bharry's WebLog : Visual Studio Team System

GamCom Talmia - A very cool process automation tool for TFS

bharry — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:11:25 GMT

GamCom have just released a video demo of Talmia, their innovative process workflow tool for Team Foundation Server.

The video shows how an example development process can be implemented so that work items are created and updated automatically along with relevant email alerts, escalation criteria and more. Updates are made interactively in response to user actions and according to the user’s process definitions. The video also shows how running processes can be monitored and reported on to improve process visibility.

Talmia can be used to support any ALM process from project start-up and iteration management through to development and testing. Talmia is available now for TFS 2008 with a 2010 version coming in March.

For more info see Terry Clancy’s recent blog post or go directly to the video demo or web site for Talmia.

Brian

Visual Studio Testing Tools Roadshow in Chicago and Milwaulkee

bharry — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:44:00 GMT

Angela Dugan (Binkowski), a friend of mine in the field, asked that I help her advertise a roadshow she is doing. Here’s what she had to say about it:

Visual Studio Testing Tools Roadshow and Deep Dive

Ram Cherala, Principal Program Manager in the Visual Studio Test Tools Business, will be visiting the Midwest District to provide a deeper dive into the innovative new capabilities being introduced in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Test Elements and Test and Lab Management products.

These sessions are targeted toward Developers, Architects, and Quality Assurance teams. Attendees will be given the unique opportunity to have a first glimpse into the products and interact directly with the Redmond team responsible for designing and delivering these products to the market. We will cover a broad range of important topics including Software Quality Assurance, historical debugging, manual test runner, test impact analysis and test lab management.

Agenda:

8:30am – 9:00am................. Introductions and Continental Breakfast

9:00am – 10:30am............... VS 2010 ALM Tools: Walkthrough of All New Features

10:30am – 11:30am............. 2010 MSDN and Licensing Updates

11:30pm – 12:00pm............. Lunch (provided by Microsoft)

12:00pm – 2:00pm............... Deep Dive and Demos of VS 2010 Quality Assurance Features (Coded UI Testing, Manual Test Runner, Lab Management, etc)

2:00pm – 2:15pm................. Break

2:15pm – 4:00pm................. Quality Assurance Tools: Migration and Integration Options

4:00pm – 4:30pm................. Feedback, Book Raffle & Zune Giveaway

This is a FREE event – Register now to reserve your seat!

Date	Location	Register
Milwaukee Monday, December 14, 2009	N19 W24133 Riverwood Drive, Suite 150 Waukesha, WI 53188	Register Here
Chicago (Downers Grove) Wednesday, December 16, 2009	Neudesic 377 E. Butterfield Road Suite 440 Lombard, IL 60148	Register Here
Chicago Thursday, December 17, 2009	Microsoft Office Aon Center Office 200 East Randolph Drive, Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60601	Register Here

	Ram Cherala is the Principal Program Manager in the Visual Studio Test Tools Business, which is part of the Developer Division at Microsoft. Ram is very passionate about building a well-integrated set of tools and technologies that enable developers build, test and ship quality software.

Book raffle and Zune Give-a-way

One random attendee will be selected to receive a brand new Zune HD!

Team System Web Access 2008 Scalability Update Released

bharry — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:47:00 GMT

While we're talking about perf...

Over the past year we've heard increasing complaints from customers about the scalability of the Team System Web Access Power Tool as more and more people try to use it. The problem is usually manifested as frequent application recycles (you can see if it's hitting you by looking in your event log). We've done a bunch of work in the 2010 release (where we've integrated Web Access into TFS) to improve performance and scalability.

Back in August, our leadership team met to make the hard call on whether to update the 2008 Web Access Power Tool or to just wait for people to upgrade to 2010 to get the fixes. After much debate, we decided that the issues were serious enough that it was worth back porting the fixes and releasing an update - particularly since many customers will not upgrade to 2010 right away.

It took a while to back port, test and customer validate the changes but, today, we released two updates (one a QFE for the TFS object model and the other a new version of the Team System Web Access Power Tool) that should significantly improve the scalability. Most of the issues fixed had to do with memory over allocation or leaking that resulted in memory exhaustion and process recycling.

