"Now" means last week

What the world needs is a dynamic database record/replay tool.

Okay, maybe not the world. But for me and for my software shop, that would address a need.

OAuth scopes in TFS 2019

Now that I have a TFS Azure DevOps 2019 box, let's dump the scopes from that one, too.

The same caveat applies: some of those might be cloud only.

TFS 2019 and commitment issues

My JavaScript TFS extensions broke in TFS Azure DevOps 2019. All my complaints about TFS API surface being underdocumented came to their logical conclusion: no docs means no API commitment, no commitment means the team behind the API gets to make breaking changes with no guilt.

Let me count the ways things broke:

Federating TFS tables across collections

UPDATE: the outlined logic will break if your TFS instance has a mix of pre-AzDevOps collections with recently (2019+) created ones. Details here. The linked gist was updated, too.

As I've mentioned earlier, Team Foundation Server stores its data in multiple databases - one database per team project collection, and also a global database called Tfs_Configuration. How is one supposed to run cross-collection queries, then?

Can't we just do a "Hello, world"?

The Joomla! component tutorial walks you through creating a Model-View-Controller (MVC) component. However, the Absolute basics of a component page also mentions that a component doesn't have to be MVC; it claims that a flat model is supported, but then spends no time explaining how it's supposed to work.

Name means ID, ID means name

Let's take a break from TFS.

This time, it's Joomla!, a popular Web CMS, which has an expansive, if sorely underdocumented, extension interface. Once again, I've discovered a little undocumented something, and would like to share.

Constrained and dignified

Another day, another TFS discovery.

I was facing a minor usability issue. We have an extension with several custom menu commands for release definitions pipelines. Out of those, two only make sense for server administrators. For anybody else, they'd error out anyway. The menu was getting crowded, so I wanted to see if I could make the admin-only commands hidden for non-admin users.