Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Visual Studio Online (cloud based TFS): Making Visual Studio 2010 allow Logging in with Different Credentials

On one project I work on the client asked me to change Visual Studio Online (VSOL) username (email address) to a different email address. VSOL was being used for source code control in a project developed with Visual Studio 2010. Seemed pretty simple to change credentials but there is a bug in Visual Studio 2010 that complicates this process.

From Visual Studio 2010's Team menu select Connect to Team Foundation Server which seems to offer a way to sign out:


Hitting "Sign Out' does nothing.

The solution is to close the Connect to Team Project dialog. From the View menu select Other Windows | Web Browser. In the web browser navigate to http://msdn.microsoft.com:


Sign out from MSDN which is logged in with your previous VSOL account.

From Visual Studio 2010's Team menu select Connect to Team Foundation Server which seems to offer a way to sign out. It actually does this time: 



This time when you sign out, Visual Studio will sign the account out of Visual Studio Online and prompt a user to enter new credentials:


It is not possible to sign in with the updated Visual Studio Online credentials.



Saturday, January 25, 2014

Visual Studio Online (cloud based TFS): Creating Additional Administrators

We have all been bottle-necked when there is one administrator for Visual Studio Online and hence only one person who can manage source code control. While the VSOL administrator is on the beach in Florida there are no new projects created and no new users added to VSOL.

To create a second administrator:
1) The administrator should log in to VSOL (this blog's instance of VSOL is found at https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com).

https://<VSOL instance name>.visualstudio.com

2) The administrator should navigate to the screen which allows access to security including group and use management:

https://<VSOL instance name>.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_admin/_security

For this blog's instance of VSOL the link can be found at https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_admin/_security.


4) From the security tab, select "Users" and click on the user to be assigned administrative permissions:



The current administrator is Keyser Soeze. User, Jan David Narkiewicz, will also be made an administrator. The screen shown demonstrates the individual permission associated with Jan David Narkiewicz. Instead of setting individual permissions it is simpler to assign the user to the appropriate group or groups.

5) From the previous screen select "Member of":


6) To associate the user with additional groups including making said user an administrator click on "Join group":


7) From the "JOIN A VISUAL STUDIO ONLINE GROUP" dialog click on "Browse":



8) The list of account types is listed. The type of administrator can be fine tuned such as checking only "Project Collection Administrators" or "Project Collection Build Administrators". After adding all groups the permissions for user, Jan David Narkiewicz includes every administrative level feature because such permissions are inherited from the groups associated with the user:



Note: individual permissions can be added by clicking on the "Not set" control next to the permission type and setting the value to "Allowed".




Friday, January 24, 2014

Visual Studio Online (cloud based TFS): Changing Account Owners

As a consultant, many of my clients do use source code control or use a flavor of source code control running locally on a server (SourceSafe, SVN, etc.). In these cases, I immediately sign the client up for Visual Studio Online (VSOL, http://www.visualstudio.com/) with its free, source code for up to five users. Before completing work for a client, I make sure to make each client the account owner of their VSOL code repository.

To change the account which owns a VSOL instance perform the following steps:
1) Have the client create a Microsoft ID if they do not already have one. This is typically the client's hotmail.com, msn.com, outlook.com or live.com email address. For the sake of this example assume the client's Microsoft ID is Nicolaus_Copernicus@outlook.com.
2) Login to the client's VSOL that you currently own (our sample repository is: https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com and it is owned by pumpkinko@hotmail.com).
3) Add the client's Microsoft ID as a user to VSOL which is as simple as clicking the User menu (e.g. https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/_user) and then clicking Add (see below):



4) Navigate to your VSOL instance's  settings page which for our sample repository is https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/_admin/_home/settings):


The "Account owner" drop down allows the user to be changed from "Jan Narkiewicz" to "Nicolaus Copernicus."