New TeamReview release & new TeamReview contributors

TeamReview has crossed a few milestones lately that I am proud of, including another release (details below), and we have one big upcoming celebration to tell you about.  

Today "the most complete code review tool for Team System" surpassed the 2K download mark. Yesterday we published the 9th release of TeamReview to add some nice-to-have features out-lined below. You may have noticed I said "we published" instead of "I published" in the last sentence. One of the things I am most proud of, and most excited about is that 2 new contributors recently joined and have started making some great changes. Somehow going from just one guy with a far-fetched idea hacking out some code to now being part of a team of 4 developers delivering on the product's vision makes this open source project seem more real. Maybe it's my perspective, but at least to me it feels like a "bigger" open source project with a brighter future than before. 

The cherry on top of all the fore-mentioned positives is that TeamReview will be celebrating it's first birthday on April 8th! It's hard for me to believe it's been a year, time flies when you're having fun.

Here are the features in yesterday's release to make TeamReview an even better product.

• A packaged VSTS 2010 install
• Support for DB Projects
• More support for Solution Items and projects within Solution folders
• Form fields are sorted logically
• The New Code Review Response form is re-sizable
• The New Code Review Response form will show in the same position and size as last used during that Visual Studio "session"
• The Code Review Replay form is updated with values when work items are edited and saved.
• The grid in the Code Review Replay form is sortable
• A few minor bug fixes

VSTS Code Review Tools Evaluation

In early February I gave a presentation on Code Review Tools in Team System. During that event we recorded a group evaluation on various aspects of the tools. I am finally publishing those results. The evaluation was relatively simple, I demonstrated the product and then asked the group if the tool supported various aspects that are beneficial to code reviews, and recored that as a simple Yes or No.

As you can see, the Out-of-the-box guidelines had the worst combined score, with the Yell method, and the CRMail offering doing a little better but each scoring fairly low on our evaluation. TFS Code Review Workflow and Attrice's Code Review Sidekick fared better, with TeamReview having the highest approval rating of the available code review tools for Team System.

Evaluation Form - Code Reviews in Visual Studio Team System 

Presented by JB Brown and the .Net Developers Association, Feb 9, 2009 - Redmond Wa.

Supports..	OOB	Yell	CRMail	TFS Workflow	Attrice	TeamReview
Updates to the project (project is active)	Y	Y	N/A	N	Y	Y
Workflow	N	N	N	Y	N	Y
Conversation	N	Y	N	N	N	Y
Good, Fast, Clear, Objective Feedback	N	Y	N	Y	N	Y
Clear outcomes	N	Y	N	Y	N	Y
Identifying and managing the bad things..	N	N	N	N	N	N
Sharing Tacit Domain-Based Knowledge	N	Y	N	N	N	Y
Distributed teams, different time-zones	N	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Team Members without Visual Studio	N	Y	Y	N	Y	N
First class member of ALM	N	N	N	Y	N	Y
Low TCO	N	Y	Y	N	Y	Y
Auditing, reporting, trending	N	N	N	Y	N	Y
VSTS 2005	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
VSTS 2008	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
VSTS 2010	Y	Y	Y	N	?	Y
Developer Joy	N	N	N	N	Y	Y
Creating Business Value via Code Reviews with VSTS	N	N	N	y	Y	Y

Whitespace in Team System Compare Results

Why do VSTS diff results include whitespace?

A teammate of mine shared a great tip with me during a merging exercise the other day. We noticed many differences shown in a file comparison that didn't seem different to us. It was simply whitespace that was causing the comparison tool to show more differences than would actually matter to the compiler.

He then recommended creating the following setting buried deep in the chasms of Visual Studio in

Tools -> Options -> Source Control -> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server -> Configure Users Tools.. -> Add ->



It's the "%5 /ingorespace" ending that differentiates the new Compare behavior from the out-of-the-box results. Now a Compare action will create results that you might expect - only the differences the compiler cares about.

James Manning has a great blog post explaining all the options and further Visual Studio configuration for compare tools.