Chris Bowen's Blog : Team System

New Team Foundation Server Guide and Project Server Connector

cbowen — Fri, 25 May 2007 01:29:48 GMT

Team Development TFS Guide

The Patterns & Practices team's J.D. Meier posted that Beta 1 of the "Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server" guide is now available on the CodePlex community site.

Here is the chapter listing:

Introduction
Ch 01 - Introducing the Team Environment
Ch 02 - Team Foundation Server Architecture
Ch 03 - Structuring Projects and Solutions
Ch 04 - Structuring Projects and Solutions in Team Foundation Server
Ch 05 - Defining Your Branching and Merging Strategy
Ch 06 - Managing Source Control Dependencies in Visual Studio Team System
Ch 07 - Team Build Explained
Ch 08 - Setting Up Continuous Integration with Team Build
Ch 09 - Setting Up Scheduled Builds with Team Build
Ch 10 - Large Project Considerations
Ch 11 - Project Management Explained
Ch 12 - Work Items Explained
Ch 13 – MSF Agile Projects
Ch 14 - Process Templates Explained
Ch 15 - Reporting Explained
Ch 16 - Team Foundation Server Deployment
Ch 17 - Providing Internet Access to Team Foundation Server

A good resource of industry practices and recommendations for those of you using or considering using Team Foundation Server.

Project Server 2007 VSTS Connector Preview

Also on CodePlex, the Visual Studio Team System Rangers team announced availability of a preview of the Project Server 2007 VSTS Connector:

The Visual Studio Team System Project Server 2007 Connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities of VSTS with Project Server 2007. It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution. Future versions of Team System will have native integration with Project Server, in the meantime this Connector solution is the best way to integrate the two Microsoft products.

The direct link to the Connector preview is http://www.codeplex.com/pstfsconnector

-Chris

Prescriptive Guidance for Visual Studio Team System

cbowen — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:45:31 GMT

The Patterns & Practices team has just released an excellent set of prescriptive guides for Visual Studio Team System.

Read the detailed information in J.D. Meier's announcement post, but here are the direct links:

Explained: Branching in Team Foundation Server
Explained - Structuring Your Solutions and Projects in Source Control with Team Foundation Server
How To: Perform a Baseless Merge in Team Foundation Server
How To: Step Through Creating a Custom Check-in Policy for Team Foundation Server 2005
How To: Step Through Creating Your Source Tree in Team Foundation Server 2005
How To: Structure Your ASP.NET Applications for Team Foundation Server
How To: Structure Your Source Control Folders in Team Foundation Server
How To: Structure Your Windows Applications for Team Foundation Server
Source Control Practices at a Glance (updated)
Source Control Questions and Answers (updated)
Video: How To - Migrate from VSS to Team Foundation Source Control
Video: How To - Setup Your Source Tree in Team Foundation Server
Video: How To - Structure Your ASP.NET Projects for TFS

As J.D. mentions, keep an eye on the Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project on CodePlex as more guides, recommendations, and instructional resources are released!

-Chris

Team System Public User Group Meeting - Dec. 21st

cbowen — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 14:08:33 GMT

The Boston area's newest user group, the Team System Public User Group, will be having its first meeting at the Microsoft Office at 201 Jones Road, Waltham this Thursday (12/21) from 5:30-7:30.

Agenda from the site:

This meeting will kick off the user group as a whole and a presentation and discussion:

"The State of Team System"
A discussion and exposure of various Visual Studio Team System initiatives inside and outside of Microsoft. Expect discussion of SP1 which is imminent in its release. A lot of focus will be placed on an inventory of “Collaborative Community Source” projects and commercial third party applications as well.

For more information about the group and meeting, see Michael Ruminer's post on the new group. From Michael's post:

This months meeting will focus on a meet and greet and then a presentation/discussion of existing initiatives around VSTS/TFS both inside and outside Microsoft and both third party commercial and collaborative source projects that exist out there. Are you involved in any? Do you know of any? Do you have a special project you'd like to start up? If so bring that info along so that if my inventory misses it you can fill us all in.

-Chris

Launch Event for Team System Edition for Database Professionals

cbowen — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:52:50 GMT

The New England launch event for Visual Studio Team System's new Database Professionals role is coming to the Boston area (Waltham) on December 14th from 8:30 AM - 1:00 PM.

This new Team System role complements the existing Architect, Tester, and Developer roles, providing many new features for working with databases:

The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of your choice

Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change

A New T-SQL editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans

SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and a database) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync

DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync

The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to create database unit tests using T-SQL or managed code

DataGenerator lets you create data generation plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based upon your existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior to running unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

You can read more about these features here.

Full details of the launch event are attached below. Register for the Boston/Waltham event or visit http://teams-deliver.com for other cities and more information.

Hope to see you there!

-Chris

Keeping competitive means leveraging your data to provide your people with the tools they need to drive sales, efficiencies, and customer satisfaction. Visual Studio Team 2005 Edition for Database Professionals delivers a market-shifting database development product designed to manage database change, improve software quality through database testing, and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and life cycle development to the database professional.

Join us at one of 23 cities to learn how Visual Studio 2005 for Database Professionals can help your SQL DBAs and Visual Studio developers.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
SQL development teams, developer teams writing against databases

WHERE ARE THE EVENTS?
Events are held in 23 cities across the United States.

Atlanta GA 11/30
Boston MA 12/14
Chicago IL 12/12
Cincinnati OH 12/07
Dallas TX 12/13
Denver CO 12/13

Detroit MI 12/05
Ft. Lauderdale FL 12/12
Houston TX 12/14
Los Angeles CA 12/07
Milwaukee WI 12/06
Minneapolis MN 11/29

Mountain View CA 12/5
New York City NY 12/12
Philadelphia PA 11/30
Phoenix AZ 12/12
Pittsburgh PA 11/28
Raleigh NC 12/14

Seattle WA 12/14
San Diego CA 12/6
St. Louis MO 11/30
Tampa FL 12/5
Washington DC12/5

AGENDA
  7:45 a.m. - 8:30 a.m. Registration & Continental Breakfast
  8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. Joining Forces: Assimilating Data Experts into the Development Team
  9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Taking Control of Database Change
10:30 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. Break
10:45 a.m. - 11:45 p.m. Automate Database Testing to Improve Quality
11:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Lunch
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Panel Discussion