Ok way too long for my own good but I need to pick up allot of slack when it comes to sharing these days.  My half year resolution (read: beginning of FY09 for us at Microsoft) begins today and blogging is the included endeavor.  I've been busy with a few things I'd like to share mostly work related in the areas of ALM, Team Suite, and UX experiences (does experience get cancelled out here? :-)).   Let me first begin by sharing out a content project I've been working on to help partners and customers get more familiar with Visual Studio Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.   This content has been put together over the last year and varies from focusing on Team System Overviews to Profiling to Web Testing, to Code Analysis to Customizing Team Foundation Server so on and so forth.  If you are interested in any of these sessions feel free to download them at your leisure.  

You can download the abstract plus the sessions at: www.codeplex.com/almspecialisttoolkit

Here are just a few the abstracts for that content:

 

Session Title

Description

Customizing Team Foundation Server 2008 (2 Hours)

Team System provides allot of out of the box features and templates such as MSF for Agile.   However, in many cases you may need to customize elements of Team Foundation Server to fit your organization and your requirements.

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this session will provide an introduction into the “What, How, Why, and Who” of customizing Team Foundation Server.   You will learn what can be customized from Process Templates to Reports to simple configurations.   You will also learn when you customize and who can help you with that work.  Demos are open ended and depend on what areas of customization are important to the customer e.g. process template editor.

 

Session Title

Description

Improving Application Performance using Team Suite (60 Minutes)

What is Team Suite and how can it be used to improve application quality? Specifically what components in the Team Developer and Test Edition of Team System 2008 can be used to improve application performance from web applications to smart client applications?

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this one hour session will introduce Team Edition for Developers and Team Edition for Testers from a performance tuning perspective. We will discuss and demonstrate how to use code metrics, web testing (including web services), load testing, targeted code analysis, and profiling dashboards.  We will discuss how you can use Team Suite to tune the performance of any application and how to eliminate the complexity and noise of these tools by focusing on what is important.

 

Session Title

Description

What’s New in Team System 2008 (90 Minutes)

With the next major version of Team System code-named “Rosario” still months away Team System 2008 provided an incremental yet significant step forward to improving Team Development.   Many of the features of Team System 2005 were significantly improved and a few new features have been added.

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this session will introduce these new capabilities comparing what was in Team System 2005 with what is now included with 2008.  We will demonstrate both new Team Foundation Server and Team Client features such as Annotations, Folder Compares, Code Metrics, Profile Hot Pathing, Improved Web Testing, Improved Load Testing, and more. 

 

Session Title

Description

ALM Executive Value (90 Minutes)

Despite years of effort to improve, building software solutions to address business challenges continues to be exceptionally difficult and, more often than not, less than entirely successful.

 

This session will introduce Microsoft’s approach to helping teams overcome common development challenges, more effectively manage the application lifecycle, improve project success rates and focus on the delivery of high quality solutions that correctly address business needs.

 

Session Title

Description

Value-Up Software Development (60 Minutes)

What is Value-Up software development? What’s the big deal about Agile methods? How can Team System help development teams take a value-up approach to building solutions?

 

This one hour session will briefly introduce the concepts behind value-up software development, a way of building software that incrementally delivers business value.  We will also discuss the Agile methodologies that support this concept and how this approach delivers business value to end users sooner while enabling the constant refinement of requirements necessary to building the proper solution to effectively address business needs.

 

Session Title

Description

Team System 2008 for Developers (60 Minutes)

What is Team Suite? What components make up the Developer Edition of Team System and how can it be used to improve development quality?

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this one hour session will introduce Team Edition for Developers. We will discuss and demonstrate how to use code metrics, unit testing, code analysis, and profiling.  We will also demonstrate TDD with unit testing and how Team Foundation Server can be added to play a big role in improving test result reporting and build management.

 

Session Title

Description

Team System 2008 for Testers (60 Minutes)

What is Team System? What components make up the Team System Ecosystem?   How can Team System help improve the quality of my applications through testing? What testing features are currently in this version of Team System? How can Team Foundation Server be used to manage Test Cases?

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this one hour session will briefly introduce Team Foundation Server (TFS) as well as focus on the Team Edition for Testers product. We will discuss and demonstrate how to create tests ranging from web tests, manual tests, generic tests, load tests, and ordered tests.  We will also demonstrate unit testing and how TFS can play a big role in improving test result reporting and collaboration.

 

Session Title

Description

Team System 2008 for Database Professionals (60 Minutes)

What is Team System? What components make up the Team System Ecosystem?   How can Team System help improve the quality of my database-based applications? What schema design, testing, comparison, and data deployment features are currently in this version of Team System? How do I include database deployment in my automated build?

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this one hour session will briefly introduce Team Foundation Server (TFS) as well as focus on the Team Edition for Database Professionals product. We will discuss and demonstrate how to import database schemas, work in an ALM world, learn how to leverage source control with database artifacts, create database unit tests, leverage data generation features, and much more. 

 

Session Title

Description

Team Development With SharePoint (90 Minutes)

Are you new to Lifecycle Management (ALM) yet part of the SharePoint Development Team within your organization?  Want to leverage SharePoint development best practices such as testing for performance across all SharePoint projects?

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this session will introduce these team best practices that can be utilized by SharePoint development teams by using Team Foundation Server and the Visual Studio Team Editions.   We will explore how to leverage Team Suite to test portals, web parts and integrated applications and take a quick look at how SharePoint developers can leverage Team System as a whole. 

 

Session Title

Description

Team System 2008 for Java Developers (60 Minutes)

Similar to the Session above “Team System – Not Just for .NET Developers” however this session dives a little deeper into the aspects of using the Teamprise Plug-in and only focuses on Java.

 

Through slides and demonstrations, this session will introduce these capabilities and explore what can be done with Team Foundation Server for Java Developers using Eclipse and the Teamprise 3.0 Plug-in, the Teamprise 3.0 Command Line Tools, and Teamprise 3.0 Explorer.   We will specifically look at how the new version has added build support for managing Ant builds using Team Build and how customizations can be made to support most third party java tools e.g. Unit Testing and Code Coverage.