I just received word that the Visual Studio 11 ALM Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts have been translated through community efforts into both Brazilian Portuguese and Arabic!
A huge thank you, obrigado, and شكرا to Mohamed Radwan, Arley de Padua, Helder de Padua, Willian Candido, Marcia Candido, Camila Tomaz, Pablo Coelho and Marcelo Bolzan for making this happen.
I love it when the community bonds together to develop content like this which can help make this content accessible to millions of people around the world.
PS: If you prefer Hindi, Tarun Arora posted a subset of these labs from the developer preview in Hindi. The screenshots and steps are slightly different from what’s in the beta, but the ideas are the same.
The Visual Studio 2010 ALM Virtual Machine has been updated with a longer expiration date. If you are using the previous version, please note that it expires on April 9, 2012. The new version will expire on September 10, 2012.
You can download the new version here.
The Visual Studio 11 DemoMates for showcasing application lifecycle management scenarios have been updated based on the beta release. You can download the DemoMates here.
DemoMates are a nice alternative to the Visual Studio 11 Virtual Machine for when you don’t have time or hardware resources to run the virtual machine.
The Team Foundation Server 11 beta is available for download, including a "go live" license and support, meaning that you can start using the beta for real projects and there will be a supported upgrade path to the final release. If you are using an earlier version of Team Foundation Server, then you may want to consider upgrading to the beta.
Most scenarios will "just work" when upgrading to the new release. However, depending on the complexity of your existing Team Foundation Server deployment, the capabilities you are using, and the customizations you have made, there may be additional steps for you to consider in order to ensure the smoothest upgrade path.
To help you in this process, I just uploaded two Channel 9 videos by Ed Holloway and Ewald Hofman who are both on the Team Foundation Server product team.
The first video focuses on upgrading the core components of Team Foundation Server, including the database.
A second video focuses on how to upgrade process templates which were created using an earlier version of Team Foundation Server to take advantage of the new capabilities.
Additional Resources:
I’m pleased to announce that in conjunction with today’s beta release of Visual Studio 11, the Visual Studio 11 ALM Virtual Machine has also been updated, along with all of the hands-on-labs and demo scripts.
Start your downloads here!
I love this new Windows Phone 7 application from my friend René van Osnabrugge in the Netherlands. The idea is simple – you want to take a picture and upload it to Team Foundation Server. Maybe you want to capture some drawings from a whiteboard, maybe it’s a picture of an error message from a user’s desktop, or that proverbial “drawing on the back of a napkin” where all good ideas are born… whatever it is, this application for Windows Phone makes it easy to snap that photo and upload it as an attachment to a work item.
This app also looks stunning. It’s clear that René didn’t just call it a day once he got the basic functionality working. He took the time to make a great looking application which is a joy to use.
Selfishly, of course, I’m thrilled that he decided to use my OData Service for Team Foundation Server to enable this solution. :-)
You can read all about the application and how to download and configure it here. Enjoy!
The same day I blogged about the Visual Studio 11 ALM Hands-On-Labs being available in Brazilian Portuguese, I received a note from Tarun Arora who volunteered to translate them into Hindi as well!
He has already finished the first 4 labs which you can download here.
Tarun’s blog is definitely one to bookmark – he’s an avid user and blogger of Visual Studio ALM technologies. Keep up the great work, Tarun, and thanks for the translations.
A few months ago we released the beta of the OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010. Today, I am pleased to announce that v1 of this service is now available and you can download it here.
What the heck is an OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010? I’m glad you asked. The purpose of this project is to help developers work with data from Team Foundation Server on multiple device types (such as smartphones and tablets) and operating systems. OData provides a great solution for this goal, and has been embraced by numerous developers for building great device-specific applications. OData is accessible from any device and application stack which supports HTTP requests. This OData service interacts directly with the TFS client object model.
What is OData? OData exposes a way to work with data over the web. If you’re new to OData, I suggest spending a few minutes at http://www.odata.org/ reading about this evolving standard. It uses interfaces similar to REST, so that you can programmatically consume and manipulate data from any device or application stack which supports HTTP requests. DPE has been working with several organizations (such as PayPal, Facebook, and Netflix) and product groups to enable OData where it makes sense to do so. Team Foundation Server was an obvious choice since it not only allows developers to extend TFS in new and interesting ways, but it also allows us to further showcase support for this evolving standard with the developer community at large.
Can I see a demo? Of course! I filmed a video for Channel 9 which shows you how to get started using this service. When you’re ready to get started, just download the release which includes full documentation. The service can be easily hosted in Windows Azure to front-end your own Team Foundation Server instance, or if you want to use this with CodePlex we’ve already hosted this service for you at https://codeplexodata.cloudapp.net/. As long as you have contributor rights on any CodePlex project backed by Team Foundation Server 2010 you can start making OData calls immediately. We also have included a sample Windows Phone 7 application, and WebMatrix Helpers, which show you how to get started building applications which consume this service.
You can also find a few great projects from people in the community who have been using this during the beta to build some great applications, such as TFS on the Road (a TFS app for Windows Phone) and a few other examples here.
(this is a video I filmed during the beta so you'll hear me refer to this as a beta, but the concepts are the same for the v1 release)
What’s new in v1? Since the beta, we have invested heavily in better documentation and a better installation experience. We have also made a few bug fixes and added support for a few operations, mainly around build definitions. Everything we have done since the beta has been based on direct customer feedback. Thanks to everybody who has contributed by evaluating the beta and helping to make this a great release!
So this is v1 – what is your roadmap for future releases? Is this supported? I would like to continue to iterate on this and add value over time. I should make it clear, however, that this is not an official release from the TFS engineering team. The TFS engineering team has reviewed the service and approved of the approach we are taking, but there is no official support for this service. That said, all of the source code is provided for you, the license permits you to use it and extend it for your own purposes, and we are interested in (but not committed to) continuing to add capabilities over time. Personally, I’d love to get this working with the Team Foundation Service, but since it’s only in a “preview” mode at the moment it’s a bit too early to be building extensions for it.
If I build an application using this service, will users need client access licenses (CAL’s)? In most cases, they will. Connecting to Team Foundation Server via OData has the same licensing implications as connecting via Team Explorer, the web, or any other client. But there are a few exceptions where users working with Team Foundation Server don’t need CAL’s. Please refer to the Visual Studio 2010 licensing whitepaper for all of the details.
I hope you enjoy this – if you build something interesting please be sure to drop us a line and let us know!
The November 2011 refresh of the Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs is now available. This new version includes an extended expiration date of April 9, 2012. Please note that if you are using the last version of the virtual machine it will stop working on November 1, 2011.
Follow the instructions here to download the new virtual machine and hands-on-labs.
Muito obrigado to Arley Pádua, Carlos Ubirajara Amorim, and Marcello Andrade – these guys have generously translated the Visual Studio 11 ALM Hands-On-Labs from English into Brazilian Portuguese!
The virtual machine itself is still available in English only, but at least for people who are more comfortable with Brazilian Portuguese as their language of choice this can make it easier to learn about the application lifecycle management improvements we have coming in Visual Studio 11.
The Brazilian Portuguese labs can be downloaded here, and the original English labs can still be found here.
PS: If anybody is interested in translating any of my hands-on-labs into their own native language, please let me know!