A new Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing white paper is out. Very few people get excited about licensing--I doubt you'd find many people who print a EULA because they just love to read--but one of the more common questions I get is about licensing.
You can download a copy to read in PDF, Word, or XPS format from Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing.
It's a 13-page document, even though a lot of work goes into making licensing as simple as possible. It's a constant trade-off between addressing some specific customer needs and trying to keep the licensing simple. The paper is a little longer because some examples are spelled out specifically--like the licenses required for a multi-server configuration, when users need a client access license and when they don't, what a call center scenario would require, etc.
One of the changes in the Team System license is that "you can submit a bug for free"--e.g. outside users can submit, track, and modify their bugs, change requests, or other items. They still need a license to modify or track work items from other users. To be exact:
“A user does not need a CAL to create new work items or to view and update work items that user has created. This waiver applies only to work items related to defect filing or enhancement requests. All other access to work item tracking functionality requires CALs.”
With Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server a user may now do the following:
· Open a new work item of any type within the system.
· Access to work items opened only by that user. A user cannot view or access a work item opened by anyone else unless that user has a Team Foundation Server CAL.
· Edit any work item you opened to clarify the original entry, change work item fields, or make annotations to the discussion of the opened work item
This CAL licensing exception is limited to defect filing and enhancement request scenarios only. Our goal is to allow organizations to permit their users to enter bug / issue/ defect / enhancement request submissions into Team Foundation Server.
Again, you can get a copy of the paper from Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing.
If you are a Microsoft Partner with a competency in building custom development solutions on the Microsoft Platform, or you are interested in expanding your practice in this direction, then Microsoft's MSDN Field Evangelism Team invites you to attend one of our upcoming half-day briefings. You won't want to miss this briefing to learn and takeaway new ideas and opportunities to help your business grow and prosper in key areas now and into the future.
For more information visit: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnm/archive/2008/02/18/prodev-partners-only-briefing-us-east-region.aspx
Here are the remaining sessions:
| Location | Date | Time | Registration | Event ID |
| Reston, VA | Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 8:30am – 1:00pm | Click Here to Register | 1032369688 |
| Malvern, PA | Tuesday, May 6, 2008 | 8:30am – 1:00pm | Click Here to Register | 1032369689 |
| Tampa, FL | Tuesday, May 13, 2008 | 8:30am – 1:00pm | Click Here to Register | 1032369690 |
| Alpharetta, GA | Thursday, May 15, 2008 | 8:30am – 1:00pm | Click Here to Register | 1032369691 |
| Iselin, NJ | Wednesday, May 21, 2008 | 8:30am – 1:00pm | Click Here to Register | 1032369692 |
Brian Harry blogged about Installing TFS 2008 on Windows 2008, and referenced Etienne Tremblay's guide to installing TFS 2008 on Windows 2008.
I used Etienne's guide to do it myself. I installed it on a VPC. There are a couple of things that that I had to learn.
First, if you're like me, you installed Visual Studio before Team Foundation Server. That installed SQL Server Express. Unfortunately, the SQL Server Express install will block the installation of the SQL Server 2005 BIDS and Management Studio because the "Tools" folder already exists. I had to go to "<install drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\" and rename the "Tools" folder to "Express Tools". Then I installed SQL 2005, and got a full suite of the tools.
Second, if you have the installation guide, you need to know where to look for the SharePoint setup instructions.
- First, get the latest version of the "TFSInstallGuide" at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79226.
- Second, go and find the instructions for installing SharePoint at "/Installing Team Foundation Server/Prerequisites for Team Foundation Server/How to: Install SharePoint Products and Technologies on Windows Server".
- If that's too much searching, click on the search tab and enter the text "stsadm", then click "List Topics"; you'll only see one result.
- Be careful when you get to step #19.
- You'll have to open a command prompt AS ADMINISTRATOR to type in the commands. That is, you have to right-click and choose "run as administrator" rather than just opening the command prompt. I widened my command shell to 150 characters so I could see the entire command. I also set
>SET PROMPT=[$P]$_:$G
so that I would have a nearly empty line to type on. Of course, my prompt is two lines now, but it's OK with me.
- Then you have to type in this line:
stsadm.exe -o extendvs -exclusivelyusentlm -url http://WSSServerName:80 -ownerlogin Domain\UserName -owneremail "admin@localhost" -sitetemplate sts -description "Description"
The italicized bits are the parts you replace with your local versions. I found that "Description" (called out in red above) had to be "Default Web Site", or I got two web sites on port 80.
The final thing I learned (again)--don't put your virtual hard drive (*.vhd) files in a compressed folder. I did that by accident, and it robbed me of performance.
