Jeff Beehler's Blog : Community

Welcome Willy, our newest Team System Ranger

jeffbe — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:50:11 GMT

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

jeffbe — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:35:05 GMT

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

jeffbe — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:08:55 GMT

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

jeffbe — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:30:22 GMT

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!

TFS Branching Guide 2.0 published

jeffbe — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:21:00 GMT

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!

jeffbe — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:34:00 GMT

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

jeffbe — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:36:00 GMT

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

Team System has a new website manager!

jeffbe — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:31:30 GMT

A few months I grew my team by one person when we brought Sharon Elkins on board to manage the Team System website. This is the first time we’ve had someone dedicated fulltime to our website and as such, I’m really excited that she’s joined our team. The website will finally get the attention from us that it deserves. Over the past few years, our website has fallen in disrepair as we’ve had a patchwork of volunteers work on it in an adhoc way…not exactly a recipe for success. When we ask our customers what one thing we can do to improve our product, many of them mention improving our website so I’m eager to be able to respond to that feedback in a meaningful way. She recently started her own blog in order to give folks insight behind the scenes and to provide you a way to provide her feedback on our ideas and how well the website is working for you. She’s shared some of her plans with me and I’m eager to get them implemented so we can see how well they work for you. Please let us hear from you on what’s working (and what’s not) so that we can make the most of Sharon’s energy and passion around providing a great online customer experience.

Please join me in welcoming Sharon to the team!

jeff

Using Team System for SharePoint development

jeffbe — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:25:40 GMT

From all indications, Microsft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) adoption is growing quickly as it provides an easy way to share information, facilitate collaboration, manage content, and implement workflow within enterprises. We use it daily here on our team to store documents, and share project details. We’ve done a bit of customization but I can tell that there are many more capabilities that we have not yet exploited. As customers adopt and customize the platform, they find that they want bring the power of Team System to managing the lifecycle of their sites just like they’ve done for their other application development efforts. To help with this, the Team System Rangers have engaged in an effort to develop guidance around the best practices for SharePoint application development. We plan to publish the guidance in the form of white papers and articles to MSDN.

As we engage on this project, we’d like your feedback on the top topics around leveraging Team Foundation Server (TFS) for MOSS application development. Please review the below list of categories that we’re planning to cover and let us know if we’re hitting the most important ones. Are there any that we’re missing?

Implementing TFS Team Build for SharePoint Development: Customers want to use Team Build to centrally build their SharePoint application projects on demand or on an automatic schedule as well as how to extend Team Build for deployment to target SharePoint farms.
Assembly and Artifact Development Models for SharePoint: Development teams need to reconcile the differences between artifact and assembly development, including combining these two components into a single source control repository such as Team Foundation Server. There are various team and organizational models ensure all artifacts and assembly components of a SharePoint application get packaged for farm deployment as a single unit.
Deploying and Managing SharePoint Solutions: Development teams and administrators need strategies for deploying their application into a target SharePoint environment. Since there are various types of SharePoint applications, there are various strategies and scenarios to consider.
Implementing TFS as an ALM Platform for SharePoint Development: Developers want advice on how to best take advantage of the collaboration capabilities of TFS to increase their ability to stay organized and focused on meeting business requirements.
Leveraging Testing for SharePoint: Customers, given the complexity some of their customized SharePoint applications, want advice on tools and methods needed to test their SharePoint applications and how Team Foundation Server can extend these capabilities.

So, if your team is creating custom applications for SharePoint, we’re hoping that guidance on these topics will be helpful. Please let us know if we’re missing any major areas from your perspective.

Thanks!

Guidance Explorer: enabling discovery, composition and consumption of high quality development guidance

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:06:56 GMT

Several of our MVPs just recently “discovered” the Guidance Explorer project run by our very on patterns & practices team even though it’s been released for some time now. Since this was a surprise to many of them, I figured it’d be good mention it more broadly in case others might find it useful. As you hopefully know by now, the p&p team is all about providing guidance to architects and developers interested in learning more about how to apply Microsoft’s technologies to common application development scenarios. They produce a ton of content and often times customers want to customize the organization of that guidance to make it easier to access and navigate. Enter the Guidance Explorer. This Codeplex project provides an easy way to:

Find relevant patterns & practices guidance
Build customized checklists for your development scenarios
Build customized guidelines for your development scenarios
Build custom sets of guidance and share with your team as recommended practice.

