Jeff Beehler's Blog : Team System

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.

Gartner SCCM Magic Quadrant Ranks Microsoft VSTS a Leader

jeffbe — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:56:10 GMT

A few weeks ago Gartner published their 2009 Magic Quadrant for Software Change and Configuration Management for Distributed Platforms (what a mouthful!) and in their evaluation has ranked Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server as a leader in the space. This is Microsoft’s first time ranking as a leader which is defined as having a “broad solution with significant support for ALM deployment.” From my perspective, it was merely a matter of time before we were recognized in this way but it’s still an exciting milestone for us.

Some of the strengths that are called out in this evaluation include:

The product has a flexible process model implemented in a single integrated metadata repository.

Basing change, versioning and configuration around the concept of work items, rather than physical code changes, reduces programmer overhead for change management.
Distributed support within a team system project is well-supported with Web proxies.
Team System has demonstrated scalability.

You can read the full reports here:

Congrats to the Team System team for receiving this important recognition.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted (SCCM MQ2009, March 26, 2009. MarketScope for Application Life Cycle Management, 12/17/08) by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Team Test 2008 Quick Reference Guide now available

jeffbe — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:54:21 GMT

The Rangers have shipped again! (Faithful readers know just how much I love saying that). This time, led by Geoff Gray, they have put together the VSTT 2008 Quick Reference Guide, a comprehensive technical document about Visual Studio Team Test functionality, specifically focusing on Web, Load and Unit testing. Geoff is a member of our Services Testing Lab, an arm of Microsoft Consulting Services and he’s help putting together this great reference based on his own personal experience using our products in customer settings. As such, it’s chockfull of very helpful advice and best practices informed by real world usage. If you’re at all interested in using our Testing tools, I’d highly recommend taking a look at this guide.

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!

Visual Studio sales site gets a facelift

jeffbe — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Check out the updated sales site for Visual Studio at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio. On the new site you can find numerous case studies as well as some of our current offers for Visual Studio as well as Team System. Finally, there’s in-depth information about the Team System line of products. All in all, a very nice looking and (much more importantly) informative site.

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!

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

System Center 2007 Management Pack for TFS 2008 is available!

jeffbe — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:58:31 GMT

The Team System Rangers have delivered again! This time it’s a comprehensive Management Pack for TFS 2008 working with System Center 2007. This release represents an amazing amount of effort and coordination between the Ranger, the TFS product team, the System Center team, Microsoft Consulting Services and a number of early adopting companies. We hope you find it a valuable addition to your arsenal of TFS management tools.

You will find the download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28c745b5-28cc-474a-a5fd-944c246d7727&displaylang=en, You can also go to the System Center Operations Manager Catalog and search for it by selecting "System Center Operations Manager 2007" and entering TFS as a keyword.

Overview

The Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 Management Pack monitors exposed services of TFS. This management pack includes event rules and monitors. It is designed to proactively monitor quality and availability of TFS services and even automate recovery in some scenarios.

Feature Summary

Auto discovery of TFS components
Leverages ASP.NET MP and SQL MP
Implements containment hierarchy reflecting logical architecture of the Product
Implements a proper health model using Monitors
Contains tasks, diagnostic and recovery for certain failures
Events indicating service outages
Alerts indicating configuration issues and connected data source changes
Verification that all dependant services are running
Targeted running of BPA against TFS Servers from Operator Console

I want to thank the Team System Rangers for their work in putting this together and getting it shipped. They've done a terrific job delivering add-ons and guidance for Team System over the past few years and this is one more in a long string of accomplishments.

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

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!