Jeff Beehler's Blog : Rosario

Resources to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010

jeffbe — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:29:40 GMT

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.

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

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

Thoughts on Exit Criteria

jeffbe — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:08:25 GMT

On occasion I write an email to the Team System team that steps back and tries to explain a little bit about the background of why we do something rather than just what we’re doing and when it’s due. I’ve been wondering recently if these updates would be interesting to folks outside of our team. So, I’m going to try publishing a slightly sanitized version of these emails and gauge the response. Let me know what you think and we’ll see where this takes us.

~~~~~~~

Over the past week there’s been a concerted effort to review and clarify the exit criteria for future releases of VSTS10 including beta and release. At last count we had approximately 25 exit criteria that we’re managing for this release. Some, such as Performance and Side-by-Side, are familiar to many of you while others, such as App Isolation and Windows Logo, might not be. As I sat through hours of meetings last week reviewing each of these in detail I thought about why these are important. In the end, I realized these criteria help us pop above the din of day to day activity and instead see the broader fundamentals for the release. For instance, it doesn’t matter if we have the world’s best Test Impact Analysis if installing VSTS10 causes other applications to stop working or if the performance of the overall system is horrible. Customers will just back away before they even realize the benefits of the value we’ve added to the product. So, as we make our way through what sometimes seems like unending test passes and bug triages over the next year, keeping these fundamentals in mind will help us ensure that 1000’s and 1000’s of decisions each of us will make are in line with a high quality release that our customers will appreciate and value.

We’ve also established a ramp for most of these exit criteria such that the Beta criteria are reduced when compared to RTM. In part, this is in recognition that when we ship Beta we’ll still have at least time before we ship the final version so we don’t have to be all buttoned up at that point. But it’s important to start practicing driving this type of quality into the product. Many of these things take time to get right and we can’t assume that we can make them all go green in the final weeks of the project unless we’ve taken a measured approach to get there.

For various reasons, some teams will not be able to meet the graduated ramp for the exit criteria that we’ve outlined. When we roll these guidelines out you’ll see that some are identified as “critical” while others are labeled “important”. The idea here is to guide teams into how to apply their limited resources in the case where they don’t believe they can meet all of the Beta1 criteria. We’ll be making exceptions for specific criteria on a team by team basis through a negotiation between the team, the divisional exit criteria owner and the divisional release team. These discussions will focus on ensuring that the right tradeoffs are made while not endangering the overall integrity of the release. This information will also have a strong influence during the DCR approval process. Teams that are in good shape with regards to bugs and exit criteria will have a much better chance of getting their DCRs approved than those teams who have considerable bug or exit criteria debt to pay.

One thing that’s not well captured in the exit criteria that I want to continue to find a way to shine a light on is the state of integration between features. A team that’s nailed their features, exit criteria and bugs might still not be ready to ship if their features aren’t well integrated together. This is obviously more subjective than some of the other tests that we run but nonetheless important to our customers. I think our end-to-end scenario effort that has been underway for the past 6 months is an important part of this discussion and we’ll keep looking for ways to ensure the state of this aspect of our product is well understood by everyone.

Starting in December we’ll be tracking our exit criteria state on a common divisional scorecard in TFS. I appreciate your efforts to help us keep it as up to date as possible so that we can view our progress and make good decisions as a team based on accurate information. As we manage the VSTS10 endgame, it’s very informative to use the scorecard to view trends for teams as well as particular criteria to guide our decisions. If at any time you think our scorecard doesn’t really represent the true nature of our situation, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note so that we can work to rectify the situation together.

As always, I’m eager to hear from you on how we can improve our engineering process and systems so please let me know what you think about exit criteria or any other aspect of how things are going with VSTS10.

Yours,

jeff

April Rosario CTP now available!

jeffbe — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:36:29 GMT

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

Value of Community Tech Previews

jeffbe — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:21:22 GMT

We've been issuing Community Tech Previews (CTPs) for some time now including the most recent for Team System code named "Rosario", and I recently asked our MVPs to help me understand what value they derive from these releases. I received a flurry of responses and since the results were interesting, I thought I'd share what I heard in hopes that you find it interesting or might even have something to add.

First, just to set a little context, we started issuing CTPs in the middle of the Visual Studio 2005 project and made them available several times during the Visual Studio 2008 project as well. In some cases, these are issued as virtual images to ease the need for installation testing as well as impact on customer machines. In all cases, these releases are lightly tested and don't meet the stringent quality requirements of our various beta releases. Essentially, we're looking for a low cost way for us to expose our current in order to get early feedback. This program has met with mixed success ranging from "madness" to some fantastic early feedback from customers. Obviously we're always looking to move away from the former and towards the latter.

The MVPs suggested several benefits they get from CTPs including the ability to:

see the direction of the product in a way that's more detailed and concrete than product roadmaps
influence product development at a point when things haven't completely settled down yet
demonstrate to customers what's coming up from Microsoft so they can see the direction and plan for the future
inform our partners of our direction to enable them to build add-ons
gauge how far along we are in order to make the mental shift in preparation of the eventual release

They also provided suggestions on how we can continue to improve the value of the releases:

continue doing the mini-story walkthroughs and demos which make it easy to try out new features
provide release notes outlining features added, removed and fixed since the last release
run webcasts and publish videos outlining new features and areas we'd like feedback in