You can get the updates here:

· KB974402 - QFE for TFS Object Model Assemblies

· TSWA 2008 – Updated TSWA 2008 SP1 Release (full install, you need to uninstall your existing TSWA 2008 instance first)

And you can read a bit more about it on Hakan's blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2009/12/07/team-system-web-access-2008-sp1-scalability-update.aspx

Your mileage with this will vary but to give you some context, it had gotten to the point where our heavily used dogfood server was recycling about once an hour. With the fixes provided here, we are now seeing recycles every 29 hours (which is what the IIS app pool is set to recycle at by default) - so, in other words, pretty much no recycles due to memory consumption issues.

Brian

Lab Management in VS 2010

bharry — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:18:00 GMT

One of the coolest new capabilities in 2010 is "Lab Management". It enables you to automate the setup and configuration of test environments, saving you a bunch of time doing it every time you have a new build you want to test. We first released it in Beta 1, but the truth is it's a V1 product and it just wasn't really ready enough for a lot of people to be successful getting it up and running - installing and configuring it was too complicated.

We've done a ton of work over the past 7 months or so to make it much easier to get up and going, easier to diagnose when there are issues and more reliable when you use it. While what we shipped in Beta 2 isn't done, we believe that most people should be able to get started and see the value of it.

An important part of our release cycle is soliciting feedback from you to know when we are ready to ship. We've gotten a lot of feedback on Beta 2 - particularly on performance as you can see from other posts I'm writing :). We don't feel like we've gotten enough feedback on lab management to be able to tell. We need your help. We've put together a 4 part blog series that covers everything you need to know to get started with Lab Management. I know I'm asking a lot - it requires significant hardware and several hours of time investment, but I really believe if you get it up and working and figure out how to integrate it into your development cycle, it will be a big time saver for you in the long run. If you can, I'd really appreciate you giving it a try. Here are links to the series.

Part 1: Install

http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management/archive/2009/11/18/Getting-started-with-Lab-Management-_2800_Part-1_2900_.aspx

Part 2: Configure TFS, build controller, test controller

http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management/archive/2009/11/18/getting-started-with-lab-management-part-2.aspx

Part 3: Configure system under test – unit testing with a calculator app. Create LE, configure test settings, etc.

http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management/archive/2009/11/20/getting-started-with-lab-management-part-3.aspx

Part 4: Stitch all the pieces together to create the E2E workflow.

http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management/archive/2009/11/23/getting-started-with-lab-management-part-4.aspx

Looking forward to hearing from you...

Thanks,

Brian

Quest releases a public Beta of Oracle integration

bharry — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:15:00 GMT

Quest software has been working on a provider to enable the Visual Studio database tools to work with Oracle databases (refactorying, deployment, testing, analysis, etc). They've just released a public Beta that you can try out with the VS 2010 Beta 2. Read more about it and download the Beta. You can also check out a video demonstration of the capabilities. In it they cover creating a new Oracle database project, importing your schema, managing and altering objects, comparing your changes to the live schema and deploying them back to the database.

Check it out!

Brian

Initial TFS 2010 BPA Tool Available

bharry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:18:29 GMT

We’ve also just released the first cut at the TFS 2010 Best Practices Analyzer that will help you diagnose configuration issues on TFS 2010 servers. It’s a long way from being done – we’ll be continuing to work on it hard between now and the 2010 release but it’s a start.

Updating the BPA tool was a major undertaking due to all of the new TFS topologies and features in 2010. Application Tier scale out, Data Tier scale out, Build agent pooling, Sharepoint flexibility and Lab Management are just a few of the new features that required a pretty major overhaul of the BPA tool. Our goal for this initial release was to get the BPA infrastructure updated to support the new multi-machine topologies, remove all of the old rules that don’t make sense any longer and add a handful of new rules that show we can scan the breadth of a TFS 2010 Server Farm. Over the next few months, we’ll be building out the new rules to provide a more comprehensive validation of a TFS install.

We’d certainly appreciate you giving it a try at some point and letting us know how it works for you.

