The P&P team is looking for feedback and avid readers of their Acceptance Test Engineering Guide. Beta 2 was released yesterday on CodePlex. It’s a svelte 209 pages, in “commentable PDF”.
It’s a thick, thick document. They cover a number of test perspectives, including the solution architect, the development manager, user experience, operations manager, test manager, and enterprise architect. I’ve barely glossed the document so far.
The main authors are Grigori Melnik, Gerard Meszaros, and Jon Bach. Grigori blogged about the new segmentation of the guide and put out a table of contents at Acceptance Test Engineering Guide, volume 1 BETA2 release.
I use FoxIt reader to view PDF, and if you go to “Tools->Commenting Tools” you’ll find a variety of options to comment the PDF. They would like comments to go through the Codeplex site (Issue Tracker or Discussion Forum) or you can email it to Grigori.
The CodePlex site is located at patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance – Home. You can download the document from here.
(I’m back after a few weeks away. Nice to be back)
RDA is giving an Azure deep dive on Tuesday, July 7th at the Microsoft Atlanta Office. Here’s some detail from the horse’s mouth:
We are pleased to invite you to a complimentary day of intensive training on the Azure Services Platform for developing the next generation of enterprise applications in the cloud.
This Microsoft sponsored event is being offered at no cost to you. Breakfast, lunch, and free parking will be provided.
The event is targeted for developers and technical decision makers with a background in .NET development. No prior experience with Azure is required and this training session will provide enough background for software development teams to pilot cloud-based applications in their organizations. The training will be divided into multiple sessions to provide a comprehensive overview of the platform.
You can find out more and register here: Upcoming Seminars and Events from RDA
One of the fine people over at EMC (nee Conchango) describes a permission you need to set to enable the Task Board report to work. Just look at the blog entry Scrum for Team System : Task Board Report for the details.
Bonus points-they have a SQL script that will add the permissions for you. You just need to hit ctrl-shift-m and fill in the info. In my case, it was just the user name "domain\tfsReports".
I get a lot of questions about setup problems, and they're regularly related to a missing user permission. The Team Foundation Application Tier is (typically) composed of IIS Web Services, SQL Reporting Services, and Windows SharePoint Services. Loosely speaking, adding a user through Team Explorer will only set the permissions for the IIS portion-an administrator still needs to set the permissions for the other two components.
You can go into Windows SharePoint Services and SQL Reporting Services and grant the permissions in separate steps. MSDN has a section on Managing Permissions, including some how-to examples for common groups:
If you'd like to use one interface to manage all three permissions at the same time, you can download the TFS Administration Tool from CodePlex. The user will need the right to grant permissions on all three systems. I have a quick walk through in the following video:
Using the TFS Administration Tool to manage permissions
Jeff Barnes and Joe Healy are reprising the .NET Tiki Hut tour in Florida. Jeff has done some beautiful things with SilverLight, Robots, and Virtual Earth. They'll be demonstrating how to use and develop against a number of technologies. With that, check out Joe and Jeff's event:
![clip_image001[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/dscruggs/WindowsLiveWriter/ForthoseofyouinFloridaJeffandJoehavegrea_8C80/clip_image001%5B1%5D_thumb.jpg "clip_image001[1]")
That's right, the .NET TIKIHUT tour is back - just in time for the start of the 2009 Florida Hurricane season!
Please feel free to invite your customers and partners to the upcoming events using the attached email template.
For more details - check out the Official MSDN TIKI HUT Road Show web site: www.DotNetTIKIHUT.com
Menu at the Hut
Session 1: Developing on Microsoft Windows 7
Building applications that are easy to use, visually appealing, and offer high performance is a challenge that developers face every day. Innovative applications can greatly improve the user experience, empowering companies to differentiate their services and solutions. However, developers are increasingly asked to do more in less time, while also optimizing the power and performance requirements of their applications. The Windows 7 platform makes it easy for developers to create engaging, user-friendly applications by providing familiar tools and rich development features that allow them to take advantage of the latest PC capabilities. In this session we will explore the new Taskbar and Jump Lists, the Scenic Ribbon, file management with Libraries, and Windows Web Services among many other enhancements to the new operating system.
