Jeff Beehler's Blog

Updates to Visual Studio UI

2009-05-14T16:47:42Z

Jason Zander, the Visual Studio general manager, just posted a follow up to his post regarding the new look for VS2010. Based on popular feedback, we’ve updated the look and feel of our outlining feature. It’ll be available in our upcoming VSTS 2010 Beta 1 release and we hope you take a look and try them out. If you do, please let us hear from you.

Thanks!

VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions

2009-05-13T12:57:00Z

Our team, in conjunction with Microsoft Research, have been working on a power tool known as AjaxView which helps measure the performance of web applications that execute JavaScript inside the web browser. This power tool provides an IIS extension that automatically adds profiling code into a JavaScirpt-based web application as well as a Visual Studio add-in to view the profiling data in the Visual Studio Performance Explorer.

Check out the details on Soma’s blog: VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions.

Free VSTS training in Seattle May 21st

2009-05-03T15:09:00Z

Our friends Jeff Levinson and Steve Borg from Northwest Cadence are offering a free day of VSTS training. This session-packed day will show you how to do more with less. Use software development process and Visual Studio Team System tools to cut costs, leverage resources, and get immediate results.

Details:

Redmond, WA Building 43 Shasta Room
Thursday, May 21, 2009 8:00 AM -5:00 PM

Sessions

Successful Adoption of VSTS
Branching Strategies
Regulatory Compliance using VSTS
Metrics for Real Process Improvement
Using Team System to Drive Agile Adoption

Resources to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010

2009-04-10T16:29:40Z

While the various Visual Studio teams are working on our first beta release, I thought I’d point out some important resources to learn more about what we’re doing. First is the new weekly video podcast series known as 10-4. This has been going on for a few months now but I finally figured out where the name came from…I just couldn’t get past the CB phrase that was so popular when I was growing up. I now get that it’s a clever combination of VSTS 2010 and NetFx 4. Duh! I guess I’ve been triaging a few too many bugs recently. :-) Anyway, Brian Keller and crew have done a great job making this information very accessible and interesting along the way. Here’s a quick list of the podcasts posted to date:

10-4 Episode 14: Sentient DSLs

10-4 Episode 13: No More Late Surprises

10-4 Episode 12: Simplifying Your Code With C# 4.0

10-4 Episode 11: Bi-Directional Routing with ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

10-4 Episode 10: Making Web Deployment Easier

10-4 Episode 9: Visual Basic 10

10-4 Episode 8: Pure Client-Side Development with ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

10-4 Episode 7: No More Planning Black Box

10-4 Episode 6: Parallel Extensions

10-4 Episode 5: Code Focused in Visual Studio 2010

10-4 Episode 4: No More Parallel Development Pain

10-4 Episode 3: ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

10-4 Episode 2: Welcome to Visual Studio 2010

10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC

The other recent activity in this space is Brian Harry’s new series on VSTS 2010 which he started this week: Team System 2010 Overview. If you haven’t already subscribed to his blog, I’d certainly recommend it. Brian’s always got interesting things to say.

Gartner SCCM Magic Quadrant Ranks Microsoft VSTS a Leader

2009-04-10T15:56:10Z

A few weeks ago Gartner published their 2009 Magic Quadrant for Software Change and Configuration Management for Distributed Platforms (what a mouthful!) and in their evaluation has ranked Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server as a leader in the space. This is Microsoft’s first time ranking as a leader which is defined as having a “broad solution with significant support for ALM deployment.” From my perspective, it was merely a matter of time before we were recognized in this way but it’s still an exciting milestone for us.

Some of the strengths that are called out in this evaluation include:

The product has a flexible process model implemented in a single integrated metadata repository.

Basing change, versioning and configuration around the concept of work items, rather than physical code changes, reduces programmer overhead for change management.
Distributed support within a team system project is well-supported with Web proxies.
Team System has demonstrated scalability.

