Quite a backlog of stuff to blog about! However, I think I’ve crossed the line from blog post to newsletter.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System, December 2004 CTP

• If you haven’t heard, we shipped the Dec CTP of Team System last Wednesday, December 22nd. As promised, it went out before the holidays. It’s available for download from MSDN Subscriber Downloads.
• While you wait for the download to finish (> 3GB), please take a few minutes and review the Installation Guide, which is also available for download as a CHM or PDF.
• Some of the things to look at in this release:
• Shelving and branching
• Improved Office integration
• Data-driven testing
• Debugger integration with testing
• Load testing usability improvements
• Distributed System Designer integration with Team Foundation Version Control
• Improved Test Management UI
• A couple things you’ll find, but aren’t quite ready for use:
• Team Build
• Reporting
• Taking a wait and see approach? Follow Paul Murphy’s blog as he posts his experience installing this CTP release of Team System:
• Team System December CTP -- I
• Team System December CTP -- II [Bringing up a Domain Controller]
• Team System December CTP -- III [First Impressions]
• Wally McClure on .NET 2.0 builds in Whidbey releases: “Each team is on a slightly different schedule, so each team is putting out bits that have different build of .NET 2.0 Whidbey Framework. It has been my finding that these builds can't be mixed and matched on the same machine.  So, how should you get things working?  Well, you have a couple of alternatives.” (Working with various builds of .NET 2.0 Whidbey Framework) See this post ('The Device Bits in December CTP are older than November CTP' - How and Why does this happen ?) from Amit Chopra, too.
• Christopher Bowen has posted a reminder about using the Whidbey newsgroups: “There are about a dozen groups on Team System alone…” (Microsoft.Private.Whidbey.* Newsgroups - Use Them!)
• Jason Barile on using Team System internally (aka dogfooding): “…we didn't use all the features of Team System, but we did put source control and work item tracking through its paces.  Here's a sample of how we used Team System…” (Rounding the corner…)
• John Lawrence discusses an aspect of Team System extensibility: “Although there is a publicly visible web service, this is not the recommended way to extend Work Item Tracking. Instead, we’re providing a richer client side object model which sits on top of the web service.” (Work Item Tracking Extensibility)
• So far, the reviews on installation have been good. Chris Menegay found it to be “a breeze to install.” (Dec. CTP w/Team System - Success!)

Microsoft Tools for Domain-Specific Languages

• Several people have noted the release of the December CTP for DSL Tools, which is destined to become part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK:
• Jochen Seemann: “The first CTP (community technology preview) release of the complete set of DSL tools is ready for download here.” (First download of the complete DSL tools available)
• Harry Pierson: “Maybe it's not as exciting as what my 2 year old has on tap for Xmas, but some of my Xmas came early when I got the new release of the DSL toolkit.” (Early Xmas Present)
• Stuart Kent blogged about some articles in the works (Tools to create, tools to consume, tools to check). I’m the bottleneck on three articles these guys have written on using this release. I’m hoping to have these ready to go very soon. Two CTPs at one time makes for a lot of work. My apologies for the delay.
• Meanwhile, Jack Greenfield has launched his blog (via Gareth Jones – Another one of the team online and Harry Pierson – The Pharonic Architect is Blogging) with an in-depth post on where Microsoft stands on DSLs: “What we have rejected is the claim that the UML is the most appropriate medium for model driven development, where models are used as source artifacts that are compiled, interpreted, or otherwise used to automate software life cycle activities. On this point, we agree with Grady that UML is not appropriate for all purposes. After all, it is a unified modeling language, so called because it was developed to integrate notational styles used by multiple methodologists, not a universal language that can solve all problems.” (Microsoft and Domain Specific Languages, Reprise)
• And Alan Cameron Wills responds to Grady Booch’s comments (Microsoft and Domain Specific Languages) about his post on UML (Why not base domain specific languages on UML?): “UML is good for lots of things, for example helping me analyse a new domain, or helping me design or understand code.” (UML the answer? -- more)
• Steve Cook discusses semantics vs syntax: “Recent postings have talked about “semantics” of graphical languages.  When I was involved in UML development this word caused a lot of argument and confusion.  In my view, it goes like this.” (Graphical languages – semantics vs syntax)
• The December 2004 issue of Application Development Trends has an article on Software Factories: Software factories come into modern times (via Mickey Gousset, who is now enlightened on the subject).
• Stuart Kent presented on the DSL Tools in Visual Studio at the December UK Architect Forum. You can download the slides from here.

Team System Chat

• Shortly after we released the December CTP of Team System, Microsoft India hosted an online chat. I was all set to participate in this chat and was ready to go 90 minutes early. Alas, I fell asleep at the keyboard and awoke with 15 minutes left in the chat. Doh! My apologies to the host and attendees. Steven Borg has a series of posts about the event:
• VSTS Chat - 23 Dec 2004
• VSTS Chat - Expert Answers
• VSTS Chat - Guest Chat

Testing

• Marcelo Russomanno links to Cem Kaner’s article archive: “I've read his article, Architectures of Test Automation [http://www.kaner.com/testarch.html]. I've seen many of these considerations come up in practice, but it's great to have them formalized, or at least written down.” (Hats off to Cem Kaner)
• Sara Ford on test case best practices: “In our test case world, we assume a test case fails, unless we log pass.” (Test Case Best Practice: It’s better to LogPass than to LogFailure)
• Jason Barile wants to know how you do QA: “I'm just curious to get some reports of how QA fits in at other software companies.” (QA roles in other companies)
• Jeff Putz on test-driven development: “You write all of these tests, maybe hundreds, and start to write code that passes the tests. There's no way in hell you'll pass them all the first time you run the tests (if you do, you're doing it wrong). But every test you pass is a little victory toward the bigger goal.” (Little victories in programming with test-driven development)
• Scott Dockendorf has some follow-up information about his recent article on Team System Unit Testing (Images for my "Unit Testing with Whidbey" Article).

Other

• After a few failed attempts, I was finally able to post some slides for presentations Sam Guckenheimer made recently at EuroSP3 (Designing For User Experience – 12/2/2004) and SD Process 2004 (As Simple As Possible, But No Simpler – 12/6/2004) on the Microsoft Download Center (Sam Guckenheimer: EuroSP3 & SD Process 2004 Presentations). Also, see Channel 9’s interview with John Pruitt (John Pruitt - Thinking about the customer in design).
• Want to know more about MSF 4.0? Read Granville “Randy” Miller’s article on the subject on Ask Burton (The Microsoft Solutions Framework: An Integrated Approach to Agile or Formal Software Development Process).
• Johan Lindfors is curious to know where we should spend our money on educating developers. He’s asking about Sweden in particular, but it’s a valid question globally: “We are continuosly trying to improve our strategies when it comes to meeting developers, and helping them educate themselves as well as introducing them to new topics. I am however wondering, are we doing it right?” (How do developers want to be educated?) What do you think?
• Peter Provost has posted some quotes from Ward Cunningham: “Last month I went to see Ward give a talk over at MS Research. During the presentation I tried to type into my phone many of the funny and insightful things he shared with the group. Here are some of my favorites.” (Ward Cunningham Quotes)
• Using Virtual Server to “virtualize” your Team System experience? Be sure to see this post (Some Performance "Tips" for Running Virtual Server 2005) with some performance-enhancing suggestions from Bob Roudebush (RoudyBob) (via Bruce Cowper). There’s also a Virtual PC FAQ (via Richard Hundhausen).