provide builds that are ready to install so they can try them out in alternate configurations beyond the virtual image we provide
more specific blog articles on key features and improvements that we'd like feedback on

I'd like to hear from you on this. What value do you get from the CTPs? What could we do to make them more valuable to you? What sort of frequency would work best for you? How can we get more early feedback from you on these releases?

I look forward to learning more from you.

Thanks!

November Rosario CTP now available!

jeffbe — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:11:59 GMT

I'm happy to announce that the next Community Technology Preview of Rosario (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” November 2007 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 following seven parts of this release:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part01.exe

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part02.rar

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part03.rar

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part04.rar

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part05.rar

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part06.rar

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part07.rar

Architecture Edition

Visualizing Interaction Sequences between Service-Oriented applications
Using the Distributed System Designers and the Web Service Software Factory to build WCF applications
Designing and Visualizing Interactions between classes

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

Test Edition

Planning a testing effort
Executing manual test cases

Team Foundation Server

Managing user stories with the Agile Process
Managing features with the CMMI Process

In addition, we've included support to build setup packages with Windows Installer XML (WiX) technology. You can learn more about that here and here.

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” (November 2007 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.

Finally, we have refreshed our page on MSDN focused entirely on Rosario. On it we’ll have links to the latest downloads, blog articles, documentation and other key information. I’d suggest bookmarking this site and returning regularly to keep up on the latest for the release.

Please join me in congratulating the Team System team on this release. It’s exciting to me that even in the face of significant effort on the recent release of Visual Studio 2008 that we’ve been able to make impressive progress in these important areas. I hope you agree...please take a look and let us know what you think.

Woohoo!

jeff

New Team System User Group in Seattle

jeffbe — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:30:33 GMT

Brian Estep of Velocity Partners is organizing a new user group for Team System here in the Seattle metro area. They have set their first meeting for October 9th and have invited me to speak to them about Team System 2008 as well as "Rosario". I'm excited to meet the charter members of this group and get their feedback on our upcoming releases. Maybe I'll see you there!

Improved VPC download experience

jeffbe — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:21:21 GMT

If you're struggling to download the huge VPC images for Team System 2008 or the "Rosario" CTP, I recommend that you check out Brian Keller's article outlining steps that you can follow to make the process faster and more reliable.

Initial feedback on Rosario starts flowing in

jeffbe — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:22:10 GMT

It hasn't taken our early adopters much time to start providing feedback on Rosario since our announcement just under two days ago. We've received our first bug through Connect, seen our first questions on the Rosario forum and just recently Grant Holliday (one of our MVPs) has posted a great article outlining our hierarchical work item support features. Pretty amazing!

First Rosario CTP now available!

jeffbe — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 23:51:47 GMT

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the availability of the first Rosario CTP (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” August 2007 CTP). Customers can immediately begin downloading the VPC images and learning more about the specific features in this release from the Rosario CTP whitepaper.

For this release, we have focused on a number of important experiences which form the core of Rosario:

Development scheduling & tracking – by using the hierarchical work item support in Excel, users will now be able to complete work breakdown activities within Excel. For instance, users can import Requirements into Excel and then break down that requirement into Features and from there into associated Tasks. The work item links are automatically created and maintained through Excel so that when these changes are published to the TFS server, the relationships are preserved for everyone to query and report on. In addition, using these relationships, the Work Breakdown spreadsheet can roll up completed and remaining work values from Tasks to their associated features and requirements to show high level status.
Requirements test coverage and manual testing – test cases are now stored and managed like other work items. As such, a user can run a query to determine which Requirements do not have any test cases associated with them then create new Test Cases at that point. We have greatly enhanced our support for creating manual test cases so that each step can be called out with specific instructions and expected results. When running the manual test, a video recording of the screen can be made in case a bug is found during testing. If a step fails, the tester can file a bug directly from the manual test runner which will prepopulate the bug form with the test steps, a copy of the video recording and a link to the test case making it much easier for testers to create actionable bugs for developers.
Managing dependencies – using the hierarchical work item support, users can now indicate predecessor and successor relationships between tasks making it much easier to determine what work must come first and what work is blocked behind it. This will enable team members to prioritize their work appropriately and for project managers to use reports to determine bottlenecks within their team.

With this release we have preloaded the VPC with a sample Team Project so that you can hit the ground running in evaluating some of the new work item tracking features. Look for the eBanking Team Project to get started.

This release is a CTP (Community Technology Preview) and 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. 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” (August 2007 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.

Finally, we have created a page on MSDN focused entirely on Rosario. On it we’ll have links to the latest downloads, blog articles, documentation and other key information. I’d suggest bookmarking this site and returning regularly to keep up on the latest for the release.

Please join me in congratulating the Team System team on this release. It’s exciting to me that even in the face of significant effort on the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2008 that we’ve been able to make impressive progress in these important areas. I hope you agree...please take a look and let us know what you think.

Woohoo!

jeff