Jeff Beehler's Blog

Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (1 week later)

Jeff Beehler — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:56:00 GMT

Last week, we published the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Since then we’ve seen a strong positive reports from customers about their experience so far with the release.

I meet with a team of about 20 folks every morning to review the latest feedback from a variety of sources and discuss the latest trends and responses. We look at install data indicating a strong demand and high install success rate. We look at the satisfaction survey (if you haven’t taken it yet, please do) which gives us both a quantitative as well as qualitative feel for how things are going. We also look at Twitter (please use the #vs2010 hashtag), top rated bugs from Connect, responses to key blogs (including those from Soma, Scott, Jason and Brian) and Forum participation (ALM, VS Pro, and .NET). All of this helps me get a good sense of how we’re doing and where we need to spend time addressing before we release our final version.

So far, the response has been very encouraging. Here are some representative comments:

Just tried VS2010 RC. One word incredible. Super fast, great build with things I saw in earlier releases fixed. So awesome.
First impressions: Fast builds,clean,no hangs, fast intellisense,better font rendering.
Congratulations for the RC Milestone, #VS2010seems pretty more snapier, also looks more fine-grained like an finished product!
VS2010 RC: I must admit, I am impressed. Major speed and performance improvements. They are obvious immediately!
Trying out VS2010 RC: Snappier UI, much faster intellisense, significant build time reduction, etc. Overall: AWESOME JOB!
VS 2010 RC performance is ridiculously faster, can't wait to switch over full time!
Oh my goodness, VS2010 RC is much, much faster. Kudos to the VS perf team and everyone else. Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 :-)
#vs2010 is fast like ambulances flying through a school zone at 120 mph being chased by ninjas. and the ninjas are on fire!
Very speedy to load projects and compile. Fast to move through the IDE. a VAST improvement over Beta 2
It's become a lot faster, feels faster as well. I love the improvement you made from BETA1 to BETA2 to RC.
As far as I've tested it, performance is absolutely awesome. It was my biggest concern in Beta2, but right now it seems as fast as VS2008, or even better.

Through this we’ve also identified a few issues including:

Upgrading from Beta2 – Before installing the RC, you’ll need to uninstall the Beta2 version. Aaron has posted a blog article covering this in a bit more detail.
Corrupt DVD ISO downloads – some customers are encountering issues with corrupt DVD ISO files after downloading. Heath Stewart from our deployment team has written a good blog article on this issue.
Intellisense crashes – some customers are are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed. We’ve published a patch to this problem which you should apply immediately. You can read more about it here. Let us know if it doesn’t help address your problem.
Silverlight 4 support - We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop. If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now.
Express availability – we did not provide any of the Express versions of VS with the release candidate. All the features are available in the drops we’ve included. Express editions will be sim-shipped at RTM. It was just easier for drop logistics to limit the number of SKU’s we posted.
Mobile tools support - as with Beta2, the RC does not include Mobile support. While Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t contain built-in mobile support, we are working closely with the Mobile team to deliver support for mobile development to VS 2010 developers in the future.

If you haven’t already, please take this opportunity to download, install and begin using the VS2010 RC. If you plan to ‘go live’ with this build, please read my article on this. If you have installed please take a few moments to submit your thoughts on our survey.

Thanks for helping us ship a great Visual Studio 2010 release.

Jeff

“Going live” with the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate

Jeff Beehler — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:53:14 GMT

We are pleased to declare that the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 will be supported as a “go live” release. This means that VS2010 RC has met high standards of quality for pre-release software, and we are licensing it for developing and deploying production applications.

We hope that you will consider using VS2010 RC for “go live” production purposes. As you use the release, we want to hear from you at our Connect site if you find any bugs.

In order to decide whether or not using VS2010 in a “go live” scenario is right for you, you should carefully understand the terms and limitations of the “go live” license. Start by reading the license terms for VS2010 RC, which includes the official “go live” licensing terms.

VS2010 RC is licensed for use through June 30, 2010 at which point you’ll need to upgrade to the final release to continue using the product.

The following guidelines should also help you understand the ways in which we are committed to helping you have a great experience with VS2010.

