bharry's WebLog

Cool stuff coming for Visual Studio Team System

VSTS Training Material

Over the past several months I've been hearing a lot of people asking about the availability of training for Team Foundation Server.  I've heard it from end users who are working on their adoption plans and from training partners who want to add a VSTS offering to their repetoire.  I'm pleased to let you know that we've been working on it for months now and the results of that effort are nearing fruition!

We have two sets of training material in the pipeline right now:

"200" level - This includes 20-25 hours of self guided training material that will be made broadly available for download and is intended to teach the "how-to's" of using Team System.  It is broken into a set of modules so that you can go at your own pace and focus on the components you are most interested in.  The material includes:

• A VPC with sample projects and data so that you can see how VSTS's features work on "real-world" project and experiement with it.
• Videos, slides and other e-learning material.
• A set of Word files containing labs or modules for each of the VSTS components.

"300" level - This includes 32-40 hours of instructor lead advanced usage and customization material.  The 300 level material will generally only be made available to training partners as the material must be delivered by a trained instructor.  It is broken into about 12 relatively independent modules covering various aspects of VSTS.  Based on our early experience with it, this course will require 4 full days of classroom time to adequately cover the full set of information.  The material includes:

• A VPC with sample projects and data - based on the 200 level VPC but enhanced with additional content to support the more in depth training.
• Slides and speaker's notes for the trainer to present.
• Labs with step by step instructions.

I'm really thrilled to be able to provide this and I think it's going to be a big help for people who are making the leap to VSTS.  The content will be released over the next couple of monts (with the 200 level content coming out first).  We're working now to line up training organizations to be in a position to deliver the 300 level material when it is available.  If you are interested in getting access to the material (200 or 300), please contact your Microsoft Developer Solutions Specialist, Microsoft Account Manager or reseller.  If only a few people out there contact me directly about it, I can probably manage forwarding you to the right people :)

Team Foundation Server community add-ons

I just got mail the other day about a few cool new TFS add-ons that an internal team built and have posted for the public.  I sometimes hear people question how relevant Microsoft's dogfooding of TFS is to the broader population.  First, I believe that the quality, scale and direct feature feedback we get internally is really valuable but, these add-ons demonstrate another key reason it's valuable.  It's one thing to have our one little team in Developer Division building and delivering team development and collaboration features for the world.  It's quite another to have every team at Microsoft building tools and solutions based on our commercial product and that we can provide to all customers.  Over time, it will magnify our ability to deliver value to you at least 10 fold.

Philosophy aside - here's the cool new tools.

Code Review (CodePlex) - A cool add-on that includes a code review work item type and a checkin policy that works with it and helps manage the process of code reviews on a development team.

http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=TFSCodeReviewFlow

Custom Path Policy (Code Gallery) - A great add-on that enables you to scope checkin policies to portions of your source tree.  TFS only supports project wide checkin policies but this add-on enables you to restrict it to certain folders.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=96d7da50-0d61-4230-9af9-49684ae9881e

Event Subscriber UI (Code Gallery) - This one looks a bit less developed to me and may need further work before broadly useful, but the idea is good.  It's a tool to help you create and manage finer grained subscriptions to TFS events than the TFS UI supports.