We’ve got a few places left for this session next Tuesday, so if you fancy coming along to see a walkthrough of pretty much the full lifecycle then just let us know by emailing ukvsts@microsoft.com . The agenda is here . Cheers, Giles

Power Tools compatible with the Release Candidate are now available . This includes everything in the Beta 2 Power Tools release plus some bug fixes and a return of the Team Members functionality which adds a new node under each Team Project to the Team...

Registration for UK Tech Days events from 12 th to 16 th April is now open: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays . Days 1 & 2 are focussed on Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010 and .NET 4.0. UK Tech Days is a week-long series of free...

The Lab Management team have released a VHD for Lab Management , which enables you to try Lab Management scenarios. It is single VHD available for download with the following installed: TFS with Lab Management pre-configured, VS Ultimate with a sample...

We’re going to be running a 3 day course on Team Foundation Server from the 14th – 16th April. This is a QA delivered course run at the Microsoft Campus in Reading .This is a course that combines a 2 day and a 3 day course into a single 3 day course....

Black Marble moved offices recently , and they have been having some trouble with their normal phone numbers. If you’d like to go to this event , but have had any difficulty in registering please try this alternative phone number: 0845 644 7656 Alternatively...

Like to take a step back and rebaseline the stack of products and technologies that make up the Microsoft application platform? Here’s a really excellent summary of the current application platform . Cheers, Giles Technorati Tags: .NET , Microsoft Platform

The new dashboards that you get when you use Office SharePoint Server/Enterprise SharePoint with TFS 2010 are excellent. The ability to take an Excel report (possibly created for you from a Work Item Query) and use the SharePoint Excel Data Services to...

We’re running a free demonstration of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server at the MS Campus, Reading on the 2nd March. Here’s the blurb: This session demonstrates how Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server can be used throughout the lifecycle of...

A very interesting post from Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson on what’s new in the MSF Agile and CMMI process templates in 2010 , specifically; Why they are now web hosted, rather than local files Content changes following customer feedback from Beta 1 Cheers...

It’s not a definitive list but I’m aware of a few UK events on the horizon around Visual Studio, some of which I’ve mentioned before, but I thought it would be worth a quick recap, all free except the 18/19th march training course: 25th Feb, Edinburgh...

Although the Release Candidate’s purpose was to tackle the performance issues identified in the IDE in Beta 2 there were also a few feature changes. In particular the Test tools have had feedback incorporated to help with the user experience. There is...

This post form Kirill Osenkov is an interesting summary of the improvements that have been made in memory consumption of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE between Beta 2 and RC. An interesting comparison from the post: “After finding and fixing a lot (a lot...

If you had any modelling projects in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, and you’ve installed the RC, then you’ll need to apply the following upgrade tool to make those elements compatible with the RC. You will need to do this for: UML Model Elements and Diagrams...

If you need to give the TFS 2010 data warehouse a kick or change the update interval then you’ll need the web services. You can find them on your TFS server here: http://<tfsservername>:8080/tfs/TeamFoundation/Administration/v3.0/WarehouseControlService...

I’ve replaced my DVD drive on my laptop with a second hard drive. This means I have enough room to keep a few virtual machines on my second drive, and I think they run better from a separate drive. The downside? On the rare occasions that I want to install...

Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and .NET 4.0 have now been released for general download – i.e. you don’t need to be an MSDN subscriber. An interesting and timely blog from one of the UK MVP’s-  Martin Hinshelwood – he’s successfully upgraded...

Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010 and .NET 4.0 Release Candidates are all available for download if you have an MSDN subscription . To summarise some useful posts: Jason Zander’s blog explains what the RC addresses, and includes a video...

I really like the capability to create automated tests from manual tests in Visual Studio 2010. I’ve been playing with it a little recently and I though it was worth quickly running through it as it joins up the use of Test Manager and Coded UI Tests...

Stuart Preston has formed a new UK Application Lifecycle Management User Group . To steal the description from the home page: “The UK ALM User Group is for practitioners of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC...