Visual Studio Team System

• See Sean McBreen’s testimonial [Virtual PC – get it, it rocks!] for using Virtual PC to demonstrate Team System.
• For those looking to use Virtual PC (or Virtual Server) to evaluate Team System, see my post about an article [New on MSDN: Installing the December CTP Release of Visual Studio Team System] written by Dave Bost. I’m hoping this guide will help people in Sam Gentile’s predicament [TFS/Win2K3 Server Part 3 - It's a Bust] and [Team Foundation Server Part 4].

Architecture

• Go watch Ali Pasha demonstrate the Application Designer on Channel 9 [Ali and Dmitriy - Early Demo of Distributed System Designers (Part 1)].
• Thom Robbins shot some video at the Web Services Edge conference of Ali Pasha presenting on Team Architect and posted a link here [Quick Topics with Visual Studio 2005].
• The Distributed System Designers are part of a larger Microsoft initiative called the Dynamic Systems Initiative. For more information, see this recent post [The Dynamic Systems Initiative] by Lewis Curtis and this site [Dynamic Systems Initiative].
• Pedro Silva : The transcript for the DSD chat on Feb 2nd has been posted on MSDN [Distributed System Designers Chat Transcript].
• In this post [Design Pattern Links II], Lance Hunt provides his “…definitive recommendation on learning Design Patterns for .NET developers”.

Development

• NetObjectives has posted their newest streamzine, this time on the subject of writing code that is more maintainable [Code Qualities]. Want to get a taste of agile project planning without consequence? See Agile Planning Game Simulation.
• Raymond Lewallen went looking for custom FxCop rules [Where are all the custom FxCop rules?] and Darrell Norton blogged about David Kean’s Managed From Down Under blog that has several [Custom FxCop Rules].

DSL Tools & Software Factories

• Stuart Kent has a couple of posts that answer questions raised in the newsgroups about our DSL Tools.
• Creating your own DSL / DSL template
• Answers to questions on the domain model designer and future features
• Gareth Jones points to a post by Chris Pratley [OneNote Shared Sessions] on using a feature of OneNote Gareth mentioned in one of his earlier posts about collaborative sketching in modeling tools [Chris on Shared Sessions in OneNote].

Events

• CBR Online : Microsoft will be at EclipseCon next week to “connect with current and future partners” and to show how to extend the Visual Studio IDE [Microsoft debuts at Eclipse conference].

In the News

• ITWeb : The current models for developing software are inefficient and should be replaced by the "software factory" concept, which uses common characteristics to speed up development and implementation, says Microsoft. This emerged this week during a three-city tour by Microsoft representatives to promote the concept of software factories. [Birth of the Software Factory]

Project Management

• David Anderson has posted the third installment in his series on the Declaration of Interdependence [Thoughts on DOI #3].
• David has also revised an earlier post he made on classifying levels of uncertainty [Classifying Uncertainty Revisited].
• Jason Salas : The best software modeling/project management tool you've never heard of: PowerPoint
• Darrell Norton blogs about a new book, Managing Agile Projects [New Managing Agile Projects book available].

Team Software Development

• Buck Hodges is the author of the most recent post on the Team Foundation Team blog with a post that provides an Overview of Branching, Merging, and Shelving. Also, see this extensive post [Chapter 7: Branches] from Eric Sink on the subject of branches.
• Jeff Lucovsky has a post that provides a brief overview of Team Foundation alerts and how to customize their appearance [Team Foundation Alerts].
• Jason Barile announces the availability of a new blog by Akash Maheshwari [Questions about converting to VSTS Version Control? Ask Akash!]. Akash is the program manager who owns the conversion tools for migrating to Team Foundation version control.

Testing

• Alex James has a follow-up post to Peter Jones’ TDD without a D post [Automatic test generation from attributes?].
• Are you a tester looking for a community to join? Jonathan Kohl blogs about an association he found: Association for Software Testing [Association for Software Testing].

Other

• Brad Abrams has a great post about the work Brian Harry did several years ago to make Developer Division more transparent [On BHarry's famous finalization email].