Visual Studio Team System

• Willy-Peter Schaub is looking to hear from anyone that has successfully installed the December CTP of Team System (VS.NET 2005 - Looking at the December CTP Release). Drop by his blog and let him know what you think. With Beta 2 around the corner, I think he should give the December CTP a try to get familiar with it. By the time he’s ready to do some serious poking around, Beta 2 should be upon us.

Architecture

• It looks like Bill Ryan is having trouble getting started with the Distributed System Designers in Team Architect (Team System thinks I'm a l0s3r). If you want help ramping-up on this technology, be sure to try the walkthroughs we wrote for this purpose. You’ll find them in the MSDN Library (if you installed it). UPDATE: Ali Pasha has a post on this, too (DSD Walkthroughs - Okay I've got the December CTP, now how do I start using the designers again?).

Development

• Welcome to blogging, Ian Huff. Ian is a developer working on the profiling tools in Team System. In his first post, he pulls out all of the stops and gives a great introduction to these tools (Using the new Visual Studio Team System Profiler in the IDE - Part 1: Starting a new performance session).

DSL Tools & Software Factories

• Just a quick note here – the December CTP of the DSL Tools only works with Beta 1 or Beta 1 Refresh. It is not compatible with the December CTP of Team System.

Events

• VSLive! is underway in San Francisco. Yesterday, Eric Lee and Ajay Sudan presented on Team System. Here are some posts with summaries of those presentations:
• Steven Borg : VSLive2005 - Eric Lee - VSTS: Enterprise Development and Testing Tools
• Steven Borg : VSLive2005 - Ajay Sudan - Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Sudio 2005 Team System
• See the last couple of paragraphs of this post (If I tell you, I have to...) from Dennis v/d Stelt that addresses this nay-sayer article (Is Burton Really Ready?) from last summer in CRN.

In the News

• Here’s some media coverage from VSLive!:
• eWeek : Microsoft Plugs Visual Studio Resources
• c|net : Microsoft pitches new Visual Studio tools
• CRN : Microsoft To Release Whidbey CTP, Avalon And Indigo For Windows XP Soon 

Project Management

• Now you can sign the Declaration of Interdependence, which was announced in this post (Declaration of Interdependence) by David Anderson.

Testing

• Sara Ford explores the differences of automated and manual testing, and when to which, in this post (Automation Testing versus Manual Testing Guidelines).
• Patrick Steele reflects back on NUnit’s origins in JUnit and the rise of attributes in unit testing for .NET (Unit Testing is not difficult).
• Scott Bellware applauds Brad Wilson on a comment he made in the TDD Yahoo! group about not testing internals, even though you can in Team System (Great Comment on Testing Internals by Brad Wilson). What do you think?