Ozzie Rules Blogging

Microsoft Dev Tools Ecosystem Summit -makes me mad!

Just recieved this in email and must admit it made me mad!

Why did this event (which looks to be a great time) make me Mad?

I can not believe i didn't think of doing something like this several months ago!

I guess that is okay, a lot of what I would want to cover several months ago wasnt' really ready for prime time.  

That said with PDC around the corner i no longer have that excuse!

If there is an interest I guess my next steps needs to be the Microsoft briefing center to start securing dates.

let me know what you think!

Chuck

*********** 

In September, the VS Ecosystem Product & Marketing team will host our annual conference for developers who extend Visual Studio.  This is an opportunity for product teams to educate tool builders on how to integrate with our current products as well as share our future plans to help the partners evolve with us.  For the first time we are making two days of the conference open to all VSX developers so the general community can learn how to extend our existing technologies.  We’ll then narrow the audience to the VSIP program members on the third day to discuss our NDA business plans & product strategies.

The Microsoft Dev Tools Ecosystem Summit will have 3 parts:

· Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) Developer Conference: Presentations that are open to all developers who extend Visual Studio, including VSIP partners, the VSX community, and internal Microsoft employees.  The content & demos should be 80% focused on VS 2008 with some high-level talking points about how these features will improve in Dev10.

· Partner Business and Strategy Day:  For VSIP partners and NDA insiders only, focusing primarily on the business strategy, marketing discussions, and early information about undisclosed technologies.

· VSIP Developer Clinic: VSIP program members meet 1:1 with Microsoft subject matter experts.

If you have a session topic you’d like included in this event please send a draft title & abstract by 7/18 to AnthC & HHodges.

Attendee Registration

General Extensibility Developers: Community VSX Developers can register for the conference here: http://msdn.com/vsx/conference/.  A small registration fee was created for the general public to minimize no-shows.  The bulk of fee is returned through attendee take homes like a book on VS Extensibility.  If you have a customer you are willing to vouch for then we can provide you with a discount code to wave the registration fee.

VSIP Partners: All VSIP program members are invited to this event and will be able to attend for free.  VSIPs should use the following link to register for the event and bypass the registration fee: http://www.vsipmembers.com/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=20.

Recipe for making an MVP

One of the absolute best parts of my job is that i get to work with the VSTS MVP's on a regular basis.  Due to this interaction i have had a couple people ask: "How is a VSTS MVP chosen?"

Other variants of this question would include:

"What is the process for selecting an MVP?"

"What is the critera for selecting an MVP?"

"What is the process for selecting an MVP?"

The process is pretty straight forward with three levels of "voting" starting at the regional level.

1. Our support orgranization recieves nominations with contact details like name, email -and their country.
2. These nominations typically come from Microsoft employees in the field but other MVP’s can submit them or any full time Microsoft employee (I have written ~4 since coming to this role-6 months ago)
3. Once a quarter, the regional MVP lead evaluates their nominations.  Giving them a approval/declined "vote".  For example my good friend Rose is the MVP lead for Australia/New Zealand, PJ Forgione is the MVP lead for the US (developer tools)and LIlian and Cathy run APAC etc.  Interesting fact: Most of the VSTS MVP's are NOT from the US.  
4. The Global MVP lead for the specific technology then evaluates these regional nominations giving them a approval/declined(Mei Liang is the developer tools global lead)
5. “I” receive the list from Mei with all the recommendations – this includes re-nomination recommendations too.
6. I research this list and do one of two things: agree or disagree.  If i disagree i send email to the regional lead and/or the nominator asking for supporting evidence.   Having global scope i see folks in one area doing more than nominations from another area and I try to normalize this as best as possible.
7. At this point I send the list to the internal VSTS community council for feedback -with the ones I disagreed with called out.  The VSTS community council is representatives of all areas of Team System (Test, Dev, PM, UE etc) that can speak for the different products we ship (Team Arch, Test TFS etc)
8. The folks that make it through the approval process are then awarded the MVP title and assigned two leads: a local regional lead (i.e. Rose in Australia) and a product group lead.
9. For the poor souls in VSTS this is ME.  Charlie Calvert is the C# lead, Beth Massi VB, Ken Levy Fox Pro, Christine Boyd VSTO,  Simon Muzio ASP.NET and Silverlight etc etc etc etc

"What is the critera for selecting an MVP?"