Here’s a quick screenshot of the tool:

As you can see, it provides the ability to navigate, search, filter and customize your view on all of p&p’s content. Some of the guidance you might want to navigate with the Guidance Explorer includes:

Check it out and let us know if this works for you!

jeff

Welcome Grant!

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:47:23 GMT

Grant Holliday, a former Team System MVP, recently joined our team focused on adoption of TFS internal to Microsoft. Since he’s a veteran TFS user, he hit the ground running and now is a voracious force on the internal support aliases. I’m happy to see that he’s also started blogging with a similar level of energy. Looks like in the three brief weeks he’s been with us, he’s posted 15 blog entries…that’s 1/work day and he started with a handicap since the first couple days were spent in “New Employee Orientation”. I can remember when that process took < 2 hours but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his blog. I certainly have.

Welcome aboard Grant…it’s great to have you here!

Team System community update posted

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:33:44 GMT

Chuck Sterling, our Team System community lead, has posted a copy of his monthly update on community activities to his blog. In the past, these updates have been only for internal consumption but, at my behest, he posted the most recent update for all to read. This sort of transparency is a bit of an experiment and your feedback will help us decide how to proceed in the future. Do you find this update useful? What else regarding the community would you like to see in these reports?

Please take a look and let us hear from you.

Thanks!

jeff

Localized hotfix pages now available

jeffbe — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:28:00 GMT

We have hit another milestone on our journey to improve our process around delivering hotfixes to customers. Now, not only will the most commonly requested hotfixes be available for download in English, but in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese as well.

You can browse the list of Hotfixes on MSDN CodeGallery here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?TagName=Hotfix. MSDN Code Gallery allows the community to provide feedback on our hotfixes and they can stay informed when a new hotfixes is released by subscribing to the following RSS feed: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/rss.ashx?behavior=bytag&TagName=Hotfix.

When you select a language, it will take you to a resource page where they can read the localized KB article content and details for the hotfix you’ve selected.

Please note: The title of the hotfix will not be localized and will appear in English.

Hope you find this improvement helpful!

jeff

Tools for Agility - A white paper by Kent Beck

jeffbe — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:57:01 GMT

Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, a product manager on our team, recently worked with Kent Beck to publish a great white paper on tooling for the agile team. The section on transparency really resonated with me especially this passage:

A transparent team can more cheaply and effectively coordinate their efforts towards shared goals. Acting transparently sends a signal to others that they can trust you. Trust, when realized, reduces the friction of development as people focus more on what they are accomplishing together and less on avoiding blame. Just as TDD allows me to trust my code and do more with it, trust on a team allows them to be more innovative and experimental.

I like the notion that transparency makes a team more effective, innovative and experimental. I’ve certainly run into my share of teams that claim that they can’t tell me what they’re doing because to do so would slow them down. Of course we still have plenty of work to do in order to make it easier for the tools to support transparency but I’m totally convinced that this is the right direction to go.

What do you think?

PDC2008

jeffbe — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:28:56 GMT

As you may have heard, registration is now open for the next Microsoft Professional Developers Conference happening in October! PDC2008 is going to be packed with all of the latest information about the future of the Microsoft development platform. For a taste of some of the sessions being offered, check out the preliminary list of sessions.

PDC2008 will be a great place to learn more about Visual Studio Team System code name “Rosario” in addition to a myriad of other Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s software + services strategy.

I would also recommend looking at the list of pre-conferences, which are designed to train you on how to make the most of currently shipping Microsoft technologies. I am especially excited about the Visual Studio Team System 2008 pre-conference which is being delivered by Brian Randell. Brian is a Visual Studio Team System MVP who has trained development organizations around the world on how to make the most with Visual Studio Team System. If you have ever seen Brian present then you know he’s passionate about sharing best practices for software development!

To learn more about PDC2008 visit http://www.microsoftpdc.com.