If you’re one of the lucky ones to be attending the ALM Summit this week (I’m not), you’ve been able to experience first-hand the bevy of announcements made concerning Visual Studio Update 2.  An evaluation CTP (read: Not supported, not “go live”) has been dropped and is ready for feedback.

Brian Harry explains it best in his blog post (as always), but here’s a quick list of my highlights:

• You can tag work items: Similar to tags on blog posts, you can place various tags on work items to help with categorization and organization.
• Web-based test case management:  Think Test Manager (MTM) in the browser.  You can do basic management and execution of test cases via the web.  This will make it much easier to perform manual tests on non-Windows platforms.
• Unit testing
• Playlists: Create arbitrary test lists/groups.
• Windows Phone app support
• Fakes & Stubs has been moved down to VS Premium (still in Ultimate)
• Office 2013 support
• Blue Theme – if you still can’t get past the reduction of color in VS 2012.

But nevermind all that – did you hear that Team Foundation Service (compare) now supports Git repositories?  More on Brian’s blog.

As you may or may not know, my primary geography of responsibility is basically the entire western United States.  Scaling to support thousands of customers involves a lot of prioritization, packed travel schedules, and “breadth”-type activities.

While I think I’m pretty good about replying to email and phone calls (let me know here), I’m always looking for other manners to be more accessible to customers.  To this end, I’ve set up virtual office hours for this spring (running through June 2013).  I’ll be holding office hours every Friday (well, most Fridays ;)) for 1 hour (and will add more time if this becomes at all popular) in the mornings (9AM Pacific, 10AM Mountain).

To do this, I’m following the lead of some of my peers and using OHours.org to manage online office hours.  Per that site, here’s how it works:

• Each office hours session is broken into 4 15-minute segments
• Anyone can RSVP for a 15-minute session
• Upon RSVP, I’ll send Lync and phone info to you

I think the advantage to using this process is that I’ll know if anyone plans to show up.  There’s no point in sitting on a Lync call if no one plans to join!

Here’s the link to view and sign up for my office hours:  http://aka.ms/SteveLangeOfficeHours

Please feel free to sign up and join me for a chat one of these Friday mornings!

You’ve probably found a few comparisons on the interwebs comparing the “traditional”, on-premise TFS with the new cloud-hosted Team Foundation Service.  I get asked about this a lot – as a result, I thought I’d share the slide deck I used to drive this conversation.  Please let me know if you have any questions!

Basically, TF Service is a nice way to get up and running quickly, without worrying about infrastructure, backups, etc.  What you lose is some customization, lab management, and SSRS reporting.

Happy developing!