We’ve decided that this blog finally needs to be renamed as the VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) designation has long since gone now. The new blog is therefore called VisualStudioUK : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudiouk/ and if you want...

One of our ALM partners, Black Marble is running a free event on implementing the Microsoft SDL process this Thursday (26th Jan) at the Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford Security should be at the forefront of minds when developing Enterprise-grade solutions...

Some exciting news about a brand new testing event that we are sponsoring. To quote from the Testfest website: “ Testfest is a new and exciting event, bringing testing and QA communities of the ‘traditional commercial’ teams and the game industry teams...

TFS support for Agile practices Tailoring TFS to support your Agile process with process templates Iteration planning Information radiators But I’m not a .NET developer Agile support in TFS 11 A topic that comes up reasonably often is how Team Foundation...

I met Rob Myers at an event recently and he would like to get some anonymous information on ALM for his MSc research project. If you can spare a few minutes to complete the survey he’d be very grateful: “ I am working on a research project as part of...

We’ve just launched a new on-line tool to help provide feedback and inputs into your Application Lifecycle Management strategy and adoption. The tool will take you through the different areas of ALM and provide a report as a summary. There’s no need to...

GoingNative 2012 is a 48 hour technical event for C++ developers. Distinguished speakers include the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup , C++ Standards Committee Chair, Herb Sutter , C++ template and big compute master, Andrei Alexandrescu , STL master...

I run TFS 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on my laptop so that I can demonstrate TFS without needing to be attached to a network (when on a customer site for example). My laptop is (rightly) subject to the corporate management policies so I need to change my...

Got an idea for an awesome WP7 application?  Well, get writing it before the end January 2012 and you can earn points (and we all know that points make prizes) in addition to the riches your app could generate in the marketplace. More details from...

Microsoft UK have just launched the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Assessment which is designed to quickly identify how an organisation approaches software development from requirements to release.  Based on your answers, the assessment will...

The Windows Azure SDK (November 2011) has just been released and one of the updates caught my eye: Team Build: The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 now offer MSBuild command-line support to package your application and pass in properties. Additionally...

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 team will be at EuroSTAR, Europe’s premier event for software testers, in Manchester next week.  Find out more about the event by visiting their site here We have some great opportunities to get expert support on...

In the run up to the November euroSTAR test conference , euroSTAR has started publishing a number of short podcasts on test related topics and there are three I’d like to point out (there are other podcasts there but these are the ones that relate directly...

I ought to build up to this quite slowly in case the excitement is too much for the more sensitive reader, but the latest version of the Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN Licensing White Paper is now available ! But seriously folks, this can be a useful document...

If you’re interested in a five day Scrum development course then you may be interested to know that Simon Reindl currently has places on the November course. This will be run at the Microsoft Campus in Reading from the 7th –11th November. Course summary...

I want to highlight an easy way to create project reports from data held in Team Foundation Server 2010 using Excel. There are a series of reports provided in the standard process templates (MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMi) in both SQL Server Reporting...

I had an interesting email update about Scrum for Team System today – version 3 is now open sourced and available from Codeplex , with support provided by Crispin Parker: " Scrum for Team System has been my full time job for the past 4 years. Now...

If you’re interested in attending the Application Lifecycle Management for the Microsoft Platform summit in Redmond from 14th – 18th November then you can register here . Speakers include: Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President of the Visual Studio team...

We’ll be at the iqnite UK 2011 conference on the 6th October at the Russel Hotel in London. Microsoft is one of the sponsors of this conference and to quote the organisers: “Communication, discussion and information - this is the key focus...

We’re going to TestExpo next week at the QE2 conference center and I’m delighted that Danny Crone of nFocus will be presenting on “ How can test tools help with the challenges of tomorrow’s world? ”. It looks like an interesting...

Brian Harry has extended the number of “bharry” activation codes for TFS Service Preview, so have give it a go if you’re interested! Cheers, Giles

Wow, I’ve been struggling to keep up with the releases coming out so this is just a quick summary in case you haven’t seen it all. I’m then going to allocate some time to look at each of these in more detail and report back: Hosted TFS The Windows Azure...

The EuroSTAR Virtual Conference on Software Testing takes place tomorrow and we’re going to be providing on-line chat coverage of our Microsoft Visual Studio “booth” together with nFocus and TestHouse . If you’re interested in having a look at the exhibition...

I’ve been dabbling with TFS event handlers and check-in policies recently – which came about because I had a meeting with a Team Explorer Everywhere (TEE) user a few days ago and he mentioned that one of the things he’d like to see is the ability to include...

Visual Studio 2010 introduced significant new testing tools including the notion of “actionable bugs”. An actionable bug contains a configurable collection of diagnostic data including keystrokes, event logs, system information, IntelliTrace logs and...