable it on the Build tab of the Properties page of the project.

Once you build the project with the XML documentation option enabled, a list of warnings will be populated with the additional warnings informing you about the missing XML comments.

You can remove these warnings by simply adding the XML comments to each of the publicly visible types from the list. To add XML comment to the publicly visible type, simply type /// on top of it. Visual Studio will automatically generate the required XML comment syntax and all that is left for you to do is to describe it.

XML documentation supports a wide range of the XML tags used for formatting. I will describe these tags in detail in the second part of this post.