You can read more about it on Ladislau’s blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/lszomoru/archive/2009/11/17/team-foundation-server-2010-beta-2-best-practices-analyzer.aspx

Brian

SCRUM For Team System V3, Beta 2 released

bharry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:53:00 GMT

EMC (formerly from Conchango) has recently released a Beta of a new release of their popular SCRUM for Team System. This Beta is designed to work with TFS 2010 Beta 2. You can find download details here:

http://scrumforteamsystem.com/cs/forums/4554/ShowPost.aspx

and I recommend checking out Crispin Parker's blog to learn more:

http://consultingblogs.emc.com/crispinparker/default.aspx

Brian

TFS 2010 Power Tools are Available

bharry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:02:00 GMT

The first public build of the TFS 2010 Power Tools are now available. I wrote details about them a couple of weeks ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/11/18/tfs-2010-power-tools-coming-soon.aspx

A reminder – these are really “pre-release” Power Tools. We’re producing this build so that early adopters of TFS 2010 Beta 2 will have them but we’ll be producing a final 2010 Power Tools release near the VS/TFS 2010 launch date.

We’ve also moved our Power Tools from the general Microsoft download site to the Visual Studio Gallery site. This is in an attempt to make it easier to find all of the relevant Visual Studio add-ons.

Here are the links:

1. TFS MSSCCI Provider: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/f959ea32-5ac3-424a-a709-5001a158ebe8

2. TFPT: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/0e69a28f-020c-488b-80b3-f4c89a20621d

As always, if you find any issues, please report them. We are eager to fix any significant issues before the final 2010 release.

You can share questions, comments, etc on: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfspowertools/threads

And you can report bugs at: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio

You can just set the product as TFS 2010 and note somewhere that it is a Power Tool issue and we’ll route it appropriately.

Thanks and sorry for the long wait,

Brian

VS Beta 2 is now available to MSDN subscribers in German

bharry — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:23:00 GMT

In addition .NET 4.0 Beta 2 is available in Arabic.

Here's the SKU list:

Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 2 (x86 and x64) - DVD (German)

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 (x86) - DVD (German)

Visual Studio 2010 Professional (x86) - DVD (German)

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 Web Installer (x86) - (German)

Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 2 Web Installer (x86) - (German)

.NET Framework 4 Full Language Pack Beta 2 (x86) - (German)

.NET Framework 4 Full Language Pack Beta 2 (x86 and x64) - (German)

.NET Framework 4 Full Language Pack Beta 2 (x86 and ia64) - (German)

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Language Pack Beta 2 (x86) - (German)

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Language Pack Beta 2 (x86 and x64) - (German)

.NET Framework 4 Full Language Pack Beta 2 (x86) - (Arabic)

.NET Framework 4 Full Language Pack Beta 2 (x86 and x64) - (Arabic)

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Language Pack Beta 2 (x86) - (Arabic)

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Language Pack Beta 2 (x86 and x64) - (Arabic)

Brian

Beta 2 Survey Results

bharry — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:01:26 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I asked you all for feedback on Beta 2 and pointed you at a survey. I think, all of you that contacted me directly have been contacted by someone to investigate the issues you reported. If not, let me know and I’ll get it fixed. We’ve spent the last week or so assessing the survey results.

One thing that has become clear is that you all really like the release/feature set. There has been a ton of very positive feedback about the new testing features, architecture tools, Intellitrace, Sharepoint tooling, etc. We’re seeing more people choose to go live on this Beta 2 release than we’ve ever seen before – people just can’t wait to take advantage of the great new features.

At the same time, we heard that while the performance has improved dramatically since Beta 1, 30% of you are either very dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with VS 2010 Beta 2 performance. We’ve received a lot of details on what people are unhappy with and most of them revolve around a few areas – typing/intellisense, project load, debugger, some C++ project issues, etc.

30% unhappy customers is clearly extremely unacceptable. We have redoubled our effort on performance and are investigating every customer report. We are looking at VM usage, working set and revisiting our performance tests to make them more reflective of “real-world” customer scenarios. We’ve made some really big improvements, for example, I saw a 40% Intellisense throughput improvement recently and yesterday we found more than 100MB we could cut out of TFS Basic memory usage. We’re continuing to look hard and finding significant improvements.

