FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

re: FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

Willy-P. Schaub — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:50:55 GMT

Thank you for the candid feedback :)

re: FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

Allen Feinberg — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:41:46 GMT

Thanks for the reply willy. Yes a single quarterly or bi-annual package of with all of the lastest HOLs as a single download would be most excellent.

Obviously you can't solve the different release cycles, different focus, legal compliance, HOL specific prerequisites and regional download bandwidth constraints, BUT you can SOLVE the packaging of all of the materials at REGULAR intervals.

With Project Server integration, MOSS development, and WCF Load Testing, I'd image the base Ranger Image would have to be a minimum of 2 Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs (domain controller, and TFS Server) and additional VMs beyond that for each lab.

While packaging up a bunch of HOL word documents at regular intervals would be a starting point, I'd REALLY like to see a single TFS environment download (even if it was 200 Gigs) released on a regular cadence that had everything ranger related( use the MS Download center and break the package up into 700 rar files and I'll use an auto downloader even if it takes 4 weeks to download here in slow missouri).

If you can't post a really BIG environment VM then take a look at the dependency scripting that sets up the web camps training kit. See the ASP.NET MVC - Intermediate - ASP.NET MVC 3 Testing Setup Lab code.

Thanks again...I just want an easy way to consume all of the ranger guidance...it's just too difficult and to hard to find currently.

re: FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

Willy-P. Schaub — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:45:04 GMT

The challenge of combining the VMs is that we all have different focus, release cycles and more importantly that a consolidated VM introduces immense size and maintenance challenges. Creating one single VM has been and is on the drawing board, especially as part of the rangersvsvmfactory.codeplex.com initiative. However, challenges such as different release cycles, different focus, legal compliance, HOL specific prerequisites and regional download bandwidth constraints need to be addressed first, before we can consider an effective one-image solution.

The reason we introduced the HOLPackage concept for all Rangers new solutions is to ensure that we can easily and consistently create and share a Rangers image within the Rangers community and that anyone can easily apply the Rangers HOL environment setup to any other VM, including Brian’s. Rangers projects, such as tfsintegration.codeplex.com, vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com, vstfs2010rm.codeplex.com and vsdatabaseguide.codeplex.com include a HOLPackage as part of their downloads to allow users of that guidance to setup their HOL environment on their VM.

Would it help if we would allow you to download the complete HOLPackage for all Rangers HOLs as one download?

re: FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

Allen Feinberg — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:03:51 GMT

Sounds like you MSFT guys are unecessarily shipping your internal org chart. I don't really care about who owns what and who doesn't own something else. With TPCs couldn't the rangers simply build off of Brian's VMs and the ranger's projects would just be additive to that image? I can understand that you personally are only responsible for the ranger's HOLs so with that in mind is there a SINGLE VM that includes all of the Rangers HOLs? It's hard enough chasing down all of these HOLs...but for the rangers are you guys shipping a consolidated package of all of your HOLs...or is it hunt and search codeplex (fruitlessly)?

re: FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

Willy-P. Schaub — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:03:50 GMT

Good question :) The Rangers Hands-on-labs (HOL) are not related to the labs that Brian Keller has included on his ALM VM. The Rangers HOLs are associated with the Rangers solutions, see msdn.microsoft.com/.../ee358787 or www.codeplex.com/.../search, most of which have HOLs and all new Rangers solutions where HOLs are a core deliverable.

We have Rangers base images, used by Rangers, which have all the Rangers HOLs pre-installed and the HOL Package which allows those without access to the base image to setup all HOLs in their environment. Again the Rangers base image is not related to Brian's ALM VM.

re: FAQ (2) – What is the Rangers HOL Package all about?

Allen Feinberg — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:45:20 GMT

Willy. Great Blog Post. But where is the list of currently available HOLs from the rangers is this the same 9 HOLs that are delivered as part of the recently released Visual Studio 2010 ALM Virtual Machine + Labs: December 2010 Refresh? Brian Keller commented that no new labs were coming "nothing planned as labs".

blogs.msdn.com/.../visual-studio-2010-alm-virtual-machine-labs-december-2010-refresh.aspx

Is this is something different where can I download a VM with the latest and greatest HOLs? Would this image include the recently released MVC 3 HOLs(I'm looking at the intermediate MVC HOL as a way of demonstrating end to end unit testing with code coverage from TFS and deployment of custom binaries from MVC 3 with team Build 2010? trainingkit.webcamps.ms/AspNetMvc.htm