March, 2006

I'm sitting in the Auckland User Group meeting along with ~50 other Auckland based developers.

The great news is that all but three people in the room have seen Visual Studio Team System before.

Grant's session is titled "A day in the life of a Team Developer" and is a great interactive session with himself and Bennie a developer from the Orbiz team showing how they use VSTS each day.

If you're not here don't worry the session is being filmed and will be online shortly.

Sitting in this session got me thinking about what resources we are making available on VSTS today.

We have a bunch of virtual labs on Visual Studio Team System so that you can try the product out for yourself.
Included is Microsoft Virtual Lab Express, a 30-minute hands-on overview of the features of VSTS.

There are 49 quick fire videos on VSTS here (vsts 001-vsts 049).

Michael Leworthy was down here to speak at the Software Developer Conference last week and mentioned that a bunch of new resources are coming April 1 so keep your eyes peeled for those.

We also have some upcoming NZ based training for incorporating your development process into Visual Studio Team System coming up…
Wayne Ewington our resident Microsoft expert on VSTS is running a Deep Dive on the 28th and 29th of March in Auckland. The cost for this 2 day training is $1400 inc GST.

I was also tonight chatting to an instructor from Equinox Software Architects. Equinox are running a course on implementing SDLC using VSTS.

We’ve had a number of NZ customers adopt VSTS and the attendance tonight is testament to that... included are Airways NZ.

If you are a BDM or a software architect there is a business value whitepaper here and if you are an IT Pro you can download the latest help on Team Foundation Server to get advice on installing TFS to dual and single server environments (remember the chm fix).

So now TFS and VSTS have both been released...

180 Day Trial's of Visual Studio Team Suite are available for you to order from here.
If you require help with purchasing or understanding the licensing of Visual Studio Team System please call Auckland 09 3575807 between 10:30am and 7:30pm Monday to Friday... we have Arabind (based out of Australia) here to answer your calls.

Tags: VSTS, TFS, DNUG