- Load Test Report Generator now available on Codeplex
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The Team System Rangers have shipped again!
Last Friday, we published our Ranger Load Test Report Generator to Codeplex. We decided to post this to the existing Load Test Reports Codplex site for customer convenience.
The Load Test Report Generator contains a utility and a set of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports that allow users to generate Summary reports, counter comparison reports within and across test runs. The reports are simple but very flexible and can be used to generate & visualize various scenarios that a test team would like to create as a summary report for a set of load test runs.
The tool allows users to author and generate reports in HTML/MHT and Doc formats. It applies a task based approach for creating reports and is based on the feedback received from consultants in professional test labs.
Reports can also be generated using the concept of a template that makes it very easy to reuse predefined reports as templates for new ones. It is very simple to use custom build reports with the tool. All you need to do is publish your custom report in SSRS.
Congratulations to the Team System Rangers for their continued work in accelerating the adoption of Team System by filling the gaps in our current offering.
- Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper now available
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Kevin Kelly, a Team System Product Manager, announced today that at long last the Team System 2008 licensing white paper has been published. I’ve lost track of the number of people who have asked about this important update so I’m sure there are many people interested in this announcement. As Kevin says, we continue to simplify this topic and as a result you can expect an update to this whitepaper in August which will include explanations and examples for both Work Item Web Access (WIWA) and the new data synchronization license.
We’re thinking hard about our licensing for upcoming releases at this time. Your feedback on better ways to simplify and communicate our licensing is welcome and timely.
Thanks!
- Watch James Whittaker talk about Software Testing
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James Whittaker has recently joined the team responsible for producing Visual Studio Team System Test Edition as an Architect. He’s got years of experience in the testing field and it’s great to have him on board. Brian Keller recently interviewed him for a segment on Channel 9 which is well worth watching. You should also check out the Tester Center which contains even more material from James.
- More Rosario specs available
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While I hope many of you are now or soon to be actively using Visual Studio Team System 2008, we’re hard at work with developing our next release known as Rosario. We’ve been publishing specs for some of the new features and just refreshed the list updating or adding 7 specs bringing our full total to lucky 13. Mario Rodriguez posted one on “Enterprise TFS Management” which he describes in greater detail on his blog. As always, we post these to get your feedback which you can share on our spec feedback forum.
Thanks!
- March 2008 TFS Power Tools now available
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Check out Brian Harry’s post on the latest release of the increasingly popular (and increasingly valuable), TFS Power Tools. As you can probably tell by the name, we’ve been working on this release for a bit and ran into a few delays along the way. Hopefully you’ll agree that it’s worth waiting for once you take a look at what’s available. At the highest level, here are the key points:
- Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls
- TFSServerManager client
- TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008
- Work Item Template improvements Scriptable Team Project creation
- Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms
- Unshelve to a different branch
- Improvements to tfpt review
- Delete global lists in the work item tracking system
- Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes
- Performance improvements in tfpt online
Check it out and let us know what you think!
- How DevDiv uses TFS
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Gregg Boer, a program manager on the TFS work item tracking team has started a series of posts outlining in good detail how we used TFS work item tracking within Developer Division to manage the Visual Studio 2008 project. Based on the popularity of my Channel 9 video covering similar topics, I suspect this will be interesting reading for many of you. Check out the first 4 articles in his occasional series:
Hopefully this explanation of how we have implemented TFS internally will help you with your own implementations. Please let us know what you think.
Thanks!
- Migrating hotfixes to MSDN Code Gallery
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As we continue to improve the availability of our Visual Studio and .NET hotfixes, we have recently begun the migration of them to MSDN Code Gallery, to our new web property designed specifically as a place for us to share applications and code snippets with the developer community. We had several benefits in mind as we planned this migration:
- Hotfix Discoverability – VS and .NET product updates are available in a single location
- Improved User Experience – The overall experience of Code Gallery is better/easier than that of Connect
- Ease of Access – No log-in is required to access and download Hotfixes
- Rich Search – All downloads can have multiple tags and tags are searchable to help you find relevant Hotfixes
- Customer Feedback – You can provide feedback on Hotfixes via the Code Gallery forums. This enables you to provide advice and support to each other. It also provides us with Hotfix experience feedback so we can address problems and interact directly with you.
We have just started this migration so expect to see the list of available fixes increase as we move more over the coming days and weeks. Check it out and let us know what you think: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?ProjectSearchText=hotfix.
Thanks!
- April Rosario CTP now available!
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I'm happy to announce that the next Community Technology Preview of Rosario (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” April 2008 CTP) is now available. Customers can immediately begin downloading the VPC images from our download page. Because of the size of the VPC, I'd recommend using a download manager, such as the one referred to here, to download the follow part of this release:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part01.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part02.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part03.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part04.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part05.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part06.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part07.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part08.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part09.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part10.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part11.rar
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Apr2008RosarioCTP _12PartsTotal.part12.rar
For this release we worked on a number of key scenarios that we'd like you to try out. To help facilitate your evaluation, we've included samples and walkthroughs within the VPC to demonstrate these new features. Here's a list of walkthroughs broken out by product:
Architecture Edition
- Exploring the existing code structure
- Designing process flow as activities
- Designing user interactions with systems
- Designing system functionality as components
- Visualizing and designing types in systems
- Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems
Development Edition
- Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
- Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
- Identify the test impact of code changes
- Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger
Database Edition
- Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
- Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
- Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
- Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.
