Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team

MSDN Subscribers can start Windows Azure development

2009-12-24T10:52:58Z

See this announcement for details on how to start accessing and using Azure resources at no extra cost as part of your MSDN subscription. This is being rolled out in a number of countries including the UK.

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: MSDN,Azure,UK

Want do you want for Christmas? Yes, TFS virtual machines galore…

2009-12-24T10:45:38Z

Loads of new Virtual Machines to download.

Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Hyper-V)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Windows [7] Virtual PC)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Virtual PC 2007 SP1)

These are complete installations, with the exception of Lab Management.

The current VSTS 2008 VMs are due to expire on the 31st Dec – here are the new ones:

Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 + Team Foundation Server 2008 (Hyper-V)

Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 + Team Foundation Server 2008 (VPC 2007 SP1)

Team Foundation Server 2008 ONLY (Hyper-V)

Team Foundation Server 2008 ONLY (VPC 2007 SP1)

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,TFS,2008,2010,virtual machines

New Talmia Video Overview

2009-12-24T10:33:12Z

Talmia is a really clever and well implemented process automation engine for Team Foundation Server developed in partnership with GamCom, one of our UK Inner Circle Partners for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. I think it’s an excellent solution and Chris Turvil has put together a good overview video.

The video walks through an example development process showing how work items are created and updated automatically, and shows how Talmia provides monitoring and reporting on the process itself.

Richard blogged about this a little while ago but this is a good update. Talmia is already available for TFS 2008 and will be available for TFS 2010.

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: Talmia,GamCom,Process,Automation,TFS

UKVSTS on Twitter

2009-12-09T10:10:09Z

I’ve started to tweet about Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server here: @ukvsts. I haven’t broadcast this and it’s new so it’s still developing, but in case you find that a convenient means of keeping up to date then be aware that it’s up and running. I’d be interested in any feedback on preferred routes for information, including whether different mechanisms should be used for different purposes – should tweets be a quick reference to the blog posts, or contain different info? Also on a general note, what information is particularly useful for us to blog/tweet about? I tend to post anything I find interesting but would you also like specific how-to’s, videos, etc.?

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,TFS,Twitter,@ukvsts

Free Silverlight/WPF Training Workshop, Reading, 10th Dec (tomorrow)

2009-12-09T09:57:56Z

Some places have become available on a workshop tomorrow at the Microsoft campus at Reading. This is one-day workshop aimed at Software Developers/Designers who are targeting or are considering targeting either Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation focusing on Microsoft’s User Experience story.

It starts with an overview and selected customer case studies, moves on to demos of both the platform and the tools (WPF, Silverlight, Expression and Visual Studio) and finishes the day with some hands-on exercises for participants. You can bring your own laptop or we will provide a desktop machine. If you bring a laptop we’ll help setup the machine ready for the workshop.

The day will start at 09:30 and finish at approximately 16:30 and lunch will be provided.

If you’d like to reserve a place, please send an email to ukvsts@microsoft.com as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,WPF,Expression,Visual Studio,Workshop

A patch for TFS 2010 Beta 2 is available

2009-12-09T09:43:20Z

If you haven’t seen it take a look at this post from Brian Harry. the first of three patches for TFS 2010 Beta 2 is now available. Note that this patch addresses configuration issues and therefore needs to be used within the installation/configuration steps, rather than applied as a patch onto an existing installation.

Cheers,
Giles

Technorati Tags: TFS,2010,Beta 2,patch

Visual Studio 2010 and ALM Seminar in London on the 17th Dec

2009-12-08T10:37:34Z

One of our Visual Studio Inner Circle Partners, Black Marble, is delivering a seminar in London on the 17th December, and we’ll be supporting them at that event. If you’re interested in understanding more about Visual Studio 2010 and how the Team Foundation Server can support your whole development lifecycle you can register here to go to the event. Black Marble’s Richard Fennell is a Team Foundation Server MVP and will be presenting, and I’ll be supporting him during the day. Richard is also going to cover the support for Java developers that we can provide through the recent acquisition of TeamPrise.

