Free VSS to hosted TFS Migration Offer

visual studio team foundation serverMainstream support for Visual SourceSafe (VSS) is ending next year. Team Foundation Server (TFS)  is the replacement for VSS. In order to help VSS users make the move to source control with TFS, we are offing free migration from on-premises VSS to our TFS hosting solution until June 30, 2011.

With our 30 days free offer for TFS hosting and free VSS-to-TFS migration, VSS users can check out TFS without having to do a full TFS setup on-premises.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

DaspTV.com videos

Note: 9/9/13 – DASPTV is no more, all videos have moved to YouTube.

You know about DaspTV, right? Well you should! Go there now and take a look at a wide range of videos produced by stalwart forum moderator and DiscountASP.NET evangelist Mark Wisecarver.

Here is a recent video describing the SSL certificate ordering process.

Ordering SSL can be confusing (we made the ordering as straightforward as we could, but the process itself has many twists and turns), fortunately, Mark has got you covered.

Subversion to DiscountASP.NET Hosted Team Foundation Server 2010 Migration

A neat tool that I came across is svn2tfs and as its name suggests, it’s a utility that can be used for moving data from Subversion over to our hosted Team Foundation Server 2010.

As a general precaution, before proceeding, make sure that you have checked-in any changes on both platforms that you’re working with and that a backup is available for both Subversion and your DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server 2010 database. If you need a backup of your Team Foundation Server database, please open a ticket with the Technical Support department using the Support Portal.

Download and install svn2tfs 1.2 and the system requirements are available in the svn2tfs documentation.

Once you run the application, you’ll see that it’s a very basic interface.

While it’s a very top-to-bottom application, I’ll be working out of order slightly since there’s some tasks that will need to be handled prior to migrating.

First, we’ll work on getting the users created.

There isn’t a way to cover every variable under a single guide so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just create a one-to-one Subversion to Team Foundation Server 2010 user matchup. You’ll need to access the TFS Control Panel  Manage Users tool and then create a corresponding TFS user for each of your current Subversion users. If you need to purchase additional TFS users, you can contact our Billing Department.

After the users have been created, click on the “Help” button under the “User mapping” section in svn2tfs to produce a sample XML file. It’s fairly straightforward and you will want to use a text editor to create the mapping file. Here’s the settings that I used:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<ArrayOfUserMap xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema“>
<UserMap>
<SvnUserName>projectmanager</SvnUserName>
<TfsUserName>mycollection_manager</TfsUserName>
</UserMap>
<UserMap>
<SvnUserName>jjun</SvnUserName>
<TfsUserName>mycollection_jjun</TfsUserName>
</UserMap>
</ArrayOfUserMap>

Save the file and then click on the “Open” button under “User mapping” in svn2tfs and select the file path.

Next, we’ll work on getting the DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server 2010 connection prepared.

Perhaps I didn’t read the documentation thoroughly or search in the right places but I wasn’t prompted for a user name and password so I had to make a bit of an adjustment here. What I ended up doing was saving my DiscountASP.NET TFS user information for a Project Collection Administration through the Credential Manager in Windows 7. For information on saving the connection information, please check the “Stop asking me for my !@#$% password!” post.

For the Team Foundation Server 2010 information, you’ll want to specify the following:

  • URL: Server URL from the Account Information page, for my review, it was https://tfs01.discountasp.net/tfs
  • Folder: \Main\Source
  • Collection: Your Team Project Collection name that can also be found in the Account Information page
  • Project: The Team Project that you’ll be importing to

Click on the “Validate TFS” button just to verify that you can connect and we’ll work on the top section.

For the Subversion settings, you’ll need to make sure that you have your server URL, user name and corresponding password.

If you’ll be moving the entire repository, leave the path field blank and leave the revision at 1.

Now, one of two things will happen when we click the “Import” button. Either everything will magically work and then you’ll be set (it happened on my second import attempt!) or be prepared to fix a lot of problems.