We are committed to providing a smooth upgrade path from Beta 2 to RC and then to the final release (“RTM”) of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. For Team Foundation Server, this means moving data from Team Foundation Server 2008 to Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 and then eventually to Team Foundation Server 2010 RTM. Most importantly this means source code, work items, tests, builds and the warehouse.
We give you permission to use VS2010 to create applications using runtimes which are “go live.” For example, the .NET Framework 4 is “go live” for this release and you can create applications both for internal use and external use. See the license terms for more details, including pre-release notifications and other details for distribution.
Our Support team is staffed to help support VS2010 if you encounter problems. If you plan to use the release for “go live” please send email to vsgolive@microsoft.com so that we can register you for beta level support. If you already obtained an Access ID for VS2010 Beta 2, it remains valid moving forward as you upgrade to VS2010 RC.
Another option for requesting assistance is to visit MSDN Forums. The MSDN Forums are frequented by Microsoft MVP’s and members of the product group, and are a great place to search for issues submitted by others which might match problems you encounter.
You should take adequate measures to back up and protect your data prior to upgrading to the RC. You should also have an ongoing data backup and protection plan in place during your use of VS2010.

Thank you again for your ongoing commitment to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. With your assistance and ongoing feedback we can ship the best release ever!

Rangers ship VS2010 readiness materials

Jeff Beehler — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:38:24 GMT

Some of you might have noticed the tidal wave of shipping that happened last week. The Rangers have done it again and this time in impressive style with five detailed guides in advance of the VS2010 and TFS2010 releases:

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance: consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and Visual Studio (VS) 2010, addressing the core problem of teams in the field who are unaware of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server capabilities or have little time to invest in detailed education.
Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide: covers scenarios which may be encountered during and after the upgrade process. It provides examples of most common and potential issues. It covers scenarios related to general Upgrade Process, Work Item Templates, Reports, and Enterprise TFS Management (ETM).
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010: Branching and merging of software is a very large topic. It is an area where there is a lot of maturity in the software industry. This Ranger solution focuses on applied and practical examples of branching that you can use right now. The 2010 release includes discussions around branching concepts and strategies but also focuses on practical hands-on labs.
Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance: Requirements Engineering (RE) using Team Foundation Server. We provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle.
Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory: prescriptive guidance around the virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines. We help users with the installation and configuration of virtualized environments with least effort and maximum automation.

Each one of these projects was chosen in part due to field and customer demand and were directly informed by practical experience from MCS consultants and MVPs involved in the projects. As such, they’re field tested and customer ready materials available in advance of the product release. Follow the links above for more details on each of the releases.

When we started the Ranger program 4 years ago, we had the simple vision of accelerating the adoption of Team System but at the time we were playing catch up with a v1 product already in market so we were left trying to fill in the gaps. Now, we’re gearing up to release a v3 product and the Rangers are running ahead of the release laying the groundwork with customers and the field ensuring that everyone gets off to a running start. It’s a much better place to be and I can only imagine where we’ll be 4 years from now!

Congratulations to all involved and especially to Bijan and Willy for their undying dedication to the Ranger mission.

jeff

Fireside chat with Radio TFS

Jeff Beehler — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:09:30 GMT

Martin Woodward and Mickey Gousset called me at home a few days ago to talk about Visual Studio, TFS and the upcoming year much like they did last year. Take a listen to our interview here. It’s always a great pleasure to chat with these guys about some of my favorite topics.

Happy new year!

Tell us about VS2010 Beta2

Jeff Beehler — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:37:23 GMT

Last week we shipped Beta 2 for broad distribution. Many of you have already sent us comments and improvement suggestions (thanks!)

At this point we are down to our final set of bug fixing, perf tuning, etc. We’re very interested in your feedback so we can take action on it before we ship the final version. To help make it easy, you can take this simple survey.

One thing in particular we are hearing a lot of feedback on is performance. We are working hard on the next round of perf improvements. You can supply your feedback through the survey. When you give us your feedback, the more actionable you can make it the better. We need to know what operations you are doing (like editing, debugging, etc), what kind of hardware you have (CPU, RAM, disk), and your hosting scenario (main machine, running in VM, terminal server, etc).

