Brian Keller: Technical Evangelist for Team System

The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing Whitepaper is now published. This paper is in the same format of the very popular 2005 licensing whitepaper but now reflects the licensing changes which have been made for 2008. The spirit of these documents is to answer common licensing questions about Visual Studio Team System, and most of the verbiage centers around Team Foundation Server.

Overall the licensing for 2005 and 2008 is very similar, with a few exceptions. These exceptions are generally less restrictive than in 2005 and should come as a welcome surprise to those who have faced these challenges in the past. I encourage you to read the licensing whitepaper to read more, but here is a summary of the biggest change:

"File-a-bug scenario" - Many customers would like to allow end-users of an internal application to file bugs or enhancement requests directly against Team Foundation Server to be addressed by the development team. But in the 2005 licensing, this scenario would have required every user to be properly licensed with a CAL for Team Foundation Server. If your application was consumed by many users this could become quite expensive. But now with Team Foundation Server 2008 we allow a user to achieve this scenario without requiring a CAL. There are still restrictions on what a user can and can't do, but generally speaking the "file-a-bug scenario" which many customers have asked for can now be achieved without a CAL. See the licensing whitepaper for more details. In addition, the new "Work Item Web Access" feature of Team Foundation Server will make it easy to extend a Web client to those users for the purpose of achieving this scenario. Work Item Web Access is essentially a stripped down version of Team System Web Access which only provides the capabilities enabled by the new "File-a-bug scenario." Hence you can grant your end-users access to this interface without needing to closely monitor how they use the system.

I hope that the licensing whitepaper is useful and helps to dispel many of the questions surrounding Visual Studio Team System licensing. As always, we welcome your feedback on how we can continue to make it better.

A new Community Technology Preview was just released for Team System Web Access 2008 SP1. Hakan Eskici has all of the details:

Team System Web Access (TSWA) 2008 SP1 (CTP) · What’s New in TSWA 2008 SP1? · Download the CTP for TSWA 2008 SP1 Work Item Web Access (WIWA) 2008 (CTP) · What’s WIWA? · Download the CTP for WIWA 2008

I just got done installing this release - it was a 5 minute project, very easy! Even though Windows Server 2008 isn't listed in the system requirements as a supported operating system, I went ahead and installed both releases (TSWA + WIWA) on Windows Server 2008 and it's working like a champ. Update: Buck Hodges just posted a comment to indicate that Windows Server 2008 is in fact a supported platform. This will be updated in the docs.

One tip, once you get everything deployed if you want to edit configuration settings just open up the web.config file in the respective \program files\<app>\web folder. Be sure to open the file with elevated permissions (e.g. "Run as Administrator" either Notepad or Visual Studio) or else you'll get a permissions error when you try to save the file. One thing I did was change the default Team Foundation Server to the one I use most often. See the <tfServers> tag.

Reader's of Brian Harry's blog will be familiar with the "dogfooding statistics" he posts about related to how we use Team Foundation Server at Microsoft. Brian has blogged about our deployment topology, the number of teams using TFS, the sheer scale of the number of work items and check-ins, and so on.

But a question which frequently comes up is related to how Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server to really drive business decisions. How do you know if you're on schedule? When will a feature be "done"? Where might additional resources be required? What are the latest roadblocks being faced across your teams? Answering these questions across a team of even ten people can be a challenge, let alone the hundreds or even thousands of people who work on products of "Microsoft scale."

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Beehler who is the "Chief of Staff" for Visual Studio Team System. In addition to having a really cool title, Jeff is responsible for overall coordination of the teams who build Visual Studio Team System. Jeff has spent his career at Microsoft inventing better processes for managing large software projects, and he shared with us some of the ways he relies on Team Foundation Server every day to help him make project management decisions. Click here for the Channel 9 entry for this video.

A new episode is live and we have a logo (Thanks, Lincoln!)! This week was a TON of fun to film. Scott Hanselman stopped by to share his perspective on the news stories and offer up some awesome impressions. Hilarity ensues...

Click here for the list of topics, including timestamps so you can more easily jump to the content you're most interested in. Enjoy!

A new episode is live and we have a show name! Click here for the list of topics, including timestamps this week so you can more easily jump to the content you're most interested in. Enjoy!

Dan Fernandez recently joined our team to work with Jeff, Charles, and the rest of the Channel 9 / On10 / etc. crew. Shortly after joining the team Dan approached me about the idea of being his co-host for a weekly show covering what's hot in developer news. For some reason which will remain a mystery for all time I quickly agreed and we set to work.

I'm pleased to say that yesterday we filmed our first episode and after spending all night editing it (yes, Dan, I did fall asleep in your office and I'm blogging from your couch) it's online for you to check out. Let us know what you think! You can check out the full agenda, complete with links to what we talked about, here.

 

When I was at TechEd South Africa in October I sat down with Brian Harry to talk about the (at the time) upcoming release of Visual Studio Team System 2008. Brian is one of my favorite people to work with because he's full of great ideas and he is passionate about what he does. Check out the interview to learn about some of his favorite features of Visual Studio Team System 2008. You can also access other Virtual TechEd videos here. Enjoy!

Koders just released a product which integrates nicely with Team Foundation Server to help you perform a full-text search of work items or source code, either across your organization or across Koder's database of open source / shared source projects online. I love the tight integration with Team System Web Access!