Now that you understand the PROCESS -what about the critera?

I start with the simple guideline for weighting:

 “Community contributions delivered in the previous year for which no revenue was received”

While these are my own words it does map to the MVP program.  This critera also calls out something pretty important; that the MVP title is an Award for the previous years efforts...So even the biggest rock stars are reevaluated every year.  I must admit it is weird to see people like Mickey, Paul, Brian, Mitch, Ed, Willy etc in the nomination spreadsheet.

–beyond  this it is very subjective and i almost entirely use the “ink weight” of their nomination.  

For instance if we were to weigh the last nomination I worked on, Steve Andrews, versus one of the folks that didn’t make it it would weigh more due to the additional page count and more ink from the additional bullet points .    I realize this doesn’t take into account any quality bar but I have not needed to get any more granular in defending a disagreement** with the previous two “votes”(regional and global MVP leads).   Keep in mind the list I receive already has a default decision made by the Regional and Global Support folks, so I/we in VSTS are either agreeing with them (no action needed) or disagreeing –and defending this position.   The "no revenue recieved" definition can make some contributions like launch deliveries, dev days deliveries even TechEd sessions suspect because we often pay T&E in the form of a stipend.

In the begining of this post i mentioned only MVP's or MIcrosoftee's can submit nominations.

While my happy VSTS MVP family has grown quite a bit in the last two quarters this title is a recognition of contributions - so if you know somebody that that you think is worthy please feel free to contact me I can work with you to submit a nomination for them on your behalf.  The only thing i ask is for these nomination be for somebody ELSE not yourself-grin.

Another VSTS User Group - in the Netherlands!

Just had the netherlands VSTS Usergroup president drop me a note and let me know i had missed them!

Sorry about that Hassan!

Domestic VSTS Usergroups

Microsoft Virtual Earth in Brisbane August 1st

The Microsoft Virtual Earth EMEA team are holding an event on 1^st August 2008 in Brisbane to provide you with all the information you require to integrate VE into your business offering. Never before has it been so easy for companies to track assets, find customers, manage a mobile sales force & engineers or make sure customers find you before they find a competitor!

Gain real insight into how map-enabling business applications can help create customer satisfaction and an optimised organisation. If you are a technologist you’ll be amazed at just how easy it is to access and integrate Virtual Earth into an existing environment. Developers should not miss this opportunity to hear from Johannes Kebeck, one of the world’s leading experts on the Virtual Earth platform.

The agenda will consist of:

· Informative sessions; you will hear from customers and partners who have utilised Virtual Earth as well as technical presentations and the latest updates from VE.

· A masterclass from Johannes Kebeck highlighting useful tips and tricks for developers, ensuring you get the most out of the Virtual Earth platform.

· A valuable opportunity to network with other partners and developers as well as members of the EMEA Virtual Earth team.

The day will run from 11.30am until 5.30pm and we do hope you can join us.

Places are limited so if you do wish to register please do so asap click here to register

Steven Turner

Queensland.NET Secretariat

Ph: 0116173878 2974

queenslanddotnet@mlaa.com.au

Another Developer Event for your calendar

Just heard about another Developer event and from their price and incredible speaker line up looks to be a great time!

-If that weren't enough one of our newest MVP's, Steven Andrews, will even be there!

http://www.devlink.net/

When:
August 22 - 23, 2008

The devLink Technical Conference provides technical content of interest to Software Developers, Solution Architects, Database Administrators, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Technology Executives and IT professionals looking for the latest and greatest content.  You will have the opportunity to learn from industry experts from around the world. You'll get cutting edge techniques to solve your development challenges today and build the next generation applications of tomorrow. No other local event, no corporate trainers, no one else will compare to devLink's standard of excellence and commitment to real-world, practical information designed to take your skills to the next level.  Not only are we bringing all this cutting edge information to you in Nashville, but we are doing it for a fraction of the price you would pay at another conference.

Two VSTS Classes in Australia

There are two Brisbane training centres offering the new VSTS & TFS courses from Microsoft Learning in the next few months. Here are the details in case you know of anyone looking for VSTS/TFS training.

6214 – Effective Team Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

This three-day instructor-led course provides students with the knowledge and skills to manage source control management, a configurable build process, tools that aid in test driven development, and process workflow all integrated directly into Visual Studio 2008. By the end of the course, developers are equipped to use test-driven techniques and proven software processes to create high-quality software with a minimal change in overall effort.

· IT Training Solutions – 6^th to 8^th August 2008

· Dimension Data Learning Solutions – 6^th to 8^th October 2008

6215 – Implementing and Administering Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server

This two-day instructor-led course provides students with the knowledge and skills to implement and administer Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server. The course focuses on installation and configuration details, team projects, work items, version control, Team Build, and reporting.

· IT Training Solutions – 14^th & 15^th August 2008

· Dimension Data Learning Solutions – 9^th & 10^th October 2008

Community Update to the VSTS Product Group

Every month i send out a community update to the entire VSTS Product Group.  Jeff has mentioned a couple times i should publish it to the web and I am finally getting to it (only taken me 6 months!)

Please let me know if this is of value and i will continue publishing them!

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record with all the Yeahs!, Wahoos! and Great News! But we really have some news this month we should be proud of:

• Once again this year the VSTS MVPs rated the Team System team as the number 1 team at Microsoft
• TeamArch digs into community with an internal advisory council, their own champs list and is reaching out to all the Developer MVPs with their own Dev 10 features briefing. (Contact me or Phil Lee)
• TFS kicks off of a ground breaking community project for TSWA localization(see below) 
• TFS community legend and former MVP Grant Holliday started working for the TFS team last month
• Geoff Staneff wins a free shirt by proving he not only read all of last month’s Community update to the end but he did it in less than 3 minutes(By Microsoft Standards this is a VERY long email so the last line of my last update was an offer for a free tshirt to the first person that sent me email<G>).

MVPs

For the second year in a row, the Team System team was rated as the top group at Microsoft.  Factoring in the fact that our MVP group grew by 25% to 81 MVP’s and that the overall DevDiv trend was negative, it’s pretty incredible that our ratings increased 10% year on year. (and we are still climbing from H1 to H2)

Website

While looking for a site manager we have been doing fewer updates* to the Teamsystem Website; unfortunately we have still been inadvertently introducing breaking changes as we separate the website content into sections specifically targeting Team System 2005 and Team System 2008**. This coupled with the fact we haven’t added much content recently has netted a reduced page count and flat line in repeat visitors.   Last week somebody asked me if we should be taking these numbers seriously. The fact that visitors is on the increase means the community and marketing efforts are attracting customers. The declining page count numbers don’t tell us much but the repeat visitors (the primary health index of a technical community site) tells us our customers are not finding enough value to come back and are probably book marking the teams blogs instead. 

To make it easier for the Product groups to update their pages I will be rolling out a new tag driven update process this month.  What this means is you will be able to update your Team System web pages by creating a tag for your blog posts, articles you find, downloads you discover or any other content you can bookmark.  -Long term goal is to enable acces to the community and let them tell us what content they value.

*Couple of the updates we did this month was to rebuild the bloggers page and rebuilt the Team System Landing page to be more of a redirect and to start surfacing P&P.  Next month will be to focus on the Test/Tester Center Experience and straighten out what blogs are feeding which pages.

**Feedback has been customers would like see only information, downloads and partners that are relevant to the version they are using. Going forward with a tagging based system we should be able to apply filters to get this same affect but with a much higher fidelity i.e.  Only show me 2010 content that applies to Visual Basic and Test. Where 2010, Visual Basic and Test are all tags applied to the content.

Blogging

Our 3% month on month increase continues with our top 4 bloggers climbing from 3.46 million to over 3.58 million. The new bloggers page should also help continue driving an increase in Blog traffic. –If you are a blogger and you don’t see yourself in this list, please send me a piece of mail so I can add you! 

*If you would like your blog added to the VSTS leader board please email me

Visual Studio Forums

Last month many of the Developer Division forums were upgraded to a new infrastructure designed to increase reliability and fix lots of usability problems. Our users have been very vocal about the poor performance of the new forum infrastructure. Luckily our only forum to get upgraded so far is the Debugger forum, so we were spared most of the performance issues, but this means the usability issues like the login/logout gremlins still haunt us.  Jeremy Kelly is currently evaluating when it makes sense to migrate our remaining forums; with September being the most likely time frame.

On a positive note, with the help of our new CSS Engineer Bill Wang it looks like we have a hit a steady state situation on the forums. I have had a couple of requests to break down the forum data by product units. 

As you can see in the first graph our volume has hit a plateau (Yeah) and in the second graph the dev teams are doing a good a really job of keeping the 7 day close rate at the 70% target. 

Please let me know what you think about the improved graphs & a big thanks to Steven Powell for pulling this data out for me.

Community Project: Team System Web Access Localization

Team System is breaking new ground at Microsoft. Hakan Eskici and the Team Foundation Server team are rolling out the first Microsoft project to enable community contributors to localize Microsoft products. The first product is the Team System Web Access and the architecture of using satellite assemblies should be safe, isolated and portable to our largest products.  Despite not having even announced the project we already have 4 contributors!

• · Marcel de Vries – Project Lead and Dutch
• · Igor Abade  - Portuguese (pt-pt)
• · Tiago Pascoal  - Portuguese (pt-br)
• · Sondre Bjellås – Norwegian
• Hakan Eskici Turkish

While the codeplex site creation is blocked due to territory and licensing issues this has not blocked the fairly aggressive schedule Marcel and the community team at having the first language delivered July 17^th for the community to review. (If you would like to contribute to this project please contact me)

• · July 1st  Hakan  - Deliver first cut of the Translation toolkit
• · July 3rd Chuck -  Create Groove workspace and codeplex* website for working group 
• · July 3st Marcel - Project lead to determine workflow of adding and taking contributions
• · July 17th Chuck - To schedule next call for July 17th 11am first language review
• · July 17th Tiago - To have Feedback on the Translation toolkit
• · July 17th Marcel - Initial translation to w/ toolkit Dutch to figure out workflow
• · July 22nd Hakan  - To deliver a Turkish Translation
• · Oct 1st     Hakan  - Create video (PDC)

Conferences and Events

Upcoming Events

• · PDC Oct 26-30 Los Angeles Absolutely the event of the year, this year the theme is “Software + Services”. The number of sessions your team will receive will be dependent on how well you can deliver on this topic. Contact Sam Guckenheimer. 

Previous Events

• · VSTS Seattle Usergroup May 28^th 2008 Unit Testing with Visual Studio
• · TechEd June 3-6 Orlando.  Our first public disclosure for Dev10/Rosario. Contact Doug Seven.
• · Testers SIG June 09, 2008 contact Naysawn Naderi

Microsoft Australia creates a Windows mobile blog!

If you are mobile developer in Australia make sure and check out:

http://blogs.msdn.com/wmoz

VSTS Usergroup Tomorrow night (June 25th) Note Location Change

Tomorrow night is sure to be a great session with: Gaze into the Crystal Ball: Reporting in Team System.

http://www.seattleteamsystem.org/default.aspx

When: 6:30 PM on June 25, 2008

Where:  Microsoft Offices at Lincoln Square in Bellevue Downtown

Registration Link:

http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=127981

Back from vacation -so how was the fishing in Florida?

Back from vacation from Florida– and have been asked numerous times:

“How was the fishing?”

In a word: Amazing

I only went out two days and both days were some of the best fishing I have ever had…. Both days I went fishing I used a private charter (meaning I was the only person on the boat other than the skipper) for $500 each day– which is less than a boat rental and both of the skippers went out at ~7:00am to catch 500-600 horse eye pilchards!! The fishing strategy of both of these skippers was to throw out a bunch of these pilchards and create their own mini school of bait. I must admit it was pretty exciting when these baits started getting smashed next to the boat.

Day 1:

We left from Dania Beach at a leisurely 9:00am and was fishing on the first reef by 9:20am – pretty nice having the shelf only 2 miles out! We put out four rods with live bait and I put out my trusty 4KG spinning outfit with a Berkley gulp. This first reef was still in the green water and after 10 minutes the only action was my light spinning outfit being smashed by something much bigger than I could turn. We decided to run South to a wreck and on the way ran into a school of dolphin fish with a least 10,000 fish! For the next 60 minutes, it didn’t matter what you put into the water it was going to get smashed. I am guess between both of us we caught 50 fish+ of those we inadvertently killed -about 8 fish which went into the ice chest. I was lucky enough to be using one of the best reels I have had the pleasure to ever cast: an Ambassador REVO –S reel with a 4KG Browning® Fishing Medallion rod. Initially I was throwing an RMG Barramundi lure and but the dual treble hooks was causing too many mortalities (and very scary) so I swapped out to a painted jig head. (no nothing on it – just a jig head) . To give you how hungry these fish were a couple of them were caught with a paper towel on a hook skipped across the surface! By 11am the dolphin fish had clued into what was going and drifted off. 5 minute run to the wreck and back into the water went the 4 live bait rods: two rods on the surface and two on the bottom. Before the two rods even made it the 120’ to the bottom my Calcutta 400 on the surface went off. 10 minutes later a 30lb Kingfish was in the ice chest. By the time this rod was back in the water one of the bottom rods went off and a large black tip shark was being released before that rod made it to back to the bottom a huge snapper smashed the other bottom rod – and so it went for the next two hours. The finally tally was half a dozen large sharks, a couple bite offs, and several large snapper. By two o'clock the heat had really turned on and we pulled up the anchor and were trolling back to rest our weary arms. 

Day 2:

We left at 8:00am and ran the 75 minutes to a set of islands in the south end of Biscayne Bay where we sight fished for moving schools of Yellow Jacks. We ended the day catching 30 or 40 barracuda, Jack Caravel, a lemon shark, several mangrove snapper, 4 mutton snapper, raising one tarpon and yes caught about 10 yellow jack (our target species)

It isn’t often I am out fished but between Jay being a super fisherman and not having sight fished before I was clearly taught a lesson this day – and had a blast doing it!

Pretty ironic as one of my fishing buddies did a 5 day trip to the Swains on the great Barrier reef and I managed to out fish him in two days and was still able to go out to one of the best restaurants in the world in the evening!

So would i do it again? 

Absolutely!!! 

The difficult question becomes if i could only do one of the trips which would it be?

I guess it depends on what is running and what these skippers suggested.  In both cases the trips above are the days and the location these two skippers suggested.  That is the nice thing about chartering fisherman - they don't want to go somewhere "they" aren't going catch fish therefore are very vested in picking optimal dates/locations.

Gadget for Team System contest by our very own Mike Azocar

Have you created a useful gadget for Team System?  Do you have one in mind?  I am looking for the coolest community built tool for VSTS.  It can be something for TFS, for Visual Studio, or something that is stand alone. The winner will receive a one year subscription to MSDN with Team Suite!  

To enter, submit a screen cast (up to 3 minutes long) which tells everyone why your gadget is the coolest and the source code.  All submissions will be released to the public as free source to use and enjoy (with you getting all the credit of course).  Videos will also be made available to the public to help make you famous!  

Submissions accepted up until August 31st 2008.  Winner will be announced September 15th 2008.

Here is a link to the blog post:

http://www.michaelazocar.com/blog/?p=485

Finding Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server on MSDN Downloads

I have had a couple of folks point out Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server is no longer on MSDN Downloads.  Turns out it "is" still on MSDN Downloads - we have just moved it to where nobody would think to look and just to make it more challenging removed it from the MSDN search....Sorry about that!!!

Until i can get this fixed the easiest way to get to Team Foundation Server Workgroup or Trial Edition is: Downloads > Developer Tools > Visual Studio > Visual Studio 2008  > Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition.

Or even easier simply click on this link: Visual Studio 2008 and select the version of Team Foundation Server you want.

I am hoping to get this back into search and under the Team System category ASAP!!!!

P&P Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF

A little light on the MSMQ samples but still a very good read!

Download the Guide

· Guide Download: http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

PS I typically think everything  could use a  more MSMQ<g>

Team System Talk Radio (May Edition)

Despite a couple obstacles like having a child, needing to get ready for Teched, contracting cancer and subsequent operation: Martin Woodward, Mickey Gousset and Paul Hacker STILL managed to get out another edition of Team System Talk Radio 

Of course for the latest up to date information on VSTS don't forget to get out these guys news and technical journals at:  Team System Rocks and TFS Times

Two great new How do I video's - with "Managing Test Results" a must see for new testers!

Richard has been busy!  Make sure and check out his two new How do i videos:

How Do I: Manage Test Results and Test Results Files?
How Do I: Make Batch Edits to Work Items?

While on the topic of testing i would also recommend Richards:

How Do I: Easily Bind Data to .NET Unit Tests?