You have all seen the exciting announcements being made at //BUILD/, presenting Visual Studio 11, Team Foundation Server 11, Windows 8 and a new era of targeting platforms across devices, services and the cloud.

Visual Studio 11 Readiness

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have been working on their latest conspiracy for a while and now that the cat is out of the bag, as they say, we can announce our Visual Studio 11 Readiness initiative. This initiative is based on our strong foundation of Visual Studio 2010 and will deliver guidance for Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11, focused primarily on ALM.

Our focus is not on what is included in these technologies, but on how to plan, deploy and use them.

What makes the Visual Studio ALM Rangers solutions unique is that they are a combination of the effort and the experience (good, bad and the ugly) of a family of Rangers from a several divers groups – a number of Microsoft groups (product groups, services, user education and evangelists), the ALM Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (ALM MVP), and the community. In addition, we often extend and reference other content, such as Brian Keller’s VM and associated hands-on lab content. This unique mix of people delivers a unique mix of vision, technical expertise and invaluable in-the-field experience … that we jokingly refer to as the Rangers conspiracy.

Who are the Visual Studio ALM Rangers?

• If you are wondering what the Rangers are all about, here is the official version from the 5-year report: “accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for missing features and guidance.”
• A typical personal translation of the official vision is: “resolve challenges with tooling and share guidance to deploy, use and extend Visual Studio in real-world scenarios.”

Keeping Up to Date

To keep up to date with the latest developments of the Rangers, there are a few URLs you might want to bookmark:

• Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rangers
  The Visual Studio ALM Rangers landing page on MSDN, which cross references the solutions, the blogging and other artefacts, such as Ranger publications:
  Visual Studio TFS Branching and Merging Guidance
  Visual Studio TFS Team Project and Collection Guidance
  Visual Studio ALM Rangers—Reflections on Virtual Teams
  
• Get the latest Visual Studio ALM Rangers Solutions
  Consolidated list of Visual Studio 2005, 2008, 2010 and future Ranger solutions and pointers to the specific project sites.
• Find out who is behind the scenes and get to know the Rangers
  Index of some of the Rangers around the world, introducing themselves and the individual behind the Ranger.
  
• Visual Studio ALM Rangers Blog | Willy’s Cave
  Willy-Peter Schaub is a Senior Program Manager for the Visual Studio ALM Rangers at Microsoft. He blogs about all the latest news from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers team, along with ad-hoc posts about the non-IT world. He also tweets on the Rangers Twitter.