Test Edition
- Planning a testing effort
- Executing manual test cases
- Verify the fix
- Automate a manual test and add validation.
Team Foundation Server
- Managing an Agile schedule
- Easier reporting from Excel
- Managing features with the CMMI Process
- A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
- An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
- A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
- A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
- Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
- Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements
As you can see, we’ve been busy since our last CTP! As with our previous Rosario CTP, this release is not a beta. We’ve done a reasonable amount of testing on the bits to ensure that most the major features work to some degree and that the key experiences listed above work well but have not done any of the configuration or deep testing that we do for a beta release that we expect customers to use on a regular basis. As such, we encourage you to take the release for a spin and evaluate the new features we’ve added but please don’t expect to use it for any sort of production usage and understand that any data that you enter into the system cannot be migrated to future releases. And by all means, any applications written with these bits may not be redistributed in any way.
We’re releasing this CTP primarily for two key reasons: practice shipping and collecting feedback. Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a lot of the first as we’ve worked out the kinks associated with building, testing and releasing these bits to you. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months, we’ll get a lot of the second from you. Feedback in the form of bugs and suggestions can be submitted via http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio. Make sure when you submit issues through Connect that you indicate the product version as being “Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” (April 2008 CTP)”. That will ensure it gets to the right folks for consideration. If you have a question or would like provide feedback to the product team, we've created a special forum specifically focused on Rosario: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1736&SiteID=1. We look forward to hearing from you.
Please join me in congratulating the Team System team on this release.
Woohoo!
jeff
- Update on DevDiv dogfooding of TFS
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Matt Gertz, Developer Division's manager responsible for our internal development tactics and process, recently posted an article covering the broad post-VS2008 efforts to more broadly adopt TFS within DevDiv for future product development. As regular readers of my blog know, Team System teams have been dogfooding TFS for a long time now so this change is about getting the rest of the division switched over as well. We've certainly had our share of growing pains (ever try unshelving a shelveset with 1 million files?) but we're pretty much through the transition (and fixed a number of scale related issues along the way). I posted a recent report on internal usage stats for TFS and in it you can see the increase of DevDiv users from 1,300 to 2,200 since December '07. Now you know what prompted that considerable increase.
If you're interested in learning more about DevDiv's dogfooding of TFS, be sure to read Matt's article: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2008/03/28/milestone-quality-dogfooding-matt-gertz.aspx.
- New Team System Blogger: Stephanie Saad
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I have been working with Stephanie for several years now and so I was super excited tickled to see that she's recently started blogging. Trust me when I say that when Steph talks, people listen. I, for one, have added her to my short list of blogs that I'll be reading over the coming months.
Welcome Steph!
- Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server - now in Russian
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Folks in our Ukrainian subsidiary recently completed the translation effort for the wildly popular Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. I'm not sure I have a strong Russian speaking following, but just in case, please take a look: Групповая разработка с использованием Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Many thanks to Viktor Shatokhin for spearheading this effort.
- Requirements Management with Team System whitepaper published
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Lori Lamkin, the Product Unit Manager for TFS work item tracking and project management, has recently published a whitepaper on Requirements Management. It covered how Team System supports various Requirement Management activities today, and how your organization can choose to stretch your process to fit while using the Team System platform. It goes into some detail about how to work through some of the challenges posed by the limited linking features in TFS, as well as how to supplement Team System with various partner solutions and how those solutions fit into the process.
So, if you want to get started managing requirements with Team System, this is a great place to begin: Requirements Management with Visual Studio Team System
- More Team System "Rosario" specs available for review
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In November of last year, we started sharing a selection of the specs written for Team System "Rosario" features. At the time, we had just two specs available but the response from the community was very encouraging. As I predicted at the time, this sort of positive response would encourage others to follow suit and it has...we now have 7 specs available with 3 new ones posted in the last month:
Please take a look at these and provide us feedback. Not only will you help us make these features better but you'll also encourage other teams to go through the extra effort required to publish new specs in the future. Subscribe to this RSS feed in order to monitor future activity and join us on our forum specifically designated to promote discussion of these specs within the community.
Thanks!
- 84,248 Ads per second!
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I think that the Load Testing capabilities within Team System Test Edition and the Load Test Agent are really still just waiting to be discovered by the majority of our users. When they do, they're in for a very big surprise. As an example of what these tools can do for an organization, Ed Glas recently posted details about the experience of the adCenter Display Ads Platform team and their use of Team System. Pretty impressive results including running 42 agents generating 3,639,518,000 requests. Check out the details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/edglas/archive/2008/03/17/84-248-ads-per-second.aspx.
- Join me at our next Team System Chat
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Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.
Add to Calendar
April 9, 2008
10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
Additional Time Zones