Today is my final day at Microsoft. Over the years I have had the pleasure of pranking someone who works for me. It started when he was a college intern and I would lower his desk one inch a day until he looked like he was sitting at a pre-school desk...

Today Jason Zander announced the immediate availability of Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™ Beta 2. If you’ve had any experience with LightSwitch Beta 1, you know that it is the simplest way to create business applications for the desktop and cloud...

On his blog yesterday, Soma (Sr. VP of Developer Division at Microsoft), announced that Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 will be coming soon. I can tell you, we are really excited about LightSwitch, and apparently you are too (you’ve downloaded...

With the recent release of Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 1 to MSDN Subscribers, I have gotten a few questions. As questions come in, I’ll do my best to answer them here. One of the first questions I got was about how LightSwitch applications manage and...

Earlier this week, at the VSLive conference in Redmond, WA (on the Microsoft campus) Jason Zander announced a new Visual Studio product that we’ve been working on – Visual Studio LightSwitch – the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop...

Today, we released Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 , a Team Foundation Server process template to support Scrum software development. This release complements the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement and MSF for Agile Software Development process templates...

The Visual Studio team that brought you the SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 is happy to announce they have created a set of power tools that make developing SharePoint 2010 sandboxed solutions even easier.  Below is the list of features...

Lately there have been a lot of questions about when .NET 4 will be released on Windows Update (WU) and in Windows Server Update Service (WSUS). While I don’t have a specific date to share (yet…stay tuned), I can say that it will be soon (within the next...

Let’s face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career b ut it’s not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet . You need to have fun . Cheap beer and lousy pizza (with a New Orleans twist) We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Pat O...

In this four part series my goal is to provide you a look at Visual Studio 2010 and highlight how you can use it to improve many aspects of your team-based software development—from planning to coding to testing. While this is not a comprehensive dive...

In the book Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy states, “ All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unique in its own way. ” The same can be said for software development teams. Happy, well-functioning software development teams are all the same—explicit...

Effective collaboration between developers and testers is paramount and can make the difference between shipping quality applications on time, or slipping because bugs are found late. In this session you will learn how Visual Studio 2010 can help you...

Visual Studio 2010 introduces an entirely new set of architecture tools to aide in both understanding the code you already have and in defining how new systems will be built. In this session, you will discover how you can use new tools like the Architecture...

Let’s face it, going to a technical conference is good for your career … …but it’s not a whole lot of fun. You need an outlet . You need to have fun . Cheap beer and lousy pizza. We are bringing back GeekFest! Join us at Lucky Strike for a night of pizza...

Want to keep up on news from the Visual Studio Team System team? Want to get updates from live events and presentations? Want general pointers to valuable content? You can do so in real time by following MicrosoftVSTS on Twitter. Follow our account today...

Today it was announced Oracle support will be available for Visual Studio Team System 2010 Development through a Database Schema Provider (DSP ).  Quest , a provider of Database Management Solutions, is developing the Oracle DSP for Visual Studio...

Scott Cate has started a Video Blog showing Visual Studio Tips and Tricks. Starting with Tip of the Day posts originally done by Sara Ford over 2007 and 2008, the Video blog is a great way to see Visual Studio in action. Scott already has the first 20...

On Monday, 13-Oct I will be presenting a session at my local (and favorite) user group, the .NET Developers Association . For this session I will be providing a demo-filled tour of the next release of VSTS - Visual Studio Team System 2010 . This is your...

This morning we made the official announcement of the next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. This includes Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Team System 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. This blog has moved. See http://www.dougseven.com...

OK, mea culpa . TechEd 2008 North America has been over for a few weeks now, and I have not yet posted my wrap up. I'll keep it short and sweet, but there are some cool resources I want to point out. This blog has moved to http://www.dougseven.com/blog...

Seven (7) new white papers focused on the key benefits of Visual Studio Team System are now available in both Word and PDF format. The white papers expand on the seven key benefits outlined in the summary paper " Key Benefits of Microsoft Visual...

TechEd 2008 Developers is less than two weeks away, and of course that means we are down to crunch time. I am a co-Track PM for three tracks - Developer Tools & Languages (TLA), Development Practices (DVP), and Windows & Frameworks (WIN). That...

Let’s face it, going to technical conferences is good for your career, but it’s not a whole lot of fun. What you need is an outlet. You need to have fun. That’s where we step in. Cheap beer and lousy pizza! We are bringing back GeekFest...

Recently I was involved (only a little) in preparing some of the Visual Studio Launch content for the February 27th launch event (and subsequent worldwide events). During the preparation we held "train-the-trainer" meetings where people who...

In March and April I am actually a bit busy espousing prolifically about topics near and dear to me. I have a couple internal Microsoft events I am speaking at - one to what we call our Inner Circle Partners , and the other to System Integrators . In...