Session 2: What's New in Internet Explorer 8 for Developers
With any new browser release, there are two questions of interest to most web developers:
1.Will this release break my site, and if so, how do I fix it?
2. What shiny new features does it offer to add value for my visitors?
In this session, we'll address both of these questions, first showing how developers and users both benefit from improved standards-based rendering in Internet Explorer 8, and how developers can ensure that their sites will render properly for users using IE8. Additionally, we'll take a look at some of the new features of Internet Explorer 8 that open up new possibilities for web developers, including Accelerators, Web Slices, and Search Providers, as well as AJAX and DOM improvements. Accelerators are helpers added to the browser that allow users to access your web-based services from anywhere, via a simple right-click on any page. Web Slices allow you to designate parts of your application for the user to consume and keep up-to-date in the browser without having to visit the full site. You can leverage these features to add value to your site and make it easier than ever for users to take advantage of the services and content you have to offer.
We'll also look at the new Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools, which provides you with killer tools for examining and debugging your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all without ever leaving the page, plus profiling for finding and fixing the performance bottlenecks in your client-side code. The IE 8 Developer Tools also aid in compatibility testing, by allowing you to change the layout and compatibility modes on the fly. Lastly we'll look at some best practices.
Event Dates and Registration
Jacksonville - Tuesday, June 2, 2009, 1:00PM - 5:00PM
Jacksonville Community College - Nathan H. Wilson Center for the Arts
11901 Beach Blvd
Jacksonville, FL 32246
Jacksonville, FL 32246
Event ID: 1032415088
Register NOW: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032415088&culture=en-US
Tampa - Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 1:00 - 5:00 PM
Microsoft Tampa Office
5426 Bay center Dr., Suite 700
Tampa, FL 33609
Event ID: 1032415091
Register NOW: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032415091&culture=en-US
Ft. Lauderdale - Monday, June 15, 2009, 1:00 - 5:00 PM
Microsoft Ft. Lauderdale Office
6750 North Andrews Ave., Suite 400
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309
Event ID: 1032415092
Register NOW: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032415092&culture=en-US
(Jeff and Joe will) see you at the MSDN Tiki Hut Road Show!
The guys over at Notion Solutions released a set of tools that add some convenience to some typical Team System tasks. I've worked with the tools, an they're pretty easy to configure. I was talking with Chris Menegay, and he said that they just had common day-to-day tasks that they needed to accelerate. You can watch a video to see more.
There are four components:
- A Timesheet tool that helps you report time against VSTS work items (usually tasks). It helps with reporting and bulk time updates.
- A "Work Organizer" that is particularly useful for managing requirements and requirement artifacts. The tools add in a work-item hierarchy that works with TFS 2008, and makes it easy to generate new requirement artifacts from a template (Word documents, Visio diagrams, etc.) which you attach to the work item.
- A "Work Planner" that's useful for release and iteration management. It helps balance resources, plan which people and features will go into each release, and manage the relationships between them.
- A set of work item controls that make it easy to view and navigate work item relationships and hierarchies.
There are also reports that go with it. Out of the box, it's easy to configure for the MSF Agile and CMMI templates, but I've also configured it to work with Scrum for Team System.
While I'm mentioning Notion Solutions, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Mickey Gousset, who's done some nice work over at RadioTFS.
There are a number of tools people use for requirements elicitation—Visio, UML tools, PowerPoint, and some wireframe tools. If you look at the article at InfoQ: Using SketchFlow to Create Better Prototypes, you can see how you can lay out a use case flow and screen mockups in Expression Blend 3. Sketchflow is designed particularly for prototyping or storyboarding, and has nice features for feedback, data binding, and navigation.
There’s a LiveMeeting tomorrow at https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=G2K4BH&role=attend&pw=PN6.%3CQ%5Drb. Brian Harry will discuss Visual Studio Team System 2010.
Brian is one of the drivers behind VSTS, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Distinguished Engineer, and will be talking tomorrow (apparently at 3:30 PM Eastern Time). He created VSS, was a manager on the CLR from the initial development through the 1.1 release, and has a blog here. I feel like that description shortchanges him.