For more information see:

·         TSWA + Koders code search screencast:  http://www.koders.com/corp/products/pro/demos/tfswa/

 

·         Koders Pro for .NET Developers: http://www.koders.com/corp/products/pro/microsoft-net/

My colleague Terry Clancy, a business manager on the Visual Studio Extensibility team, is delivering some MSDN Webcasts covering a wide range of partner products which integrate with Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. I have always known Terry to deliver very informative presentations so these should be worth attending. The first of these is tomorrow (January 10th) but they are usually archived if you miss the live session.

Developing Secure Code using Visual Studio Partner Solutions

 

Organizations understand the importance of developing secure software and the unrelenting focus necessary to develop secure code. A number of Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIPs) provide tools to help you write and distribute safe, secure code. In this webcast, we cover a broad range of products available to support software security, including products that help you consistently enact good process to optimize the security of your code base.

 

Attendee Registration URL:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032362136&Culture=en-US

 

 

Defining and Managing Requirements for  Visual Studio Team System using Visual Studio Partner Solutions

 

Developing precise and accurate requirements is a crucial step in the success of a development project or a new business process. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, along with Microsoft Visual Studio partner solutions, can help companies improve their requirements development process. A number of partner solutions provide the capability to define requirements and store them in Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, integrating these requirements into the application development life cycle. In this webcast, we provide a detailed look at requirements solutions that integrate with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.

 

Attendee Registration URL:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032362264&Culture=en-US

 

 

Using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server in Cross-Platform Environments

 

Many enterprise customers have cross-platform environments and need tools that can bridge these environments. A number of Microsoft Visual Studio partners provide solutions that integrate with Visual Studio for language services, embedded systems, and cross-platform tracing, and with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for cross-platform client and team builds. This session provides a comprehensive overview of tools to help you design and implement cross-platform solutions in heterogeneous IT environments. 

 

Attendee Registration URL:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032362716&Culture=en-US 

 

From Brian Randell's blog entry:

For those of you that want to try out Visual Studio Team System 2008 including Team Foundation Server, without having to go through the process of installing the product, we have recently released two VPC images for your use:

The first VPC is what we call the “all-up” image: Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Explorer 2008, Team Suite 2008, Team Build 2008, and bits of Office 2007 in a single workgroup security mode server image running on Windows Server 2003. Over 11 GB uncompressed.

The second VPC is a TFS only image with only Team Foundation Server and Team Explorer. It's just under 7 GB uncompressed. We built this image so that you'd run it under Virtual Server with a private network and do all your dev work and builds from your host computer. We are working on a document that gives you all the details and will post it soon.

Both images expire on April 1, 2008. Updated images will be posted before then (in fact the updated images will have sample data, hands-on labs, and updates like Office 2007 SP1 and the TFS Power Tools that were announced over the holiday period).

As such I have updated my instructions for downloading VPC's using a download manager. This can save you a lot of time when downloading the files, especially when using a or unreliable Internet connection.

One of the best aspects of my job is working with early adopters of Microsoft technology and then telling their stories via case studies, presentations, videos, and other such mediums. Today our Vice President, Soma Somasegar, highlighted some of the new Visual Studio 2008 adoption stories on his blog posting.We have even more great stories on the way, too, many of which will highlight how customers are using not only Visual Studio 2008, but SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 as well! Stay tuned to www.microsoft.com/casestudies for all the latest and greatest...

 Just a quick note to reference the fact that I have updated my original post about how to download the Visual Studio 2008 and "Rosario" VPC's using a download manager. The changes I made are to reflect the fact that there is a brand new CTP of Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" available, and we refreshed the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPC's to extend the expiration date. Of course Visual Studio 2008 is released now so you may not need the Beta 2 VPC's, but until we get the RTM VPC's online these VPC's can still be useful for training or evaluation purposes. I am told that new VPC's are on their way "very soon" but I don't have more details than that.

So why use a download manager? If you don't already use a download manager, especially for large (ok, ginormous!) downloads such as VPC's then I highly recommend it. Not only is the raw download speed much faster because of the simultaneous connection streams the download manager opens, but it's more robust as well, supporting auto-resume in the event that you lose your original connection. It's also nice to be able to queue multiple downloads at once.

For the full updated instructions please refer to my original post.
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And here's the deck from the second session I presented at TechEd South Africa. This session was titled "DEV306: Visual Studio Team System Tips and Tricks." This was a new presentation I created for this conference. The idea of a "Tips and Tricks" tends to be a bit free-form so when I picked up this topic I decided to focus on the wealth of 3rd party and 1st party (Microsoft) utilities, documentation, add-ons, integrations, and other such resources to help people unleash the full potential of Visual Studio Team System. This talk was an hour but it was clear from preparing for this presentation that I could have easily filled an entire day (or more?) with this sort of content just because of the sheer ecosystem that has formed around Visual Studio Team System.

I have augmented the presentation by adding URL's in the speaker notes for each slide whenever there was a relevant resource worth linking to. Unfortunately to fit this presentation under my blog attachment limit I had to cut out some of the fun pictures. ;-)

Special thanks to Accentient for maintaining probably the best all-up list of Team System Widgets.

As promised, attached is my slide deck from the first presentation I delivered at TechEd South Africa 2007. The session was DEV201: End-to-end Database Development with Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. This session was based on a session of the same name which was delivered by Duncan Davenport at TechEd U.S. this year. You can watch Duncan delivering the original session and find lots of other TechEd 2007 session recordings here.

Looks like I picked a good time to leave the country - on the day after I left my building was flooded!

Video: Water main break at Building 18