Jeff Beehler's Blog : TSBT-DEV

Case studies galore!

jeffbe — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:39:20 GMT

Sometimes I get so heads down in the business of shipping our next version that I forget for a moment about customers using the current version. Fortunately, there are plenty of folks around me who work directly with customers on a regular basis such as the Team System Rangers and our very own Team System evangelist, Brian Keller…they don’t let me forget for very long. Recently I took a look at the updated list of case studies for Team System adoption and was happy to see that the list continues to grow by the week. According to the search engine at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies, there are currently 102 (wow!) which are related in some way to Team System. Here are a few recent ones of note:

Chicago Bears: Football Team Connects with Fans, Drives Web Site Traffic with Desktop Application

‘The team-oriented features of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition helped us ensure that we didn’t introduce any defects while developing,” says Strawmyer. “For instance, the code profiling capabilities of the product quickly and clearly showed that there was no processor abuse or inconsistent use of memory.”’

Merrill Lynch: Merrill Lynch Creates Development Framework for Increased Productivity

‘Merrill Lynch upgraded to Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 as soon as it became available. “We opted to use Visual Studio Team System because of its tightly integrated workflow, design, and development capabilities.”’

Starz Entertainment: Movie Provider Automates to Meet Higher Demand, Reduce Costs, Improve Brand Visibility

‘The collaboration and team features in Visual Studio Team System … make it faster and easier for a group of developers—we had eight working on MediaForge—to work together reliably.’

Thomson Reuters: Media and Information Provider Unifies Development Processes

‘Using Team Foundation Server, the team manages more than 2,000 work items, 70,000 changesets, and 200,000 files and folders. Since Online Services implemented Team Foundation Server, four other business units either have adopted it or have begun the implementation process.’

Anyway, there are many more out there if you’re interested in learning more about how other customers are using Team System.

Enjoy!

Radio TFS

jeffbe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:16:57 GMT

After getting my first Zune in March for my birthday, I’ve really enjoyed getting familiar with the world of podcasting…it’s a great way to extend my learning and entertainment in to my exercise, commuting and yard work time. As it turns out that there’s a podcast out there for the Team System enthusiasts produced by three of our Team System MVPs (Mickey Gousset, Paul Hacker and Martin Woodward). For the past half year they have created a monthly podcast series focused on Team System and Team Foundation Server. The first five are available here:

For those of you that are like me and need to find ways to pack more into your day, I’d recommend adding these casts to your Zune. They’ve even created an RSS feed too help ensure you always have the latest shows.

Happy listening!

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

Join me at our next Team System Chat

jeffbe — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:17:42 GMT

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

Licensing Team System editions for your build machine

jeffbe — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:46:21 GMT

David Yack, one of our MS Regional Directors and a .NET MVP, tells me there is considerable confusion around the licensing requirements for the software installed on Team System build machines. The best resource available for these sorts of questions is the VSTS Licensing Whitepaper which goes into numerous licensing scenarios in depth. In the case of if you need a separate license of the Team System Development or Test edition on your build machine, in most cases you don't. Here's the excerpt from the whitepaper:

Those users who are authoring tests and including them as part of a Team Build type must be appropriately licensed with the relevant Team Edition product. For unit tests, Team Edition for Software Developers or Team Edition for Database Professionals or Team Edition for Software Testers or Team Suite would be required by the test author. For load and other test types, Team Edition for Software Testers or Team Suite would be required. Similarly, a user who includes code analysis in a Team Build Type must also be appropriately licensed for Team Edition for Software Developers. Users who merely execute and review Team Builds are only required to have a Team Foundation Server CAL.

The way I think about it, the people that are using the Team editions need to be properly licensed which in turn ensures the that the build machines are covered as well.

Hope this helps in some small way to reduce the confusion on this topic.

VS2008 Demo and Training kit available

jeffbe — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:09:04 GMT

The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit has been updated for the RTM and has been released on the Microsoft.com Download Center for anyone to download and use. You can download the entire training kit from the download center here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397. After downloading the kit, simply run the installation program to extract the contents to your local machine. Once the installation process is complete, you will see an HTML page that allows you to navigate through the contents of the kit. It contains a full 5-days of technical content including 20 hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos.

Here are the specific Team System content items you'll find within this kit:

Presentations:

Introducing Application Lifecycle Management
Value-up software development
The Business Analyst Perspective
The Project Managers Perspective
The Architect Perspective
The Developers Perspective
The Testers Perspective

Demos:

Check-in Policies for Process Enforcement
Code Analysis
Code Metrics and Profiling
Creating and Executing Unit Tests
Process Governance with VSTS
Test Processes
Top Down Design

Props to Grant Holliday (VSTS MVP extraordinaire) for pointing me at this recent release. I love our MVPs...they often seem to know more than those of us on the product team!

December Team System chats

jeffbe — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:39:46 GMT

Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group – December 5th

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

-and-

Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Visual Studio Team System 2008 ships!

jeffbe — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:15:00 GMT

What else can I say? The big day has arrived (read the official word here on Soma's blog) and we're all very excited to let everyone know that all parts of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 product family are available today for download from MSDN. If you're not already a subscriber to MSDN, you can download a 90-day trial of Team Suite and TFS instead. We've been working on this release for the past two years so there's a whole lot of new features available, many of which we've talked about during the beta releases. Here's a quick run down of some of the key features in Team System this time around (drop me a note if I missed your favorites):

Development Edition
Code Analysis Checkin Policy
Code Metrics
JavaScript debugging
Performance run comparison
Hot pathing
Code Analysis Rules
Rules Management
Analyze menu
Spelling rules

Database Edition
Integrate TeamData v1 into Team Suite

Test Edition
Auto cleanup of results
Control Load Modeling
New default views
Devices Unit testing
Test performance improvements
Inherited test classes
Load test and profiler integration
Web test correlation
Right-click test execution
Test generation from a compiled assembly
Webtest recorder support for AJAX and popups
Webtest playback improvements

Architecture Edition
Architectural Roles
Conform to WSDL
Top-down system design
Web application projects

Team Foundation Server
SharePoint 3.0 / 2007 support
Improved deployment experience
Better offline support
Continuous integration
Build queuing & scheduled builds
Drop Management
Annotate
Folder Diff
Get latest on checkout
Performance and scale improvements (Work Item Tracking / Version Control)
Destroy files
Improved source control merging
Workspace mapping improvements
Team System Web Access (power tool)

Many, many congratulations to all the people that worked so hard over the past couple of years on this release. And more importantly, many, many thanks to our customers for providing us feedback on Team System 2005 as well as pre-releases of Team System 2008. You help us do a better job!

Please try it out and let us know how Visual Studio Team System 2008 works for you!

Woohoo!