I noticed that my bud in Australia, Chris Birmele, has created a second blog that just focuses on ALM. He's put together some nice articles out there, the broadest of which is Microsoft ALM Platform: ALM and IO Models - how do they relate?. The Infrastructure Optimization, Business Productivity Optimization, and Application Platform Optimization efforts are pillars in Microsoft's efforts to help customers achieve dynamic IT in the enterprise.
On a side note to that, some of the basis for that initiative comes from the work of Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson. For that and other reasons, Peter Weill is now one of eWeek's "most influential people in IT" (see Page 16 - Top 100 Most Influential People in IT, Part 1). You can find their book "Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution" at a number of fine booksellers (look here for pricing). I found it to be a great read.
I have an interoperability demo that I'm working on, so I'm setting up Ruby so that I can connect via WCF. It's not the normal demo I do.
I'm following the instructions from IIS 7.0 Server-Side : 10 steps to get Ruby on Rails running on Windows with IIS FastCGI. Err..scratch that--I'm using the instructions from http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToConfigureIIS7 that are based on those instructions. Rather than use the other FastCGI instructions, I used the instructions on http://blog.caneja.com/archive/2007/10/26/install-fast-cgi-on-iis7.aspx. The good news is that FastCGI is part of Vista SP1, so you don't need to download any of the preview versions.
Side note: When I was trying the outdated instructions, I did run into a "cannot find MSVCR71.dll" error when running Ruby on my machine. That DLL should be kept with the other executables that it's running with. I saw some advice on the web to copy it from your "java\bin" folder to your system32 folder, but that's not the recommended use of that library. the "R" means it's "not a known" DLL and doesn't belong in your system directories (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/abx4dbyh(vs.71).aspx). The MSVC libraries are part of the C++ redistributable libraries, and should be located with the binaries they're used by. Part of that is because the "one click installer" uses an old version of Visual C++. I'd rather just recompile to use a newer version than use the one click installer, but I haven't gotten around to that.
So, here's a page served up by Rails on Vista SP1 + IIS7:
I know it's not the most interesting, but it's a start.
Update--the first trackback is a really good tutorial as well--I wish I'd written that much about the setup.
(And as yet another side note, I was a little paranoid about the setup of FastCGI. I already had CGI enabled before applying SP1. I had no idea whether applying SP1 would add FastCGI to IIS--I would expect it to, but I wasn't sure. So, I (1) SP1, (2) removed the CGI "subfeature" of IIS7, and (3) re-enabled CGI. That's my personal moment of overkill--you'll probably never need to do that).
Carl Rogers looked into the deployment and use of TFS within Europe. He's put together some nice graphs on what methodologies people use. It's a small sample set, but it's interesting information: see Carl Rogers, Process Development Architect : TFS Adoption within EMEA – A Process Perspective
Patterns and Practices has released the latest version of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit. If you're using or creating software factories, this is a key building block. You can click the following link to Download the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit February 2008 Release for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. If you want the toolkit, you'll need to install the Guidance Automation Extensions - February 2008 Release first.
Some of the good news:
- You no longer have to uninstall older versions of the Guidance Automation Extensions to install the latest version.
- The Guidance Automation Extensions installer detects and maintains previously installed guidance packages. The toolkit requires an update, though.
- There are versions for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. If you have side-by-side installations of 2005 and 2008, you can also have side-by-side installations of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Toolkit.
If this is new information for you, you can see the primer at Introduction to the Guidance Automation Toolkit. If you want some more information, then Gregori Melnik gives a little more information here, and Tom Hollander blogs more here (basically the same info in both).
Well, I found an unexpected sliver of time. I'd been planning for a while to replace the 32-bit version of Vista with a 64-bit install for a while. The upgrade went very smoothly. I used "Windows Easy Transfer", but I got a few superfluous settings since there is some software that I'm not going to install this time around. I'd thought about installing Windows Server 2008--I've used the "Hyper-V" virtualization technology, and it's really fast and nice. In the end, I decided to stay with client software ("Vista") rather than server software ("Windows Server 2008").
Visual Studio 2008 is running great on 64-bit Vista. I still run a virtualized version of TFS, and I like to run Virtual Server more than Virtual PC. Usually, I install and configure my own images, but this time I'm using one created by someone else. The weird side effect is that I couldn't apply my undo logs to the virtual hard drive--I got a permissions error I couldn't directly overcome. Since I'd made a lot of changes, I was annoyed.
However, I discovered something cool--the undo file ("TFSRTMXXXX...vud") is just a virtual hard drive with a ".vud" extension instead of a ".vhd" extension. I renamed the file to "DeltaDisk.vhd", and inspected it--it was just a differencing disk, which I wanted on this virtual server anyway. I reconfigured the virtual server to refer to the "DeltaDisk.vhd" file and turned on undo logs, and any of the changes get merged into the delta disk instead of the one I got from a co-worker.
I also had to set up a loopback adapter (since I don't always have a usable network connection), but that's a piece of cake. I put the IP address in the same range as the default for the virtual DHCP server, and host-to-guest networking was running great. Technet's entry on Manage Virtual Networks was a great checklist.
The image I was working with didn't have a build server on it. Normally, I wouldn't want one on the same server as TFS, but since it's for demonstrations I wanted to add one. There's some good information at Setting up a Build Computer on MSDN. Note that for me, when I was changing the build service account, that wcfhttpconfig.exe wasn't in "cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE", but was in "cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies".
If you're trying to work with TFS on a Virtual Server, I'd spend some time at this guy's blog: Virtual PC Guy's WebLog. I did set up the web interface using these instructions: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/11/17/using-virtual-server-on-windows-vista-without-running-ie-as-administrator.aspx, but the really great discovery was using VMRCPlus instead:
I also refer to Installing Virtual Server on Windows Vista Beta 2 when setting up Virtual Server on Vista.
I finally ran into this today--my build wouldn't execute because my path name was longer that 259 characters. I had my root directory named "<drive>:\builddepot", and a really long name for my build (i.e. avoid "Adventureworks Supercalifragilous Debug Build with Testing and Code Analysis" for your build definition name). Fortunately, you can rename your build to something shorter. With the new TFS 2008 build agents, you can also specify that the build agent should use "$(BuildDefinitionId)" instead of the name so you get "C:\bd\123" instead of "C:\BuildDepot\Adventureworks Supercalifragilous Debug Build with Testing and Code Analysis". One of the things that was the final straw was that the database files in my project had awfully long names.
Also, remember if you're building a database project that you need to have the database edition installed on your build server.
Aaron Hallberg : Team Build and 260+ Character Paths
I picked Jeff Atwood's theme, increased the text editor font size to 12, and used Tomas Restrepo's stylesheet to transform it to Visual Studio 2008 settings from Visual Studio 2005 settings. Using "Tools->Import and Export" is also a great way to back up your current configuration so that you can undo a mistake later.
I found the instructions and a lot of themes here->Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery
Many of the blogs linked from Scott's article on VS themes are worth a look.
The "Data Dude" team added an MSBuild-callable static code analysis feature, a data generation wizard that pulls the contents of an existing database to set sample data in a new database, a file-based data generator that lets you stream file data into a database, an XML data generator, and a refactoring command generator, and two new unit test conditions. You can check out Gert's blog on them (http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/), and you can get the power tools at the links below:
Download page:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=73ba5038-8e37-4c8e-812b-db14ede2c354&displaylang=en
Installer download:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/b/8/fb8d1c0d-c0c4-4004-ab86-12396b2a3ee3/VSTSDB2008PT.msi
Documentation download:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/b/8/fb8d1c0d-c0c4-4004-ab86-12396b2a3ee3/Power Tools 2008.doc
I'm not a contributor to this project, but I have several customers who use the Test Edition of VSTS because it's an easier way of testing new frameworks than the other alternatives.
I case you haven't seen it, here's the project description:
This tool takes a WCF trace file and a WCF client proxy, or a WCF interface contract, and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of calls found in the trace file. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing.
The tool generates code for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. It also installs a wizard into both editions of Visual Studio for creating the trace and processing it from inside Visual Studio. If both editions are present the tool is installed into both editions. The source code is a Visual Studio 2005 project.
The features are listed out on the project site (WCF Load Test - Home), and it's been in use for about a year before it was published out to CodePlex, so I'd feel pretty safe with it. It was put together by members of the "VSTS Ranger Team", who published the TFS--Project Server 2007 Synchronizer and the VSTS Guidance on CodePlex. Bijan Javidi and Rob Jarrett published the code, and apparently Rob was the key writer of the code. Bijan is one of the key rangers at Microsoft.
Since it generates a unit test, it's really easy to modify it, or inject it into a load test.
I've met with some customers over the past year to discuss how to prepare developers and testers for Vista--how to test UAC, new features of .NET, how integrated search changes how you work, the effects of sandboxing IE, etc. The good news for Windows Server 2008 is that you can prepare early by going to Windows Server 2008 Developer Center, and going through some of the labs in the Developer Training Kit.
By the way, one of my co-workers Brian Hitney puts some Vista tech tips on his blog under this category: http://structuretoobig.com/home/blogcat.aspx?catid=15.
I'm sure you already know about this--and it's not technically what I focus on--but we list some nice projects over at Microsoft Live Labs. A listing of the projects is available here.
I've been impressed with Photosynth for a while. It takes 2D pictures and lets you navigate them in 3D. Listas is a new web outlining tool to help you organize everything you find out on the web.