If you’re a member of LinkedIn, you can join the LinkedIn .NET Users Group (LIDNUG).
How-to: Join a LiveMeeting http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/livemeeting/HA102308521033.aspx
I wanted to set up a load test reporting site, using the samples at http://www.codeplex.com/loadtestreports. On my host OS, I have IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition, so it was a slightly different setup. If you’re going to develop any reports for TFS, it helps to have a practice site to work on, too.
At first, I was getting a little frustrated at the SSRS site, because it kept looking for a connection to https://mymachine/reports. I didn’t have a secure web site, and I didn’t have a certificate. I tried altering the reporting services configuration through the reporting services configuration manager, but things just kept getting worse.
After a little while, I thought that maybe I could set up a secure web site. Fortunately, Rob Bagby put a nice tutorial out on configuring a self-signed certificate at http://blogs.msdn.com/bags/archive/2009/01/23/self-signed-certificates-on-iis-7-the-easy-way-and-the-most-effective-way.aspx. It wasn’t helping me set up a secure site for SSRS, though. The instructions were long, and Rob’s advice to use host headers for a phony machine name was making it impossible to authenticate to SSRS.
I found if I didn’t use host headers, I could sign a certificate with my machine name and put it into the trusted root certification authority in just one command (yes, the entire IIS job done in one command):
c:\…\SelfSSL>selfssl.exe /N:CN=MYMACHINE /V:3000 /S:1 /T
Of course, replace “MYMACHINE” with the name of your machine. The really great thing is that by downloading that SelfSSL.exe file, I accomplished in one step the entire process of loading a certificate and setting up a secure web site. The last “/T” option even added the certificate to my trusted root certification authorities store. The “/S:1” targeted my default web site. Read Rob’s article to understand everything that’s going on—still, it’s nice to do it with one command line in an elevated prompt.
You can download SelfSSL.exe as part of the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=56fc92ee-a71a-4c73-b628-ade629c89499&displayLang=en. Make sure you’ve set up IIS 6 management compatibility in the roles and features if you’re using Windows Server 2008. You can choose just to install the pieces of the resource kit you want—I just installed SelfSSL.exe.
After that, you just need to go to the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, and set the Web Service URL and the Report Manager URL to use the same certificate as IIS. Go to the advanced settings, and add the certificate to the HTTPS settings on the advanced button.
Here are the automatically configured settings for the default web site bindings (IIS Manager):
Here are the settings for the Report Manager (Reporting Services Configuration Manager):
And here are the settings for the Web Service URL (Reporting Services Configuration Manager:
With that, I could go out and create the data sources and upload the reports. I had to hand-edit the data source, and I had to go to the properties of each report I uploaded to modify the data source to use the new one that I’d created by hand:
You just go use the browse button on Properties->Data Sources to pick the data source you created. (I could have skipped that if I had used BIDS for this project).
Finally, keep this URL handy if the SSRS “Home” page is blank: How to: Configure a Report Server for Local Administration on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
Happy Reporting!
I hit a weird error with Scrum for Team System where a new installation didn’t show the “admin” page for creating new teams and environments. Of course, I was baffled. Someone found a nice fix and posted on the forums: Blank Team Project Admin page - Scrum for Team System.
In my case, TFS is running on Windows Server 2003 (at least, this one is). I went to the default web site, where WSS 2.0 is installed, right-clicked on the ScrumForTeamSystem virtual directory (it wasn’t set as an application), and looked at the “directory” tab. The application name wasn’t set yet, but the “create” button was just to the right of it. Clicking that “create” button converted the virtual directory into an application. The List Manager now works, and I have teams and environments to work with.
I had a problem where some of the data menus had duplicate entries (like the following):
It happens because the VSTS 2008 Database Edition and the VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR are both installed side by side, so you get additional menu entries.
