Jeff Beehler's Blog : patterns & practices

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

Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server - now in Russian

jeffbe — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Folks in our Ukrainian subsidiary recently completed the translation effort for the wildly popular Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. I'm not sure I have a strong Russian speaking following, but just in case, please take a look: Групповая разработка с использованием Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Many thanks to Viktor Shatokhin for spearheading this effort.

Team System guidance now in print

jeffbe — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:18:46 GMT

The remarkably popular patterns & practices guides on Team System are now available in print via Amazon:

patterns & practices Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server book

patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications book

Enjoy!

Team System guidance published to MSDN

jeffbe — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:04:39 GMT

You've heard me talk before about the Team System guidance that the patterns & practices team has produced. It's quite popular with the folks that have discovered it but we still have trouble getting the word out. So, I'm happy to announce that it's recently been posted to MSDN as well. This should make it easier to find and perhaps a bit more authoritative since it's published on the official Microsoft site for developer content. If you haven't already checked it out, please do so today. You won't be sorry.

Here's the Table of Contents to whet your appetite:

Chapters

My foreword

jeffbe — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:50:00 GMT

For the recently published Team Development with TFS guide, I wrote the following foreword which seemed worthy of posting here as well.

Before we released Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS), we first used it to develop TFS. For the final 18 months of the project, we used it extensively to manage the development life cycle of our project, a practice commonly known as “dogfooding.” Through this dogfooding, we learned a lot about the powerful system that we were creating. We certainly found and fixed many quality issues so that the resulting product was much more stable and performed better than we could have achieved otherwise. But perhaps more importantly, we learned about ways to best use (and not use) the tools we were creating. This experience, in conjunction with feedback from our customers on their practices, forms the basis for this guide.

At first glance, one might expect this information to be included with or to replace the product documentation. In fact, at one time, I held that belief as well. However, as I’ve worked closely with J.D. Meier and the other authors of this guide, it’s become clear to me that this split is both natural and important. I think the best way to describe it is to compare the two guides to your car’s owner's manual and a driver's guide ― you need both, but for different reasons. Traditionally, the product team has focused on product documentation and left the guidance aspect to others. While we still depend on others to help us out here, we're starting to invest more of our time and energy in the guidance portion because we realize how important it is to the successful adoption of our product and its role in increasing overall customer satisfaction.

Like a car, TFS is a powerful tool that can take you and your team nearly anywhere you want to go; this guide can help you get there. Every team approaches TFS somewhat differently depending on its particular needs and history. For this reason, we’ve written this guide in such a way as to allow you either to read it from cover to cover if you want the full picture, or to dive into specific topics as your needs dictate.

Customer feedback led us to write this guide in the first place, and it continues to play an important role in helping set our direction and how we achieve our objectives. We’re convinced that close community involvement in projects such as these helps make the content more useful and ultimately more successful than if we wrote it in a vacuum. With this in mind, real users helped us determine what to write about, what best practices to recommend, and how to organize the content. However, our collective job is not finished. Please help us continue to improve this guide, and let us know what else needs to be covered. The surface area of TFS is so broad that sometimes it’s overwhelming even for us. With your input, we can help our customers make the best use of the tools we’ve developed.

We designed TFS to bring teams together to deliver great software. By dogfooding TFS, we brought our teams together and I hope you’ll agree that the result is a great product. This guide can help you and your team to also realize this vision with your next project.

All the best!
Jeff Beehler
Chief of Staff, Visual Studio Team System
July, 2007

Jeff Beehler is the Team System Chief of Staff. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he began his career at Microsoft in 1990, working on early versions of Visual C++. In 1996, he left Microsoft to pursue other interests including consulting, teaching elementary school and starting a family. He returned to Microsoft in 2003 to work on Visual Studio Team System where he is involved with many aspects of the project from planning to execution to release. He’s an avid dogfooder of all parts of Team System to help him do his job better. Outside of work, Jeff enjoys spending time with his family, taking pictures and playing outdoors in the great Northwest.

final version of Team Development with TFS now available

jeffbe — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:42:00 GMT

We hear on a regular basis that customers want our advice and guidance on how best to use Team Foundation Server. Given the power and flexibility of TFS, it's reasonable that folks would want us to point them down a proven path rather than leaving them to discover the way on their own. As a result, the folks in patterns & practices (ably led by JD Meier) have created the "Team Development with TFS" guide. The guide is over 500 pages long and chock full of proven practices, product team recommendations and insights from the field. It's well worth your time to review either online or offline.

Congrats go out to the p&p team and the many people that supported them along the way. An impressive effort!