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Jeff

Visual Studio 2010 Launch Countdown Sidebar Widget

Jeff Beehler — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:11:01 GMT

With Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 out the door we’re getting very excited about wrapping the project up and launching on March 22, 2010. As part of that, we’ve created a sidebar widget that you’ll see around town to help us countdown to the big day. If you’d like to include it on your blog as well, here’s the script to add:

div#widget { position: relative; width: 250px; height: 155px; }

body ul#cntdwn { width: 250px; height: 80px; background: transparent url(http://toysfortweets.com/visualstudiowidget/cntdwn-bg.png) no-repeat scroll left top; list-style-type: none; text-align: center; padding: 74px 0 0 0; margin: 0; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }

body ul#cntdwn li { float: left; margin: 0 8px 0 0; background: transparent url(http://toysfortweets.com/visualstudiowidget/number-bg.png) no-repeat scroll left top; padding: 0 0 5px 7px; }

body ul#cntdwn li.first { margin-left: 20px; }

body ul#cntdwn li em { display: block; color: #111; font-size: 1.6em; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; background: transparent url(http://toysfortweets.com/visualstudiowidget/number-cap.png) no-repeat scroll right top; padding: 3px 7px 0 0; height: 35px; margin-bottom: -5px; }

div#widget a#link { display: block; width: 250px; height: 155px; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; }

</style>
<script language="javascript" src="http://toysfortweets.com/visualstudiowidget/countdown.js"> </script>

“Going live” with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Jeff Beehler — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:12:00 GMT

We are pleased to declare Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 a “go live” release (read more about it on Soma’s blog). This means that Beta 2 has met high standards of quality for pre-release software, and we are licensing it for developing and deploying production applications.

We hope that you will consider using Beta 2 for “go live” production purposes. As you use Beta 2, we want to hear from you at our Connect site if you find any bugs.

In order to decide whether or not using Beta 2 in a “go live” scenario is right for you, you should carefully understand the terms and limitations of the “go live” license. Start by reading the license terms for Beta 2, which includes the official “go live” licensing terms.

The following guidelines should also help you understand the ways in which we are committed to helping you have a great experience with Beta 2.

We are committed to providing a smooth upgrade path from Beta 2 to the final release (“RTM”) of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. For Team Foundation Server, this means moving data from Team Foundation Server 2008 to Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 and then eventually to Team Foundation Server 2010 RTM. Most importantly this means source code, work items, tests, builds and the warehouse.
We give you permission to use Beta 2 to create applications using runtimes which are “go live.” For example, the .NET Framework 4 is “go live” for beta2 and you can create applications both for internal use and external use. See the license terms for more details, including pre-release notifications and other details for distribution.
Our Support team is staffed to help support Beta 2 if you encounter problems. If you plan to use Beta 2 for “go live” please send email to vsgolive@microsoft.com so that we can register you for beta level support.
Another option for requesting assistance is to visit MSDN Forums. The MSDN Forums are frequented by Microsoft MVP’s and members of the product group, and are a great place to search for issues submitted by others which might match problems you encounter.
You should take adequate measures to back up and protect your data prior to upgrading to Beta 2. You should also have an ongoing data backup and protection plan in place during your use of Beta 2.

Thank you again for your ongoing commitment to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. With your assistance and ongoing feedback we can ship the best release ever!

Updates to Visual Studio UI

Jeff Beehler — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:47:42 GMT

Jason Zander, the Visual Studio general manager, just posted a follow up to his post regarding the new look for VS2010. Based on popular feedback, we’ve updated the look and feel of our outlining feature. It’ll be available in our upcoming VSTS 2010 Beta 1 release and we hope you take a look and try them out. If you do, please let us hear from you.

Thanks!

VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions

Jeff Beehler — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:57:00 GMT

Our team, in conjunction with Microsoft Research, have been working on a power tool known as AjaxView which helps measure the performance of web applications that execute JavaScript inside the web browser. This power tool provides an IIS extension that automatically adds profiling code into a JavaScirpt-based web application as well as a Visual Studio add-in to view the profiling data in the Visual Studio Performance Explorer.

Check out the details on Soma’s blog: VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions.

Free VSTS training in Seattle May 21st

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:09:00 GMT

Our friends Jeff Levinson and Steve Borg from Northwest Cadence are offering a free day of VSTS training. This session-packed day will show you how to do more with less. Use software development process and Visual Studio Team System tools to cut costs, leverage resources, and get immediate results.

