I’m really excited about the news today that we’ve released the latest Team System 2010 Community Tech Preview (CTP).  It follows on to the April 2008 Rosario CTP and as you might imagine in the past 6 months we’ve poured a tremendous amount of good stuff into the product.  We’re not quite done with the active development phase of this project but we’re certainly getting close.  We wanted to get this release out to you so that you can give us feedback before we close the book on the release.  Once we get into beta testing, changes will be much more challenging (yet not impossible) to get into the product.  Now’s the time!

To aid in your discovery of the new features that we’d like your feedback on, we have created an extensive set of product walkthroughs that accompany the CTP release.  The samples and data required to show these features off have been preloaded in the VPC so that all you need to do is download the VPC, print out the walkthroughs contained within the image (all 128 pages!) and away you go!  Here’s a brief outline of the walkthroughs we’ve provided this go around:

• Formal 1 - Design, Planning, and Implementation.
  • Walkthrough: Designing Your Application at a Logical Level - Application Requirements
  • Walkthrough: Designing Your Application at a Logical Level - Application Behavior and Structure 
  • Walkthrough: Setting Goals and Creating a Project Plan.
  • Walkthrough: Exploring Your Existing Application.
  • Walkthrough: Validating Code Changes with the Layer Design.
• Sprint 1 - Checkpoint Review.
  • Walkthrough: Reviewing the Sprint
  • Walkthrough: Finishing the Sprint
  • Walkthrough: Do Deeper Analysis of Bugs and Progress
  • Walkthrough: Holding a Great Sprint Retrospective.
• Sprint 2 - Agile Planning.
  • Walkthrough: Agile Iteration Planning.
• Sprint 2 - Agile Construction.
  • Walkthrough: Generating Interaction Sequences from Existing Code.
  • Walkthrough: Test-Driven Development
  • Walkthrough: Configuring Code Analysis Using Rule Sets
  • Walkthrough: Preventing Code Defects using Test Impact Analysis
  • Walkthrough: Creating Manual Test Cases and Adding to a Test Suite.
  • Walkthrough: Connecting Test Cases to User Stories
  • Walkthrough: Branch Visualization.
  • Walkthrough: Checking In With Build Validation.
• Sprint 2 - Agile Testing.
  • Walkthrough: Executing Manual Tests
  • Walkthrough: Using the Historical Debugger to Diagnose Test Failures
  • Walkthrough: Running Tests to Verify a Fix.

That’s 21 walkthroughs in all! They’re designed so that you can move from one to another without needing to follow them in linear order.  So if you want to learn about Manual Testing and then about Code Analysis Rule Sets, go right ahead.  There are few gotchas with the VPC delivery that you should be aware of (aren’t there always?) that Brian Keller has done a fine job outlining here.  

Please let us hear from you through our feedback forums.  We release these CTPs in great measure to get early feedback from customers.  If we get high quality feedback from you, we’ll be more incented to publish more of these over time so please don’t hold back.  Thanks in advance for your efforts in this regard. 

Woohoo!

jeff

PS – This CTP release coincides with our VSTS presence at PDC.  Read more about PDC goings on from Soma’s blog:  Announcements from PDC 2008