TDS 4.0 – Things you may have Missed

I originally published this post on the Igloo blog.

This blog post is about Hedgehog Development‘s Team Development for Sitecore, and the features in the soon-to-be-released version, TDS 4.0.

While talk around 4.0 has mainly been about the big features like Code Generation, Config Transforms and the Item Merge tool, I thought it’d be good to talk about the small features and improvements that people with access to the Beta may have missed.

The video below goes through little changes like the ability to open an item’s folder in Windows Explorer and the option to Show excluded files from the project. We also mention the updates to the ‘Sync with Sitecore’ window, and the new option to sync with just a single item.

We also go into detail about how you would use the Item Merge tool in a real world scenario, and how TDS 4.0 automatically organises the structure of the project file, meaning less merge conflicts. Yay!

Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQNFQBCK0fA

Sitecore TDS 4.0 – Item Merging

I originally published this post on the Igloo blog.

This blog post is about Team Development for Sitecore by Hedgehog Development, and the new item merging feature in TDS 4.0.

In a webinar on TDS by the Sitecore Virtual User Group, Dan Galvez, a founder of Hedgehog Development, mentioned that TDS 4.0 would include a new tool for merging Sitecore items. This would act in the same way that you’d merge .NET code.

In the past, when you sync with Sitecore you would have to choose to push the entire item either to Sitecore, or to the TDS project. The item merge tool adds more granularity, allowing you to update Sitecore for some fields, and update the TDS project for others.

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Sitecore TDS 4.0 – Config Transforms

I originally published this post on the Igloo blog.

This blog post is about Team Development for Sitecore by Hedgehog Development, and the new config transforms feature in TDS 4.0.

Igloo were privileged to obtain the TDS 4.0 beta from Hedgehog recently, to have a play with the latest features.  One of those features that excited me was the inclusion of support for config transformations.

A lot of our projects use config transformations, and have custom code built into the MSBuild file to make these transforms. While TDS v3 had a File Replacement feature that you could use for changing files based on a Visual Studio configuration, it seemed a bit long-winded compared to just transforming the file. Luckily, the Solution Architect at Hedgehog Development, Sean Kearney, announced the config transform feature on his blog back in May, and since then I’ve been busting to get this implemented on our projects.

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Team Development for Sitecore – Field Level Deployments

I originally published this post on the Igloo blog.

A couple of months back I blogged about the Advanced Usage of Team Development for Sitecore, which included in concept of Field Level Deployments. This blog post revisits Field Level Deployments, and how you could set the value of a new field on a existing items.

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Team Development for Sitecore – Using the Latest Data

I originally published this post on the Igloo blog.

In the blog post, Team Development for Sitecore – General Usage, I mentioned that we start our development by grabbing the latest data from our content entry or live server. This blog post touches on how you can retrieve this data so that you are working with the latest Sitecore items in your development environment.

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Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) – Part 3 – Settings and Builds

I originally published this post on the Igloo blog.

In this blog post we run through some of the settings for Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and what they do.

A key feature to TDS is the ability to set up automated builds with continuous integration, making development and deployment more streamlined than the regular development process. Part of setting up your project for TDS is setting it up to build properly so that your Sitecore changes are automatically pushed to your target instance (dev, QA, staging or live server).

Throughout our experience with TDS, we ran into many issues with our settings and configurations. After lots of reading, testing, and asking a lot of questions to Hedgehog’s Customer Support (massive shout-out to Charlie for his help….you’re a legend!) , we finally have our builds automatically deploying to our continuous integration server.

Below is what we have found. If you have any questions, tips, or improvements on what is listed here, please post comments below. We’d love to hear how others are using it, and further our understanding of what can be done with this product.

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