Cheers,

Giles

Technorati Tags: Black Marble,Visual Studio,2010,Team Foundation Server,Event,ALM,Java,TeamPrise

Visual Studio Gallery Extensions for Visual Studio 2010

2009-11-22T12:36:43Z

I’ve been meaning to have a look at some of the extensions available for VS 2010 in the Visual Studio Gallery for a little while. The WPF based editor in 2010 allows for all sorts of exciting editor level extensions and I’d had a little play with some with Beta 1, but I wanted to see what was available for Beta 2. The answer is a lot :-) there are 76 tools for 2010 (many more templates and controls). There are a good mix of free and commercial, and the following caught my eye:

Yellow Marker – highlight lines of code with a mouse gesture. Useful when pointing out interesting lines of code.
IntelliSense Presenter – a WPF, customisable IntelliSense UI. Looks great.
Regex Editor – Syntax highlighting and more for regular expressions. I’ve been doing a little regular expression work recently and any help is good.
Image Insertion – Allow images to be added and displayed inside source. Useful to help with documentation.
Source Outliner – See a tree view of your source code elements. Helps understand and navigate the code.
Power Commands – A collection of useful commands available from the menu.

I’m very tempted to try and write an extension myself – not sure what yet, but you can download the source for the IntelliSense Presenter and a couple of the others, so there’s something to have a look and see how it’s done.

TFS 2010 Power Tools – Coming Soon

2009-11-19T08:56:00Z

A really good update on the release of the Power Tools for TFS 2010 in Brian Harry’s blog. Key points of interest;

The Power Tools should be available within a week.
Clarification of features that have moved from the Power Tools in 2008 into the core product for 2010.
Summary of changes to the individual Power Tools in 2010.
Note that the Power Tools for 2010 will only work with 2010.

I’m particularly looking forward to the Process Template Editor. Adapting the process template (work item types, default queries etc..) to suit your own process is key, and I’m looking forward to using the new Editor.

I’ll let you know as soon as they’re available.

Cheers,

Giles

Installing TFS 2010 on Windows Home Server

2009-11-12T14:41:39Z

A really interesting blog from Jason Neave on getting TFS Basic up and running on Windows Home Server. I’m inspired to do this myself now (I just need to replace my deceased Windows Home Server hardware):

http://blogs.msdn.com/jneave/archive/2009/10/30/installing-tfs-2010-beta2-on-windows-home-server.aspx

Cheers,
Giles

Microsoft has Acquired the Teamprise Client Suite

2009-11-09T17:53:39Z

Very interesting and exciting news – Microsoft has acquired the Teamprise Client Suite that provides (amongst other things) access to TFS from Eclipse. Good blogs to read:

The official announcement

From the Visual Studio product group

From Teamprise

Cheers,

Giles

Enabling Code Coverage in VS 2010 Beta 2

2009-11-06T17:17:18Z

A quick “how-to” as the steps to enable code coverage are different in Beta 2. To enable code coverage (assuming that you have some unit tests defined already and that you have either Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Premium or Ulitmate):

Open the Solution Explorer.
Open the Solution Items folder
Double-click the Local.testsettings file:

Select the Data and Diagnostics option in the left hand list:

Select Code Coverage and make sure that it is enabled AND (and here’s the obvious but easy to overlook bit) click on the Configure option at the top of the table:

Select the artifacts that you want to enable code coverage for (in my case only the application code, not the tests themselves).
Click OK, Apply the changes, run the Unit tests and view the code coverage results:

And that’s it – hopefully that might help avoid a couple of minutes of wondering where the configuration settings can be found.

Cheers,

Giles

Migrate Existing Test Cases To TFS 2010

2009-11-06T12:52:00Z

If you have been looking at the new Test & Lab Manager with Visual Studio 2010 and you're wondering how you can import your existing test cases then take a look at the Test Case Migrator (Excel) Tool that has just been released to Codeplex.

Rich

What Does The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2“Go Live” Licence Mean?

2009-10-19T18:11:11Z

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .NET Framework 4 are declared as “go live” releases. What does this mean? A good overview from Jeff Beehler.

Cheers,

Giles

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Is Available

2009-10-19T17:38:35Z

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available from MSDN now. It will be made generally available on the 21st October. A comprehensive “how-to” around where to get it, how to install it and other useful information has been published by Brian Keller.

I’m now running Team Foundation Server 2010 natively on my Windows 7 laptop in a Basic configuration, without SQL Server or SharePoint installed, and it’s looking great. I’m really enjoying not having to have a server operating system (running in a virtual machine) just to work with my own team projects. Fantastic for small teams, or make the most of the full version with SQL Server and WSS/MOSS.

Cheers,

Giles