Gert Draper posted instructions to fix this at Home of the Data Dude : Dealing with Confused Installations. They are:
1. Make sure that Visual Studio (devenv.exe) is closed.
2. Start an elevated command prompt.
3. Run the following two commands:
| "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\DBPro\DBProRepair.exe" RemoveDBPro2008 "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /ResetUserData |
4. Restart Visual Studio.
Now, I’m running in 64-bit mode. So, for me, I have to run:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\DBPro\DBProRepair.exe" RemoveDBPro2008 C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /ResetUserData |
And there’s one more thing—the “/ResetUserData” switch unsets any options you had set—fonts, view preferences, etc. You might want to export any settings you care about first.
The VSTS 2010 CTP uses quite a bit of horsepower, and had been really sluggish under Virtual PC or Virtual Server. Hyper-V is a little more efficient, and I could add some of my second core to it as well, so I converted the image over. I used Grant Holliday’s instructions for Converting VS2010 CTP to Hyper-V which I augmented from some more instructions from Cameron Skinner's post on the subject.
In the early stages of converting the image, I ran the image in Virtual Server, removed the Virtual PC Extensions, and ran through a few more steps before moving the virtual hard disk (VHD file) over to the Hyper-V server. For some reason, the instructions by Brian Keller that I'd used weren’t “fully” working—the time was synchronizing between the host OS and the guest OS. I just set the host OS time back a couple of months (to early December) and went forward with the conversion.
Then I ran into some weirdness when I attached the virtual hard drive to my Hyper-V server—I kept getting errors like “Could not initialize machine remoting system” and "an error occurred while attempting to change the state of virtual machine" with an 0x80004005 error code. After thinking that the hard drive was incompatible or somehow corrupted, I finally found some information in an outside FAQ—the Knowledge Layer Hyper-V FAQ. The 19th item let me know that I had to restart my server. Once I did, I was up and running.
One of the nice features of Hyper-V is the ability to snapshot certain progress points. I can easily roll back to a previous point now and restart from there. It makes it very easy to experiment with something and abandon those changes. I also makes it easy for me to work without being concerned about the virtual machine’s license timing out before a new VPC ships. Hopefully, the next one will ship Hyper-V.
Grant Holliday was an MVP, but now he supports internal VSTS/TFS operations here at Microsoft. He’s got a great blog over at Grant Holliday's blog.
Before he came to Microsoft, he maintained a Team Foundation Build Recipes site. He turned it over to William Bartholomew, who’s maintaining it nicely. It’s a set of examples which show how to accomplish some basic Team Build or MSBuild activities. I’m frequently asked how to Restrict The .NET Target Framework Version, but William has an example. I’m also asked how to Deploy MSIs from TFS Build, create a WiX MSI Setup Package, how you Deploy Web Applications to IIS, and how you Keep the Build Number and Assembly Version in sync. There are more examples at Build Recipes.
There are other good build resources at
Plus, Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine is finally out, and you can get it from your local bookseller.
Hope these resources help.
I’m going to add this blog to my links on the left—I go out here often, and I frequently mail these articles to some of my customers. The work item tracking team has their own blog, and they have Excel dashboards (Building lightweight dashboards using Excel, Dashboard Creator – Part I, Dashboard Creator - Update (v1.1), Dashboard Creator - Part II, and Dashboard Creator – Part III), plus they have a series on how the Developer Division uses TFS.
Here is the VSTS Work Item Tracking dogfooding series:
You can find more out at Teams WIT Tools.
I typically run a 64-bit OS, so I occasionally see an issue with the Web Test Recorder explorer bar. For example, the Web Test Recorder explorer bar wasn’t coming up during a test. When I added the explorer bar manually, it wasn’t capturing any of the web interactions.
It turns out, I wasn’t running Visual Studio 2008 in “elevated” mode (e.g. I wasn’t running it as an administrator). Running as administrator fixed my issues, and I started recording.
There is a list of fixes posted over at Michael Taute's Blog : Diagnosing and fixing Web Test recorder bar issues. I’ve used this to bail me out a couple of times. The registry key entries are a big help (although I’ve fixed them with “regedit.exe”, not “regedt32.exe”).
It is a little easier to get to that web test recorder now—you can just bring it up from the “tools” menu in IE8:
However, you do need to launch the browser from Visual Studio, or it’s effectively disabled.
If you want to start recording without using Visual Studio first, you can use Fiddler. There are a few limitations, but it works well with multiple windows.