Most of the errors that I ran across were fairly easy to fix but there were some that proved to be quite a challenge. Luckily, there are a few good resources other than smashing your head available which are the svn2tfs discussion forum and of course Stack Overflow that I was able to turn to for help.

Discounted Tiered Pricing for TFS Hosting Available

We’ve been seeing inquiries for TFS hosting from firms with larger development teams. To provide these companies with a more economical SaaS platform for source control, we’ve introduced tiered pricing with price breaks starting from the 6th user and we get the price down to $10/mo for the 21st and over users.

More information on TFS hosting can be found at http://www.discountasp.net/tfs

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

DiscountASP.NET Attains Microsoft Gold Hosting Competency Status

DiscountASP.NET is proud to announce that it has achieved a Gold Hosting Competency in the revamped Microsoft Partner Network.

microsoft gold hosting competencyMicrosoft has updated their Partner program and is phasing out their previous Microsoft Gold Certified program and transitioning to a new Microsoft Partner Network program. Under the new Partner Network program, Microsoft has introduced both Silver and Gold levels to each of 29 different competency areas. Hosting is one of the competency specialties and we’ve earned the Gold level in this competency.

To earn a Microsoft Gold Competency, organizations must have the right number of Microsoft Certified Professionals having passed different certification exams related to the competency, submit customer references and demonstrate their commitment to customer satisfaction by participating in an annual survey.

Every year we continue to invest in achieving the Gold level status because we believe that it is a big differentiator for our business and shows our commitment to stay on top of Microsoft-related technologies.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

DiscountASP.NET Attains Microsoft Gold Hosting Competency Status

DiscountASP.NET is proud to announce that it has achieved a Gold Hosting Competency in the revamped Microsoft Partner Network.

microsoft gold hosting competencyMicrosoft has updated their Partner program and is phasing out their previous Microsoft Gold Certified program and transitioning to a new Microsoft Partner Network program. Under the new Partner Network program, Microsoft has introduced both Silver and Gold levels to each of 29 different competency areas. Hosting is one of the competency specialties and we’ve earned the Gold level in this competency.

To earn a Microsoft Gold Competency, organizations must have the right number of Microsoft Certified Professionals having passed different certification exams related to the competency, submit customer references and demonstrate their commitment to customer satisfaction by participating in an annual survey.

Every year we continue to invest in achieving the Gold level status because we believe that it is a big differentiator for our business and shows our commitment to stay on top of Microsoft-related technologies.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

Hosted Team Foundation Server SaaS Solution Now Available in Europe

Today we announce the launch of hosted TFS services in Europe in our UK-based data center.  Customers can select the US-based data center or UK-based data center as part of our online TFS hosting ordering process.

With this expansion, DiscountASP.NET provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for source code version control and bug tracking that is in closer proximity to European developers.

And getting started with hosted TFS is easy with our 30 day free offer for 1 to 5 users.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

Silverlight 5 Beta Available

The long awaited beta of Silverlight 5 is finally here and the timing could not be any better. This is another major release with a lot of significant improvements. In addition to the expected improvements to video playback and UI, Microsoft has made significant improvements under the hood.  Starting with 64 bit support. As we have a lot of customers hosting their Silverlight applications with us, I’ve outlined a few other improvements below that I believe are important to you.

  • Debugging support now allows breakpoints to be set on a binding, so you can step through binding failures. This addresses one of the most common issues our hosting customers run into. The intentional decoupling from the View and the Models themselves had made the process of troubleshooting issues complicated. Hosting a Silverlight 5 application will be much easier now.
  • The DataContextChanged event is being introduced. Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers, enabling cutting-edge MVVM support.
  • Reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking. This is a fantastic improvement. Especially for those that initiated network calls to a hosting provider in their button click events. Doing so would lock up the UI until the network call was completed even when using Asynchronous methods.

– Michael Ossou