We have changed some end game plans to make some builds available to customers who have reported issues so that we can validate that we have fixed them. We have also decided to create an RC release that we will make available to people who would like to help validate that the performance issues have been addressed.

I want to thank you all for taking the survey and sharing your opinion. I also want to make sure you know that we’ve heard your feedback and are working aggressively to address it. We look forward to any additional feedback you have – either on the Beta 2 build or on one of the subsequent builds we will make available. Stay tuned for information on further build availability.

Thanks,

Brian

TFS 2010 Power Tools Coming Soon

bharry — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

I think for 6 months or more I’ve been promising that we’d release updated Power Tools to support TFS 2010 “soon”. Well, I apologize that it hasn’t worked out that way. It seems like some higher priority activity always rears its head when we think we are ready to get started on it. But the good news is you won’t have to wait much longer, honestly. :) We’ve been working on them and testing them for the last couple of months and we are now doing final validation of the what we think is the last build. It should be available within a week.

With the new release being so close, I wanted to give you a brief preview of what to expect. The way to think about this release is that we worked to get all of the existing Power Tools that we thought were critical to support Beta 2 adoption working against TFS/VS 2010 and updated to support new 2010 features. You will see that a few of the Power Tools are still not working in this build. We will release another Power Tool update around launch where all of the Power Tools will be working.

This release of the Power Tools will only run in a VS 2010 IDE. Most of the features will work against both a TFS 2010 and earlier servers. However a few features will only work against a 2010 server. More on this below when I talk about the individual features. The 2005/2008 Power Tools can still be used with the 2005/2008 VS installs while using a TFS 2010 server. So pick the version of the Power Tools that matches your client environment.

The first step to getting the Power Tools ready for 2010 was removing all of the features that are now built into the 2010 product (or in some way no longer relevant). If you still want to use some of these features against a TFS 2005/2008 server, you will need to use the TFS 2005/TFS2008 Power Tools. For example, the Rollback command has been added to TFS 2010 and removed from the Power Tools. However, the product feature requires new server side support in TFS 2010. If you want to continue to use Rollback against a TFS 2005/2008 server, you will need to use the TFS 2005/2008 Power Tools.

The list of things we’ve moved into the product includes:

Quick Label – Replaced by the new Team Explorer label dialog.
Rollback command – Replaced by the new TFS 2010 command line Rollback feature.
History command – tfpt history /followbranches replaced by new merge tracking features in both the command line and GUI.
Find Changeset menu – Replaced by built in “Find Changesets…” in 2010
Support for Client Certificates – Built in to TFS 2010
Build Notifications – An improved version is now included in Team Explorer 2010
TFSUsers – Not necessary because TFS 2010 now automatically reacts to Active Directory user name changes.
DestroyWI Command – Incorporated into witadmin.exe
DestroyWITD Command – Incorporated into witadmin.exe
TweakUI Command – Replaced by tf certificates and other 2010 features.
Destroygl – Incorporated into witadmin.exe
changedocUrl – Replaced by Configure menu in Office apps

I’m glad we were able to incorporate so much of the Power Tools capability into the shipping product. Of course, I wish we could have done even more but there’s always next time :)

The next step was getting the rest of the existing features working against VS/TFS 2010. Here’s the list of features supported in the upcoming Power Tools release and the changes we’ve made:

Process Template Editor – Our biggest investment has been in the Process Template Editor. Not only did it require a bunch of new features to support all of the new TFS 2010 work item tracking features but we also invested quite a lot in clean up and bug fixing – we’ve received quite a few bug reports. In all, we fixed 80 bugs in the Process Template Editor. The new Process Template Editor will not edit process templates associated with older TFS versions. If you need to edit a Process Template for TFS 2005 or TFS 2008, use the TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 Power Tools. The new features include.

Support for out-of-the-box 2010 versions of MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMI process templates
Creation and editing of query folders
Creation and editing of custom link types
Support for the new work item form controls: Label, enhanced links control, web page and link labels.
Creation and editing of work item type categories.