Details:

Redmond, WA Building 43 Shasta Room
Thursday, May 21, 2009 8:00 AM -5:00 PM

Sessions

Successful Adoption of VSTS
Branching Strategies
Regulatory Compliance using VSTS
Metrics for Real Process Improvement
Using Team System to Drive Agile Adoption

Resources to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010

Jeff Beehler — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:29:40 GMT

While the various Visual Studio teams are working on our first beta release, I thought I’d point out some important resources to learn more about what we’re doing. First is the new weekly video podcast series known as 10-4. This has been going on for a few months now but I finally figured out where the name came from…I just couldn’t get past the CB phrase that was so popular when I was growing up. I now get that it’s a clever combination of VSTS 2010 and NetFx 4. Duh! I guess I’ve been triaging a few too many bugs recently. :-) Anyway, Brian Keller and crew have done a great job making this information very accessible and interesting along the way. Here’s a quick list of the podcasts posted to date:

10-4 Episode 14: Sentient DSLs

10-4 Episode 13: No More Late Surprises

10-4 Episode 12: Simplifying Your Code With C# 4.0

10-4 Episode 11: Bi-Directional Routing with ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

10-4 Episode 10: Making Web Deployment Easier

10-4 Episode 9: Visual Basic 10

10-4 Episode 8: Pure Client-Side Development with ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

10-4 Episode 7: No More Planning Black Box

10-4 Episode 6: Parallel Extensions

10-4 Episode 5: Code Focused in Visual Studio 2010

10-4 Episode 4: No More Parallel Development Pain

10-4 Episode 3: ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010

10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC

The other recent activity in this space is Brian Harry’s new series on VSTS 2010 which he started this week: Team System 2010 Overview. If you haven’t already subscribed to his blog, I’d certainly recommend it. Brian’s always got interesting things to say.

Gartner SCCM Magic Quadrant Ranks Microsoft VSTS a Leader

Jeff Beehler — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:56:10 GMT

A few weeks ago Gartner published their 2009 Magic Quadrant for Software Change and Configuration Management for Distributed Platforms (what a mouthful!) and in their evaluation has ranked Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server as a leader in the space. This is Microsoft’s first time ranking as a leader which is defined as having a “broad solution with significant support for ALM deployment.” From my perspective, it was merely a matter of time before we were recognized in this way but it’s still an exciting milestone for us.

Some of the strengths that are called out in this evaluation include:

The product has a flexible process model implemented in a single integrated metadata repository.

Basing change, versioning and configuration around the concept of work items, rather than physical code changes, reduces programmer overhead for change management.
Distributed support within a team system project is well-supported with Web proxies.
Team System has demonstrated scalability.

You can read the full reports here:

Congrats to the Team System team for receiving this important recognition.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted (SCCM MQ2009, March 26, 2009. MarketScope for Application Life Cycle Management, 12/17/08) by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Team Test 2008 Quick Reference Guide now available

Jeff Beehler — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:54:21 GMT

The Rangers have shipped again! (Faithful readers know just how much I love saying that). This time, led by Geoff Gray, they have put together the VSTT 2008 Quick Reference Guide, a comprehensive technical document about Visual Studio Team Test functionality, specifically focusing on Web, Load and Unit testing. Geoff is a member of our Services Testing Lab, an arm of Microsoft Consulting Services and he’s help putting together this great reference based on his own personal experience using our products in customer settings. As such, it’s chockfull of very helpful advice and best practices informed by real world usage. If you’re at all interested in using our Testing tools, I’d highly recommend taking a look at this guide.

Check out the updated Visual Studio look

Jeff Beehler — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:25:00 GMT

For Visual Studio 2010 we have revamped the development environment to provide a cleaner, easier to use, interface all built with WPF. Jason Zander, our general manager, announced new details at VSLive yesterday and provided a blog post outlining some of the highlights. Take a look…I think you’ll like what you see.

Welcome Willy, our newest Team System Ranger

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:50:11 GMT

I’m pleased to welcome Willy-Peter Schaub to the Team System team as our newest Ranger. Willy is a former Microsoft MVP from South Africa (his old blog can be found here: http://dotnet.org.za/willy/) and has recently joined us to help further the Ranger mission of accelerating the adoption of Team System. He’s started a new blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/) and has already written 16 posts in his brief stint here so far. At this rate he’ll quickly surpass me on quantity and may have already done so on value. As such, I’d highly recommend checking out his new feed. He’s already doing a good job of explaining what the Rangers do (nice hat!), explaining the point behind the software development lifecycle, and pointing folks to nuggets of Ranger goodness. All in under two weeks!

