Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group – December 5th

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

                -and-

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

In the next version of VSTS ( code named "Rosario" ), we are planning on providing early looks at those bits through Community Technology Preview ( CTP ) releases in a VPC format initially ( first CTP was talked about here ). Nice thing about this is that you can try out the bits without fear of polluting your existing environment. One of the downsides of this approach however, is that the downloads tend to be on the large side, and a few customers have had trouble getting all the bits down in tact. Brian Keller has just written a great blog talking about how to deal with this. Please check this post out.

Cameron

I wanted to point out a post that Rob Caron put out a few weeks back that is worth mentioning, as it discusses some changes to the official names of the various Team System product lines, including DBPro. Check out this post for details. For DBPro, the official product name that we went to market with last year was "Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals". That is changing during the Orcas delivery timeline to "Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition". Again, check out Rob's post for reasoning and other details behind these changes.

But from here on out, you may hear us refer to DBPro with the more official "Database Edition" moniker, so wanted to make sure you were aware.

Regards,

Cameron

Brian Keller uploaded another video that was done with Sachin Rekhi a few months back that talks at length about the MSF integration and the DBPro additions to the MSF guidance built into Team System. There is also a good discussion of the role of the database project in regards to the concept of offline database development that DBPro enables. This discussion is real good for folks trying to understand how DBPro supports an isolated sandbox environment where database developers can try out changes without impacting other team members or more importantly, the production database. The talk gets into how some of the other features in the tools as well, such as the use of data generation, database unit tests, etc.

Here's the link: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=334518

Cheers!

Cameron

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I co-presented with my CA colleagues today, showing the DBPro and ERWin 7.2 integration, among a few other things. The recording has a number of technical glitches ( first 30 seconds is nothing but a blank screen, then there is about a 10 second segment where the muzak takes over the presentation, and then the display of the actual demo itself is a bit blurry ), but I believe the points are still made and you should be able to follow along. If you are familiar with DBPro and ERWin, but you haven't seen the integration, jump to about 19:30 in the playback.

In addition to the ERWin integration, I also ended up showing off a little bit of our latest PowerTool drop, specifically the Regular Expression editor for data generation.

Here's the link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/cai/view?id=RD95ZR&role=attend&pw=d%28%26z9QH

Cameron

Folks, be sure to check out the great video Gert Drapers and Brian Keller just completed up on Channel 9. Here's the link:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=334261 

Gert goes into great detail on the functionality enabled not only in our first service release for DBPro, but also about the Power Tools we just recently made available.

Enjoy!

Cameron

The team has had our hands full getting all our V1 bits wrapped up and into Orcas Beta 2, while at the same time preparing and delivering our first Service Release, but we weren't done there! At the same time, we've also been very busy readying our first official PowerTool drop! I'm very glad to see the team deliver on this milestone, as not only do these tools bring new and increased power to our V1 SR1 product, but it also shows how serious the team is in regards to listening to your feedback, and turning that feedback into deliverables. Please take these tools ( details here and here, direct link to bits here ) out for a test drive ( remember, you must have SR1 installed first ), and as always, let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Cameron

Folks, Brian has a great post talking about all the features in TFS that will ship with Orcas. Again, Orcas Beta2 is ready for you to take out for a test drive ( which includes the DBPro bits replete with our Service Release enhancements! ).

Go get it! :)

Cameron

I will be participating with my partners at CA to present a "Taming and Managing Database Change" webcast on August 14th from 1PM EST - 2PM EST. The general gist of the webcast is to show how ERWin 7.2 sits on top of the DBPro project model, and how the two tools team up to attack the enormous problem of data tier change management and risk mitigation. There will certainly be some slides, but we hope to show more demos than slideware during the talk!

For those who want to register on CA's site and have the webcast automatically injected on your calendar with proper reminders, follow this link and register: https://www.ca.com/us/register/event.aspx?e=148065&eis=1

For those who just want the Live Meeting details directly, here you go:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/cai/join?id=RD95ZR&role=attend&pw=d%28%26z9QH

  Subject: Taming and Managing Database Change

  Meeting URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/cai/join

  Meeting ID: RD95ZR

  Meeting Key: d(&z9QH

  Role: Attendee

  Audio Conferencing (Toll): +1 (706) 643-7677 

  Audio Conferencing (Toll-free): +1 (877) 236-1985 

  Participant Code: 4536306

Hope to see you then!

Cameron

We've finally put the finishing touches on a CTP that begins to get you a clearer picture on what Rosario is bound to be. Rosario is the next version of Visual Studio Team Sytem. Please be sure to checkout Jeff Beehler's blog for more details. The version of DBPro that is in the Orcas Beta 2 drop is included in this CTP. Enjoy!

Cameron

On other TFS news, one of our partners, Readify, has gone live with a service that hosts Team Foundation Servers for customers, among other things. Check out this post for more details.

The TFS team has just released another killer power tool that allows web access to the server. Check out Brian's post here for more details.

Just wanted to make sure all you ERWin users out there were aware of the fact that you can now use version 7.2 to model directly against a DBPro project! Please go here for more details. This gives you the ability to make changes to the physical schema of your database and automatically propogate those changes back into the project, injecting the appropriate model into the project as well.

We will be doing a web cast that discusses the features this integration exposes in more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, certainly download an eval copy ( if you don't own ERWin yet! ), and give it a shot!

Cheers! Cameron

Hope to see you folks online at the next TeamSystem chat happening this Wednesday. Here are the details:

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new in Beta 2.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1^st, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

                -or-

Join the chat on Wednesday, August 1^st, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Cheers!

Cameron

So in the last two weeks, while I was traveling in India on business, then taking a vacation for the last week, the team has been quite busy. For details, please be sure to check out Gert's blog, but I'll give you the hilites quickly:

• The team has released our first service pack! Download the bits from this location, and read about the details here.
• Please note that if you downloaded and installed the CTP prior to the service release, you will want to certainly install the service pack. Please read this post for details.
• Also, for those of you keeping up with Orcas, all the functionality that you will experience in the service release will be included in the VSTS version that sits on top of Orcas.
• The TechEd 2007 sessions that many of the DBPro team members presented are now available. Please read this post for details.
• Orcas Beta 2 has hit the wire as well! Go here for download information, and if interested, check out this Channel 9 video of Soma and Scott Guthrie talking about the release.

Lot's of stuff going on! Cheers,

Cameron