Performance testing guide

jeffbe — Tue, 29 May 2007 16:28:06 GMT

JD and his p&p team are on fire. In the space of two days last week, they released both the Beta1 of the TFS Guide and the Beta1 of the Performance Testing Guide. They both look great and are ready for your feedback to make them even better. JD writes the following description of the perf testing guide in a recent blog article:

Today we released our Beta 1 of Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications Guide. It shows you an end-to-end approach for implementing performance testing, based on lessons learned from applied use in customer scenarios. Whether you're new to performance testing or looking for ways to improve your current approach, you'll find insights you can use.

Good stuff...check it out today!

VSTS Guidance project update

jeffbe — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:11:22 GMT

I strongly encourage everyone to take a look at the VSTS Guidance project update recently posted by JD and the p&p team. It’s impressive! We embarked on this project after hearing from our customers that one of their top needs was more guidance on how best to use our tools in the real world. The community reaction is already very encouraging. For instance, a member of our VSTS Customer Advisory Council writes:

“… I’m impressed—you’ve got a lot fantastic content pulled together. This is precisely the same sort of thing we’ve been working on internally in the form of a wiki as part of our .NET Community of Practice at Intel site. Going forward I think we’re going have to gut some parts of it and repoint it at what you’ve got …”

Because this is a work in progress, community feedback and involvement is key. So please take a look at the VSTS Guidance project and let us know what you like, what you don't and what we can do to make it even better.

Congratulations to the team on their great start!

Team System Guidance

jeffbe — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:42:03 GMT

J.D. Meier was recently telling me the way he distinguishes between product documentation and guidance...it's like the difference between the Owner's Manual and a Driver's guide. You need both but for different reasons. Traditionally, the product team has focused on product documentation and left the guidance part to others. While we still depend on others to help us out here, we're starting to invest more of our time and energy into the guidance portion because we realize how important it is to the successful adoption of our product and it's role in increasing overall customer satisfaction.

I've previously written about the Performance Testing guidance project which is already underway. Now we're starting to take on additional topics with the next one being Source Control. As J.D. announces the Team System Guidance project, he writes:

What you'll see so far, is Practices at a Glance and Questions and Answers as we're tackling source control / versioning. They are designed to give you a quick path through the lessons learned and emerging practices. These are works in progress. As we learn, we update.

We've obviously only just begun but since this is a community facing activity, your involvement early can help us keep this effort pointed in the right direction by getting involved. I'm very excited about the possibilites here and look forward to seeing where this takes us.

Organizing your source trees in TFS (an example)

jeffbe — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:34:00 GMT

I must be on a little patterns & practices binge right now now as this is my third post in the past week on something associated with them. Anyway, J.D. has posted a brief description of how they organize their source trees within TFS. One thing that we've realized in talking with customers is that while we did a good job of providing the tools and platform for team based development, we still have a ways to go in providing descriptions of the best ways to use these tools to get great results. Some of it's included as part of the Microsoft Solutions Framework and certainly many blogs around the world, but we need to pull it together into a common location in an easily digested format that has been endorsed by our team. It's something we're working on but for now, these sorts of blog entries can help.

Check out the p&p Channel 9 interview

jeffbe — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:18:00 GMT

Edward Jezierski and Peter Provost spoke with Rory of Channel 9 recently. Pretty interesting to hear about the history of the patterns and practices team who are now part of the Visual Studio Team System team. We're working hard to bring our teams together and leverage each others strengths to help bring even more value to our customers. I'm jazzed about the potential. Make sure you watch through to the end Ed and Peter take Rory for a tour of their new team friendly facility.

Thousands and thousands of software factories!

jeffbe — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 21:35:00 GMT

Over 100,000 to be precise.

Take a look at Soma's recent announcement of this important milestone for the software factories initiative. It's exciting to see the growing interest in this portion of Visual Studio Team System.

For those of you that aren't aware, a software factory is an installable package of tools, processes and guidance that extends Visual Studio and optimizes it for developing a specific type of application, like an occasionally connected client or a WCF-based service. In practical terms, a factory provides capabilities such as wizards, templates, designers, code generation and documentation, and guides a team through the development process by surfacing tools and content appropriate to the task at hand.

Congratulations to the patterns & practices team on this accomplishment!

Performance Testing Guidance Project

jeffbe — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:15:31 GMT

As I learn more about our customers through our various community activities, I'm realizing how important in depth guidance is to increasing the success of our customers and their overall satisfaction with our product. We're working hard to beef up these areas through a variety of means and I'm happy to see and share the progress of one of those efforts, specifically that of the Performance Testing Guidance Project. It's definitely still a work in progress but the momentum is good and potential great. In the team's words, here's a quick overview:

The purpose of the Performance Testing Guidance project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around doing performance testing and doing performance testing with VS 2005. It's a collaborative effort between industry experts, ACE, patterns & practices, Premier, and VSTS team members.

These sorts of collaborative efforts between various factions of our team and community are exciting to see as we begin to build up the book of knowledge required to bring Team System to the masses.

Cool stuff!