Welcome Willy!

Check out our updated website

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:35:05 GMT

The next update to our Team System website has been made with an eye towards helping make things easier to find. Sharon, our web site manager, has been working very hard to help address the feedback we’ve gotten in the past and is very eager to hear what you think about the recent improvements. Check out her blog article describing the recent changes (http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2009/02/04/new-team-system-site-launches.aspx) as well as provide her feedback here (http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2009/02/04/team-system-web-site-feedback.aspx).

We’re eager to hear from you…we still have a lot of work to do and you can help us prioritize that work by giving us feedback.

Thanks!

Listen to me on Radio TFS

Jeff Beehler — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:08:55 GMT

The Radio TFS folks called me at home just before the holidays and spent the better part of an hour talking about what I do, some of the history of Team System and where we’re headed with our 2010 release. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s a fun format for getting some of the behind-the-scenes information out to the community. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend perusing their website for other shows that might pique your interest.

Take a listen to our conversation here: Play Now- A Chat with Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff

Updated Visual Studio Team System 2008 Trial VPC images available

Jeff Beehler — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:30:22 GMT

For those of you that want to try out Visual Studio Team System 2008 including Team Foundation Server, without having to go through the process of installing the product, we have recently released four VPC and HyperV images for your use. The “all-up” image includes Team Foundation Server, Team Build, Team Explorer, and Team Suite while the TFS “only” version has just Team Foundation Server, Team Build, and Team Explorer.

These images are set to expire on December 31, 2009 (over a year from now) and are a replacement for the original VPC images we released last year.

VPC:

VSTS “all-up” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
TFS “only” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

Hyper-V:

VSTS “all-up” Hyper-V image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
TFS “only” Hyper-V image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

For more information and to find links to the images go to http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/brian/archive/2008/12/24/happy-holidays-and-look-what-santa-s-brought.aspx. Many thanks to Brian Randell for his outstanding work pulling these images together and getting them through the sometimes Byzantine release process here at MS.

Enjoy!

Visual Studio sales site gets a facelift

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Check out the updated sales site for Visual Studio at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio. On the new site you can find numerous case studies as well as some of our current offers for Visual Studio as well as Team System. Finally, there’s in-depth information about the Team System line of products. All in all, a very nice looking and (much more importantly) informative site.

TFS Branching Guide 2.0 published

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:21:00 GMT

I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but the VSTS Rangers have shipped again! This time, in the form of guidance for branching strategies using Team Foundation Server. You can find this release on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII

Selecting the right branching strategy is one of the most important aspects of TFS deployment. Picking the right strategy can lead to optimized team cooperation, increased productivity and a successful adoption. On the other hand, selecting a bad branching strategy can cause frustration, damage productivity and derail TFS adoption in an organization. We have therefore put a lot of effort in creating a set of practical guidance to educate our customers and partners and support their VSTS adoption efforts.

As the name implies, this is the 2nd version of the TFS Branching Guidance to be published. Since the first release, we have received lots of feedback and change requests. Most feedback indicated a desire for a more practical approach to branching compared to the first release which is more theoretical. With that in mind, we decided to reduce the conceptual part and focus on branching practices with Team Foundation Server.

Here’s an overview:

TFS Branching Guide - Main 2.0

This is the main article which briefly explains branching concepts and introduces 3 levels of the most common branching scenario

TFS Branching Guide - Scenarios 2.0

A collection of less common branching scenarios

TFS Branching Guide - Q&A 2.0

A set of most frequently asked questions with answers

TFS Branching Guide - Drawings 2.0

A set of branching drawings in different formats including a large branching poster

TFS Branching Guide - Labs 2.0

A couple of examples for hands on labs with step by step instruction for practicing the branching scenarios

I’m especially excited about this project as it’s the first VSTS Ranger project to have included significant contributions from our Team System MVPs including Brian Randell, Willy-Peter Schaub, Eugene Zakhareyev and Jeff Levinson. This is a new approach we’re trying out in order to increase the community involvement in our Ranger projects which will hopefully result in improved applicability throughout our user base. Please let us know if you think it’s working!

Check out the new Community tab on the Team System website!

