Chris Garty's Weblog : VS Team System

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Available

chrisgarty — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 19:59:00 GMT

After being announced last week, beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 has just become available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

If you have an MSDN Universal license, go get it now!

Presentation: Agile .Net Development - Part 1 - Tools and Basics

chrisgarty — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 21:18:00 GMT

Last night I gave a presentation at the Melbourne Agile Developer Group (MXPEG) about agile .Net development. The group has a higher proportion of Java developers, so I had volunteered to give a view of agile from a .Net perspective.

I only got through half of my material last night, so I'll be talking again next month. Last night I presented information about a set of tools that can help if you are trying to follow some of the Extreme Programming practices while using .Net. Next month I'll be focusing on design decisions in .Net that have helped me create applications with a simple and testable design.

The practices covered were: Coding Standards, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, and Testing.

The technologies covered included: NUnit, NUnitAsp, NUnitAddin, NMock, PicoContainer, FxCop, CruiseControl.Net, NAnt, NCover, and Microsoft's yet-to-be-released Visual Studio Team System.

The presentation is available here.

VSTS: Getting coded web tests to run

chrisgarty — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 19:23:00 GMT

The coded web tests supported by the VSTS test tools really excite me. There are so many web test scenarios that I can now create very easily with a combination of recording and scripting. This will nicely complement the ASP.Net testing capabilities I already have thanks to NUnitAsp.

However when I recorded a web test, generated the code from the test, and then tried to use that test the test runner wasn't able to load my assembly. It gave me an error similar to this:

WebTestCoded Coded Web Test Error Could not run web test 'WebTestCoded' on agent 'MyComputer': Could not create instance of class 'WebTestCoded' :File or assembly name 'WebTestProject1, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null', or one of its dependencies, was not found.

So I jumped on the Microsoft newsgroups and just got a reply to my query: You have to copy the assembly to VSDIR\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies.

To help with this process, add a post build event similar to the one below to all projects with coded web tests: copy WebTestProject1.dll "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies"

Thanks to Eric Adams (PM - VSTS Test) for this solution!

Australian TechEd 2004

chrisgarty — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 01:07:00 GMT

TechEd Australia will be on the 3rd of August in Canberra. Last week Frank Arrigo posted a schedule for the TechEd Australia developer track. It looks excellent and I sure would love to see the two hours worth of Visual Studio Team System demonstrations.

The early bird deadline for TechEd was recently extended till the 15th of June, so we have another two weeks to try to justify $1500 and a week off work to overselves or someone else :)

Visual Studio Community Technology Preview May 2004 - Installed!

chrisgarty — Fri, 28 May 2004 08:58:00 GMT

I had some initial trouble installing the May Community Technology Preview (CTP), but after reading the instructions (what a novel idea!) I realised that I just needed to remove all the March components: MSDN, J#, framework, and Visual Studio (VS). Keep an eye on this when you install it, since it doesn't give you much information in the error messages.

I helped give a talk at the Melbourne .Net User Group last night about the new VS Team System (nee: Burton), and so I was really looking forward to using the tools that I had learned so much about. I'm pleased to report that it really is as simple to use and powerful as the website and the videos suggest.

The web testing tool in VSTS is excellent. It is very simple to use and should support a wide variety of web applications. I tried it on a web application containing ASP.Net, plain HTML, Macromedia Flash, and Javascript and it worked beautifully first time. Web tests can be created either by demonstration (recording), or by hand coding in C# and VB.Net. The recording feature enables any VS user to create automated regression tests very quickly. I know a couple of people that will be very interested in the ability to automate their manual regression testing.

Over the next week I'll post some more information about the changes I notice from the March CTP and some more information about the VSTS client tools.

Visual Studio Team System in May CTP

chrisgarty — Thu, 27 May 2004 18:18:00 GMT

My download of the May CTP is complete. The installation process includes an informative message about VSTS:

Welcome to the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview May 2005 DVD

This Community Technology Preview includes functionality from the Visual Studio Team System, a new suite of software lifecycle tools that will ship with Visual Studio 2005. In the summer of 2005, we will release a Beta of Visual Studio. Please be aware that this Beta will not include the Team System functionality. We hope to release a formal Beta of the Team System by the end of the year. We're providing this early look at the Team System functionality so that we can get feedback on the product and make any necessary changes to our plans.

All previous caveats about the Community Technology Preview program apply to this build: don't install it on machines you care about, be aware that you may have to reformat your drive in order to completely uninstall, and the feature set is incomplete and unstable in many ways. The purpose of these builds is to help you contribute to the development process.

To that end, please submit any and all comments, feedback, or concerns to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/whidbey/newsgroups.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you!

I'll do a post later about the VSTS functionality available. Installing now... :)