You can read the full reports here:

Congrats to the Team System team for receiving this important recognition.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted (SCCM MQ2009, March 26, 2009. MarketScope for Application Life Cycle Management, 12/17/08) by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Team Test 2008 Quick Reference Guide now available

2009-04-09T18:54:21Z

The Rangers have shipped again! (Faithful readers know just how much I love saying that). This time, led by Geoff Gray, they have put together the VSTT 2008 Quick Reference Guide, a comprehensive technical document about Visual Studio Team Test functionality, specifically focusing on Web, Load and Unit testing. Geoff is a member of our Services Testing Lab, an arm of Microsoft Consulting Services and he’s help putting together this great reference based on his own personal experience using our products in customer settings. As such, it’s chockfull of very helpful advice and best practices informed by real world usage. If you’re at all interested in using our Testing tools, I’d highly recommend taking a look at this guide.

Check out the updated Visual Studio look

2009-02-25T12:25:00Z

For Visual Studio 2010 we have revamped the development environment to provide a cleaner, easier to use, interface all built with WPF. Jason Zander, our general manager, announced new details at VSLive yesterday and provided a blog post outlining some of the highlights. Take a look…I think you’ll like what you see.

Welcome Willy, our newest Team System Ranger

2009-02-08T14:50:11Z

I’m pleased to welcome Willy-Peter Schaub to the Team System team as our newest Ranger. Willy is a former Microsoft MVP from South Africa (his old blog can be found here: http://dotnet.org.za/willy/) and has recently joined us to help further the Ranger mission of accelerating the adoption of Team System. He’s started a new blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/) and has already written 16 posts in his brief stint here so far. At this rate he’ll quickly surpass me on quantity and may have already done so on value. As such, I’d highly recommend checking out his new feed. He’s already doing a good job of explaining what the Rangers do (nice hat!), explaining the point behind the software development lifecycle, and pointing folks to nuggets of Ranger goodness. All in under two weeks!

Welcome Willy!

Check out our updated website

2009-02-08T14:35:05Z

The next update to our Team System website has been made with an eye towards helping make things easier to find. Sharon, our web site manager, has been working very hard to help address the feedback we’ve gotten in the past and is very eager to hear what you think about the recent improvements. Check out her blog article describing the recent changes (http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2009/02/04/new-team-system-site-launches.aspx) as well as provide her feedback here (http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2009/02/04/team-system-web-site-feedback.aspx).

We’re eager to hear from you…we still have a lot of work to do and you can help us prioritize that work by giving us feedback.

Thanks!

Listen to me on Radio TFS

2008-12-29T15:08:55Z

The Radio TFS folks called me at home just before the holidays and spent the better part of an hour talking about what I do, some of the history of Team System and where we’re headed with our 2010 release. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s a fun format for getting some of the behind-the-scenes information out to the community. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend perusing their website for other shows that might pique your interest.

Take a listen to our conversation here: Play Now- A Chat with Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff

Updated Visual Studio Team System 2008 Trial VPC images available

2008-12-26T13:30:22Z

For those of you that want to try out Visual Studio Team System 2008 including Team Foundation Server, without having to go through the process of installing the product, we have recently released four VPC and HyperV images for your use. The “all-up” image includes Team Foundation Server, Team Build, Team Explorer, and Team Suite while the TFS “only” version has just Team Foundation Server, Team Build, and Team Explorer.

These images are set to expire on December 31, 2009 (over a year from now) and are a replacement for the original VPC images we released last year.

VPC:

VSTS “all-up” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
TFS “only” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

Hyper-V:

VSTS “all-up” Hyper-V image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
TFS “only” Hyper-V image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

For more information and to find links to the images go to http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/brian/archive/2008/12/24/happy-holidays-and-look-what-santa-s-brought.aspx. Many thanks to Brian Randell for his outstanding work pulling these images together and getting them through the sometimes Byzantine release process here at MS.

Enjoy!

Visual Studio sales site gets a facelift

2008-12-21T17:06:00Z

Check out the updated sales site for Visual Studio at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio. On the new site you can find numerous case studies as well as some of our current offers for Visual Studio as well as Team System. Finally, there’s in-depth information about the Team System line of products. All in all, a very nice looking and (much more importantly) informative site.

TFS Branching Guide 2.0 published

2008-12-21T14:21:00Z

I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but the VSTS Rangers have shipped again! This time, in the form of guidance for branching strategies using Team Foundation Server. You can find this release on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII

Selecting the right branching strategy is one of the most important aspects of TFS deployment. Picking the right strategy can lead to optimized team cooperation, increased productivity and a successful adoption. On the other hand, selecting a bad branching strategy can cause frustration, damage productivity and derail TFS adoption in an organization. We have therefore put a lot of effort in creating a set of practical guidance to educate our customers and partners and support their VSTS adoption efforts.