Command Line Interface (tfpt) – No enhancements but other than the removed list above, everything should work.
Visual Studio Integration – There’s a bunch of miscellaneous IDE features that have been updated to work with VS/TFS 2010 but without feature enhancements. The most prominent are:

Work Item templates
Alerts Editor
Find in Source Control
…

Check in Policy Pack – Updated to work with VS 2010 while still allowing policies to be shared with older clients.
Best Practice Analyzer – Because the architecture of TFS has changed so substantially in this release (AT scale out, DT scale out, Team Project Collections, new “Job Service”, Lab Management, etc we need to completely overhaul the BPA tool. You can think of this release as the first step. The BPA tool now runs against a TFS 2010 server (however you’ll need to use the BPA tool from previous Power Tool releases against previous TFS versions because the new BPA tool won’t run against a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server). It now recognized all of the components of a TFS 2010 farm but has very few rules to validate it yet. Expect a big increment of new work on the BPA tool in the next Power Tools update.
Windows Shell Extension – Updated to work with TFS 2010 but no new features.
PowerShell Cmdlets – Updated to work with TFS 2010 but no new features.
MSSCCI Provider – Updated to work with TFS 2010 but no new features.

Truthfully, many of the Power Tools required no updates because we maintained pretty good compatibility between 2008 and 2010.

So that leads me to what does *not* yet work in this 2010 Power Tools update. Ironically, the two Power Tools that I wrote :( I’ve started on a new version of TFSServerManager but haven’t completed it yet. For the mean time, I’m afraid you’ll have to live without the benefit of these tools. We’ll have them in shape in a few months and include them in the next update.

Team Members
TFS Server Manager
tfpt createteamproject

Thanks and let me know if you have any questions. I’ll blog an update with the download URL as soon as it is available.

Brian

Early look at the TMap process template

bharry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:26:00 GMT

I've had the pleasure of working with some of the folks at Sogeti on a new process template they are building for TFS 2010 that manifests their TMap testing process on top of TFS and the new VS 2010 testing features. Clemens just sent me a pointer to his blog post about the first publicly available drop of their work. If testing process is something that interests you, check it out.

http://www.clemensreijnen.nl/post/2009/11/11/First-drop-of-TMap-for-VS2010-available-on-Codeplex.aspx

Brian

Japanese 2010 Beta 2 is now publicly available

bharry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:07:00 GMT

.NET Framework 4 Beta 2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ded875c8-fe5e-4cc9-b973-2171b61fe982&displaylang=ja

.NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Web Bootstrapper

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f5e8774-c8dc-4ff6-8285-03a4c387c0db&displaylang=ja

.NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Language Pack

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=178a0003-f791-4ff3-b6f6-633f0ad1740d&displaylang=ja

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68a7173d-7ee5-4213-a06f-f2e943ec9249&displaylang=ja

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 2 Web Bootstrapper

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=206505ec-aa66-4d4e-be26-2b69b7d697d0&displaylang=ja

.NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 2 Language Pack

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f04b5749-218f-4c8e-8673-1436037e0540&displaylang=ja

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate – Web Installer

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=92c65d2d-0a6b-4507-a4dc-767f4cc6e823&displaylang=ja

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate – Iso Image

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dc333ac8-596d-41e3-ba6c-84264e761b81&displaylang=ja

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Team Foundation Server – Iso Image

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6c70fd8f-615e-4203-a028-acb2c2b8b88f&displaylang=ja

Very active blog on testing with 2010

bharry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:42:00 GMT

With Beta 2 out there and garnering attention, the teams producing the new testing tools as part of the VS 2010 release have really begun to blog about it actively. There's a ton of great content on their blog to help you get started and address frequently asked questions. Check out the blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/

Brian

TFS Sidekicks 2.4 Released

bharry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:15:00 GMT

If you haven't ever checked out the TFS Sidekicks from Attrice, here's a great opportunity to look at them. Attrice just released an update (version 2.4) with a bunch of new features and bug fixes.

http://www.attrice.info/blog/2009/11/12/team-foundation-sidekicks-2-4-release/

You can think of the Sidekicks as a little like our Power Tools but from Attrice rather than from Microsoft. They are some great tools and I point users at them all the time. They help fill in gaps and add cool features to TFS. Their permissions side kick tool has some great features for understanding what permission individual users are granted, for instance - a common request we get but haven't had the opportunity to ship in TFS yet.

Check it out!

Brian