Rich and I were talking about what we’ve found interesting and/or been looking into last week. There were some interesting product announcements;

Visual Studio LightSwitch – a brand new product aimed at really helping develop data-centric Line of Business applications very easily.

Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management – now to be included as part of MSDN with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Test Professional 2010.

Some of the questions we’ve had from customers this week:

• Can we import test cases (and more) from Excel into Test Manager?
  • Yes – and there’s even a codeplex project that provides a tool to help.
• What’s the difference between the Microsoft Scrum Process Template and the EMC Scrum for Team System Process Template?
  • Good question and we’ve not really looked into the MS Scrum 1.0 process enough yet to give a good answer ourselves. However, Crispin Parker has provided what looks like a very good comparison.
• Can Visual Basic 6 and Access users also use TFS?
  • Absolutely, using the Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider
• How large is the TFS database and what growth should we expect?
  • The only really accurate answer to this is; it depends. How many projects, how many source and other files, average size, amount of churn, number of work items (how many requirements, bugs etc.,), how many builds, tests and so on. I’ve found some internal statistics on the data sizing and growth for TFS for our Developer Division but I’m not sure if they’re shareable. I’m checking and if I can share these I will.
• How is Eclipse integration with Team Explorer Everywhere licenced?
  • If you have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN then it’s included, otherwise you will need both a Team Explorer Everywhere licence and a TFS CAL, and TFS CALs are now included in all levels of MSDN subscription.

Under the “nothing to do with Team Foundation Server but we still like it” category comes PivotViewer, an interesting way to view and interact with large amounts of data, with a great example here.

It looks like we (as in Microsoft) will be at the DevCon event in September (27th –29th), which this year is combining with the Jax event, and we (as in Rich and I) will also be delivering a couple of sessions there. Should be fun.

And finally, a great quote from a customer about his use of TFS and the benefits it can have with off-shoring:

"I have experienced significant productivity increases with a project where I was the sole developer. What I actually found that by tracking tasks, bugs and requirements my daily workflow was improved. I knew what work needed to be done without having to refer back to an external task list. Reporting status back to the project manager was simplified by sending the list of active tasks and bugs.

Currently I am working on a project with an offshore developer. The offshore developer is able to clearly view his tasks without having to refer to an email or Excel spreadsheet. With TFS and work item tracking we have a workflow that is effective and clear."

Cheers,

Giles & Rich