Jeff Beehler — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:34:00 GMT

As I mentioned recently, Sharon Elkins is our new website manager for Team System and she’s starting to make some changes to the site. Some of those first updates went live today and we’d love your feedback. You can see the new page here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/bb964396.aspx and read Sharon’s description / plea for feedback here: http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2008/12/10/new-community-section.aspx.

Take a look and let us know what you think. There’s more to come…

Thanks!

jeff

Dealing with the Team System 2010 CTP expiration

Jeff Beehler — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:36:00 GMT

If you’ve been using the Team System 2010 Community Tech Preview VPC, you’ve probably noticed that the instance of Visual Studio within the VPC is getting close to expiring. We expect that it will cease functioning around the end of the year and instead return the message “The evaluation period for Visual Studio Trial Edition has ended”:

Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before we release our next update to Team System 2010 so you’ll need to take action to keep this version working for a while. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy resolution to this problem. It involves turning off the synchronization between the host OS and the VPC. This enables you to set the time in the VPC to a 2008 date while you live in 2009. As you might imagine, Team Foundation Server doesn’t like it much when time goes backwards so you’ll want to make sure that you don’t use the VPC and then set the clock backwards after that point. Ideally, you can use a fresh VPC and disable your clock prior to launching it for the first time.

Disabling the host OS synchronization of the VPC. This is a change to the .VMC file (see below) that basically disables the clock synchronization between the VPC and the host OS. This means that time in the VPC moves forward only when the VPC is being used. As a result, we have essentially 2 months of runtime (not wall time) for the VPC which is way more time than people should need to run the CTP, even if they’re demoing it regularly to others.

Here are the changes necessary for the .VMC file (specific to a particular VPC and not a system-wide setting):

<integration>
    <microsoft>
        <mouse>
            <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
        </mouse>
        <components>
            <host_time_sync>
                <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
            </host_time_sync>
        </components>

Bunch of other stuff that I am skipping over to save space...
    </microsoft>
</integration>

Hopefully this will allow you to have plenty of time to evaluate the CTP and send us feedback on what you like and don’t like about what we put together in this release. As you might imagine, we’re hard at work putting together the next release and your feedback over the next period of time will really help us make sure that the next release is even better than the current CTP. And, yes, we will release both a VPC and native install version of the CTP so that folks will have flexibility in how they deploy and evaluate the next release.

One important note: don’t attempt to join the VPC to a domain since the domain will set the time within the VPC and thus cause Visual Studio to expire.

Many thanks to Brian Keller and his detailed description of the various activation messages associated with the CTP as well as to Virtual PC Guy who provided the original information on how to disable the VPC clock synchronization.

If you’ve converted this VPC image to HyperV following Grant’s instructions, be sure to read Cameron’s update to learn of a similar workaround for HyperV.

Happy CTPing!

Jeff

Team System has a new website manager!

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:31:30 GMT

A few months I grew my team by one person when we brought Sharon Elkins on board to manage the Team System website. This is the first time we’ve had someone dedicated fulltime to our website and as such, I’m really excited that she’s joined our team. The website will finally get the attention from us that it deserves. Over the past few years, our website has fallen in disrepair as we’ve had a patchwork of volunteers work on it in an adhoc way…not exactly a recipe for success. When we ask our customers what one thing we can do to improve our product, many of them mention improving our website so I’m eager to be able to respond to that feedback in a meaningful way. She recently started her own blog in order to give folks insight behind the scenes and to provide you a way to provide her feedback on our ideas and how well the website is working for you. She’s shared some of her plans with me and I’m eager to get them implemented so we can see how well they work for you. Please let us hear from you on what’s working (and what’s not) so that we can make the most of Sharon’s energy and passion around providing a great online customer experience.

Please join me in welcoming Sharon to the team!

jeff

System Center 2007 Management Pack for TFS 2008 is available!

Jeff Beehler — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:58:31 GMT

The Team System Rangers have delivered again! This time it’s a comprehensive Management Pack for TFS 2008 working with System Center 2007. This release represents an amazing amount of effort and coordination between the Ranger, the TFS product team, the System Center team, Microsoft Consulting Services and a number of early adopting companies. We hope you find it a valuable addition to your arsenal of TFS management tools.

You will find the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28c745b5-28cc-474a-a5fd-944c246d7727&displaylang=en, You can also go to the System Center Operations Manager Catalog and search for it by selecting "System Center Operations Manager 2007" and entering TFS as a keyword.

Overview

The Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 Management Pack monitors exposed services of TFS. This management pack includes event rules and monitors. It is designed to proactively monitor quality and availability of TFS services and even automate recovery in some scenarios.

Feature Summary

Auto discovery of TFS components
Leverages ASP.NET MP and SQL MP
Implements containment hierarchy reflecting logical architecture of the Product
Implements a proper health model using Monitors
Contains tasks, diagnostic and recovery for certain failures
Events indicating service outages
Alerts indicating configuration issues and connected data source changes
Verification that all dependant services are running
Targeted running of BPA against TFS Servers from Operator Console

I want to thank the Team System Rangers for their work in putting this together and getting it shipped. They've done a terrific job delivering add-ons and guidance for Team System over the past few years and this is one more in a long string of accomplishments.

Thoughts on Exit Criteria

Jeff Beehler — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:08:25 GMT

On occasion I write an email to the Team System team that steps back and tries to explain a little bit about the background of why we do something rather than just what we’re doing and when it’s due. I’ve been wondering recently if these updates would be interesting to folks outside of our team. So, I’m going to try publishing a slightly sanitized version of these emails and gauge the response. Let me know what you think and we’ll see where this takes us.

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Over the past week there’s been a concerted effort to review and clarify the exit criteria for future releases of VSTS10 including beta and release. At last count we had approximately 25 exit criteria that we’re managing for this release. Some, such as Performance and Side-by-Side, are familiar to many of you while others, such as App Isolation and Windows Logo, might not be. As I sat through hours of meetings last week reviewing each of these in detail I thought about why these are important. In the end, I realized these criteria help us pop above the din of day to day activity and instead see the broader fundamentals for the release. For instance, it doesn’t matter if we have the world’s best Test Impact Analysis if installing VSTS10 causes other applications to stop working or if the performance of the overall system is horrible. Customers will just back away before they even realize the benefits of the value we’ve added to the product. So, as we make our way through what sometimes seems like unending test passes and bug triages over the next year, keeping these fundamentals in mind will help us ensure that 1000’s and 1000’s of decisions each of us will make are in line with a high quality release that our customers will appreciate and value.

We’ve also established a ramp for most of these exit criteria such that the Beta criteria are reduced when compared to RTM. In part, this is in recognition that when we ship Beta we’ll still have at least time before we ship the final version so we don’t have to be all buttoned up at that point. But it’s important to start practicing driving this type of quality into the product. Many of these things take time to get right and we can’t assume that we can make them all go green in the final weeks of the project unless we’ve taken a measured approach to get there.

For various reasons, some teams will not be able to meet the graduated ramp for the exit criteria that we’ve outlined. When we roll these guidelines out you’ll see that some are identified as “critical” while others are labeled “important”. The idea here is to guide teams into how to apply their limited resources in the case where they don’t believe they can meet all of the Beta1 criteria. We’ll be making exceptions for specific criteria on a team by team basis through a negotiation between the team, the divisional exit criteria owner and the divisional release team. These discussions will focus on ensuring that the right tradeoffs are made while not endangering the overall integrity of the release. This information will also have a strong influence during the DCR approval process. Teams that are in good shape with regards to bugs and exit criteria will have a much better chance of getting their DCRs approved than those teams who have considerable bug or exit criteria debt to pay.

One thing that’s not well captured in the exit criteria that I want to continue to find a way to shine a light on is the state of integration between features. A team that’s nailed their features, exit criteria and bugs might still not be ready to ship if their features aren’t well integrated together. This is obviously more subjective than some of the other tests that we run but nonetheless important to our customers. I think our end-to-end scenario effort that has been underway for the past 6 months is an important part of this discussion and we’ll keep looking for ways to ensure the state of this aspect of our product is well understood by everyone.

Starting in December we’ll be tracking our exit criteria state on a common divisional scorecard in TFS. I appreciate your efforts to help us keep it as up to date as possible so that we can view our progress and make good decisions as a team based on accurate information. As we manage the VSTS10 endgame, it’s very informative to use the scorecard to view trends for teams as well as particular criteria to guide our decisions. If at any time you think our scorecard doesn’t really represent the true nature of our situation, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note so that we can work to rectify the situation together.

As always, I’m eager to hear from you on how we can improve our engineering process and systems so please let me know what you think about exit criteria or any other aspect of how things are going with VSTS10.

Yours,

jeff