Jeff Beehler's Blog : TSBT

Rangers ship SQL load testing tool

jeffbe — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:37:45 GMT

The Team System Rangers have shipped again! This time they’re have built on the success of the WCF Load Testing Tool and have applied that same approach to SQL. You can find this tool on our Codeplex site: SQL Load Test. Here are the details from that site:

Project Description

This tool takes a SQL Profiler trace file and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of database calls found in the trace file. The unit test is designed to be used in a Visual Studio Load Test. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing. The tool generates code for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. The source code is a Visual Studio 2005 project. The tool is still in pre-release stage of development.

Why Load Test SQL?

There is a lot of code out there that makes load testing the application very difficult. The most common type is a client application that contains direct database calls. The application however is not structured to allow the business logic to be exercised without the GUI. Another common scenario is a legacy application written in a language such as Visual Basic 6. In cases like these, it can be difficult to load test the application without a GUI test tool, which introduces other disadvantages. GUI test tools are notoriously difficult to use, generally lead to brittle tests and also have limitations in scaling the load injectors sufficiently to exercise the servers. This tool offers one possible alternative. You start with using the client application to generate a trace of the SQL statements which typically represent a usage scenario. You can then turn the trace into equivalent ADO.NET code program that can be used in a load test.

Tool Description

The tool generates a Visual Studio 2005/2008 Unit Test from a SQL Server Profiler trace. It extracts all the SQL statements and stored procedure calls from the trace and turns them into a single Visual Studio Unit Test, which can then be configured as a Visual Studio Load Test. The tool does not interact with the database itself when it analyzes the trace and generates the test code. It can therefore be used in “offline” scenarios. The generated code needs to be customized to include a connection string to the database under test. That code also includes hooks to allow the user to customize the parameters that are passed to the SQL statements and stored procedures, so that variability can be introduced into the data to prevent caching from producing artificially high performance figures. The tool is intended to be used in conjunction with a client program that runs against a database. A trace of the client’s SQL Server activity is captured using the SQL Server Profiler. This represents a test scenario, which is then processed by the tool to produce a Unit Test that replays the scenario.

Congratulations to the various Rangers involved in this project! Please check it out and let us know what you think.

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

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!

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

Cameron’s back

jeffbe — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:10:54 GMT

Cameron Skinner has recently reappeared on the blogging scene and he’s on fire! Check out a couple of his most recent posts:

I’d certainly recommend subscribing to his blog moving forward as I’m positive he’ll have more interesting news moving forward.

Welcome back Cameron!

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.

New case study for Team Foundation & Teamprise

jeffbe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:11:19 GMT

We just released a joint case study based on the success that Thomson Reuters has had using Team Foundation Server in conjunction with Teamprise in order to adopt Team System in a mixed development shop. Since the reality of many development teams is that they are dealing with some aspect of mixed development, I expect this to be a very popular case study to read. Sharing a common, integrated source control system and collaboration server across the entire development team is a very powerful tool for teams interested in the successful delivery of great software (aren’t we all?)

Here’s a great quote to whet your appetite:

“Without an integrated toolset, we had bits and pieces of information that simply didn’t mean much or make much sense,” says Mac Noland, Lead Software Configuration Management Engineer at Thomson Reuters. The lack of integration among tools made it difficult for Online Services to manage and report on projects. “Leads want transparency and easy reporting,” explains Noland. “People responsible for writing and quality checking the code want the ability to track history and associate change requests, defects, and bugs with specific lines of code. Lacking a big-picture view and the ability to drill down into the detail, we could not effectively manage the software life cycle.”

Anyway, take a look at the full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002078.

Check out good stuff from TechEd 2008

jeffbe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:44:38 GMT

This was a good week for Team System at TechEd 2008 in Orlando. I would recommend that you check out the TechEd 2008 Online site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/events/teched/default.aspx) to learn about much of what was covered. In particular, you should check out the BillG keynote in which our very own Brian Harry demonstrated some exciting new features of Rosario (you can even read more about it here). In addition, you should watch the Team System panel when you can watch an interactive session with Brian, Gert Drapers, Neelesh Kamkolkar, Peter Provost, Habib Heydarian and Norman Guadagno.

Enjoy!

early release of Database Edition updates

jeffbe — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:12:11 GMT

Gert Drapers, group manager for the team responsible for the Team System Database Edition, recently announced an early release (Community Technology Preview) of some updates to that product. The biggest motivation behind these updates was to fully support the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 later this summer. But, while we were making these updates, we also made a whole bunch of other changes in anticipation of supporting different database providers. If you’re interested in learning more, you should certainly review Gert’s announcement.

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!

Check out Brian the Build Bunny

jeffbe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:13:45 GMT

Martin Woodward, one of our many Team System MVPs, just recently posted a blog article about a project he’s been working on for some time now. Brian is actually a dedicated Nabaztag smart rabbit which reacts to the details of check-ins and builds. I’ve seen teams use stop lights and reader boards to communicate the latest build status but never a Build Bunny. Leave it to Martin to continue pushing the TFS integration envelope.

New edition of TFS Times

jeffbe — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:24:00 GMT

Paul Hacker, one of our 72 (!) Team System MVPs, has recently published a new edition of his very popular TFS Times. I’m impressed that even with his very busy personal and professional life that he’s able to publish this newsletter but somehow he pulls it off. This most recent issue focuses extensively on Testing related topics including the announcement of the Load Test Report Generator, details on web testing, and advancements in VSTS 2008 for testers, and much more. Take a look at what he’s put together for this month and let him know what else you’d like to see. I know he’d love to hear from you.