2005–03–21: Team System Pricing & Licensing

Visual Studio Team System

• NDoc is an open source utility for creating documentation based on .NET assemblies and has been a frequent topic on Rick LaPlante’s European Tour. He’d like to hear more about what you expect from Team System in this area [nDoc??].
• Joel Semeniuk surfaces to blog about his Team System activities that have him globetrotting and racking-up frequent flier miles [Joel is Heads Down in Team System]. Mitch Denny has been heads-down in Team System, too [I'm back! Did anyone notice?].
• Tim Anderson examines the many, diverse influences that he finds when examining Team System [Influences on Team System].
• Mickey Gousset is exploring Team System and blogging about his experience [Creating an ASP.NET 2.0 Project, sorry, I mean Web Site, in VSTS].

My VSTS Posts

• Introduction to Logical Datacenter Designer
• MSDN Technical Briefing: VSTS Product Team European Tour
• Team System Highlights from Today's Whidbey Chat - Rick LaPlante's Q&A
• Team System Highlights from Today's Whidbey Chat - Sam Guckenheimer's Q&A
• Recommended Reading: Inside Software Factories Interview with Steve Cook
• Upcoming Visual Studio Team System Live Webcast Schedule
• Robin & Liangxiao Demonstrate the Application Designer (Part 1)
• Robin & Liangxiao Demonstrate the Application Designer (Part 2)

Architecture

• Joel Semeniuk blogs about the Team System Distributed System Designers and how Borland Together can be complementary to Team System [Team System Distributed System Designers].
• Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell interview Paul Sheriff about all things architecture on last week’s episode (March 15 – #114) of .NET Rocks! [Play|Download].
• It’s widely held that the earlier in the life cycle that you find and address a bug, the cheaper it is to do so. What if you could test architecture? patterns & practices is developing guidance for architecture testing [Architecture Testing].

Development

• Ian Huff continues has posted Part 2 of his postings on what the performance report tells you [Analyzing a performance report in Visual Studio Team System 2005 Part 2: The Function, Caller / Callee and Calltree views].
• Krzysztof Cwalina has added new guidelines for throwing exceptions to the .NET Framework Design Guidelines [Design Guidelines Update: Exception Throwing].
• Dana Epp examines Microsoft’s security efforts since making secure software a prime focus in product development [Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle]. Michael Howard has a link to the SDL doc in his blog [Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) document is now live].

DSL Tools & Software Factories

• Harry Pierson did a good job of summarizing the recent posts about DSL Tools [DSL Toolkit Team Roundup], including:
• Gareth Jones – Adding a "New item" in a DSL Tools target designer
• Stuart Kent – Next Release of DSL Tools
• Keith Short – On Definitions
• Steve Cook – Inside Software Factories interview
• Software Factories by Jack Greenfield and Keith Short (with Steve Cook & Stuart Kent) has received a Productivity Award in Software Development’s 15th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards at Software Development West [Jolt Winners 2005].

Events

• Each day this week (Monday – Friday) there’ll be a Team System Webcast at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (-8 GMT) [Upcoming Visual Studio Team System Live Webcast Schedule].
• Visual Studio Team Systems Architect Bootcamp (Canada) – “This hands-on, instructor-led course will provide the knowledge and skills required to understand and evaluate new technologies being introduced in Visual Studio Team System, Team Architect edition.”

Project Management

• This month’s e-zine from Net Objectives includes a preview chapter from the upcoming book, Agile Software Development Explained: A Manager's Guide by Alan Shalloway [Agile Explained].
• David Anderson has been a blogging steadily as of late. Here’s what he posted last week:
• Stop Estimating
• Drive Variation out of your Constraint
• MSF for CMMI
• Agile Estimating
• Badly Burned C Level
• More brains than agility
• Barry Gervin agrees with David Anderson that software estimation can be a frivolous endeavor [Using VSTS to Stop Estimating]. Sean McBreen is looking at software estimation, too [Software Estimation – Getting it right].
• Dave Froslie discusses Scrum sprint goals and classifies sprint types in this post [Setting Sprint Goals].
• My team is using Scrum to manage our documentation project [Using Scrum to Manage Documentation Projects].

Team Software Development

• On the Team Foundation team blog, Amy Hagstrom introduces process template customization [Customizing Process Templates].
• Randy Miller blogs about what it takes to customize MSF for Agile Software Development [Customizing MSF for Agile Software Development].
• Joe Sango also takes a look at process template customization [VSTS Extended].
• VSTS Tools for Eclipse? David Lemphers and Joe Sango have a GotDotNet workspace [LINK] for working on plug-ins for Eclipse to interface with Team Foundation work item tracking and version control [Can't we all be friends? & Plugin to VSTS].
• Mitch Denny is looking for ways to extend Team System, too [Visual Studio Team System and Yesterday's Weather].

Testing

• The Braidy Tester was stuffing his brain at Software Development West last week and has a great series of posts to show for it:
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 01 (Domain Driven Design)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 02 (Exploratory Testing)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 03 [Prologue]
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 03 (Software Quality)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 04 (Testing in an Agile World)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 05 (Prefactoring)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 06 (Post-Mortems)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 07 (Controversial .NET Topics)
• Stuffing My Brain, Part 08 (Paper Airplanes)
• If you unwind this thread on Josh Ledgard’s blog [Another Believer: "Microsoft Does Listen"], there’s some interesting information on Team System’s testing features [Microsoft listens, even when you're not talking to them].