As the name implies, this is the 2nd version of the TFS Branching Guidance to be published. Since the first release, we have received lots of feedback and change requests. Most feedback indicated a desire for a more practical approach to branching compared to the first release which is more theoretical. With that in mind, we decided to reduce the conceptual part and focus on branching practices with Team Foundation Server.

Here’s an overview:

TFS Branching Guide - Main 2.0

This is the main article which briefly explains branching concepts and introduces 3 levels of the most common branching scenario

TFS Branching Guide - Scenarios 2.0

A collection of less common branching scenarios

TFS Branching Guide - Q&A 2.0

A set of most frequently asked questions with answers

TFS Branching Guide - Drawings 2.0

A set of branching drawings in different formats including a large branching poster

TFS Branching Guide - Labs 2.0

A couple of examples for hands on labs with step by step instruction for practicing the branching scenarios

I’m especially excited about this project as it’s the first VSTS Ranger project to have included significant contributions from our Team System MVPs including Brian Randell, Willy-Peter Schaub, Eugene Zakhareyev and Jeff Levinson. This is a new approach we’re trying out in order to increase the community involvement in our Ranger projects which will hopefully result in improved applicability throughout our user base. Please let us know if you think it’s working!

Check out the new Community tab on the Team System website!

2008-12-12T02:34:00Z

As I mentioned recently, Sharon Elkins is our new website manager for Team System and she’s starting to make some changes to the site. Some of those first updates went live today and we’d love your feedback. You can see the new page here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/bb964396.aspx and read Sharon’s description / plea for feedback here: http://blogs.msdn.com/selkins/archive/2008/12/10/new-community-section.aspx.

Take a look and let us know what you think. There’s more to come…

Thanks!

jeff

Dealing with the Team System 2010 CTP expiration

2008-12-09T13:36:00Z

If you’ve been using the Team System 2010 Community Tech Preview VPC, you’ve probably noticed that the instance of Visual Studio within the VPC is getting close to expiring. We expect that it will cease functioning around the end of the year and instead return the message “The evaluation period for Visual Studio Trial Edition has ended”:

Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before we release our next update to Team System 2010 so you’ll need to take action to keep this version working for a while. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy resolution to this problem. It involves turning off the synchronization between the host OS and the VPC. This enables you to set the time in the VPC to a 2008 date while you live in 2009. As you might imagine, Team Foundation Server doesn’t like it much when time goes backwards so you’ll want to make sure that you don’t use the VPC and then set the clock backwards after that point. Ideally, you can use a fresh VPC and disable your clock prior to launching it for the first time.

Disabling the host OS synchronization of the VPC. This is a change to the .VMC file (see below) that basically disables the clock synchronization between the VPC and the host OS. This means that time in the VPC moves forward only when the VPC is being used. As a result, we have essentially 2 months of runtime (not wall time) for the VPC which is way more time than people should need to run the CTP, even if they’re demoing it regularly to others.

Here are the changes necessary for the .VMC file (specific to a particular VPC and not a system-wide setting):

<integration>
    <microsoft>
        <mouse>
            <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
        </mouse>
        <components>
            <host_time_sync>
                <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
            </host_time_sync>
        </components>

Bunch of other stuff that I am skipping over to save space...
    </microsoft>
</integration>

Hopefully this will allow you to have plenty of time to evaluate the CTP and send us feedback on what you like and don’t like about what we put together in this release. As you might imagine, we’re hard at work putting together the next release and your feedback over the next period of time will really help us make sure that the next release is even better than the current CTP. And, yes, we will release both a VPC and native install version of the CTP so that folks will have flexibility in how they deploy and evaluate the next release.

One important note: don’t attempt to join the VPC to a domain since the domain will set the time within the VPC and thus cause Visual Studio to expire.

Many thanks to Brian Keller and his detailed description of the various activation messages associated with the CTP as well as to Virtual PC Guy who provided the original information on how to disable the VPC clock synchronization.

If you’ve converted this VPC image to HyperV following Grant’s instructions, be sure to read Cameron’s update to learn of a similar workaround for HyperV.

Happy CTPing!

Jeff