scooblog by josh ledgard : Visual Studio Team System

2006 Microsoft Developer Out of Box Releases

jledgard — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:24:00 GMT

So Visual Studio 2005 shipped last year. We shipped a service pack in 2006, but in addition to working onthe service pack and the next version of Visual Studio team's in Developer Division have also shipped a lot of cool stuff "out of box". Here is a quick list I put together...

Update #2: Forgot to mention that the latest book by James Avery and Jim Holmes "Windows Developer Power Tools" is now availible. It features some of the earlier contributions from our team on this list.

AJAX Control Toolkit

http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Toolkit aims to be the biggest and best collection of web-client components available.

Pack Installer

http://www.codeplex.com/PackInstaller

Beta 2 just shipped today! The Pack Installer is a tool that will let you see the latest Power Toys for Visual Studio, and other great developer oriented tools. It allows you to easily mark any tool or set of tools for download and installation, and streamline the installation process.

MSBuild Extras - Toolkit for .NET 1.1 "MSBee"

http://www.codeplex.com/MSBee

MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee” is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications using Visual Studio 2005 projects that target .NET 1.1.

Resource Refactoring Tool

http://www.codeplex.com/ResourceRefactoring

Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

VSCmdShell 2005

http://www.codeplex.com/VSCmdShell

VSCmdShell provides users with a shell window inside the Visual Studio IDE that can be used for Visual Studio commands as well. Current version allows user to use either Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) or Windows PowerShell.

Managed Stack Explorer

http://www.codeplex.com/MSE

Do you ever need to get stack traces for your .NET 2.0 applications? Want a quick and easy way to monitor managed processes and threads? Need a way to view a thread's stack trace to investigate an application hang? If so, Managed Stack Explorer is for you.

Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer w ASP.NET plugin

http://www.codeplex.com/BPAEngine

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer is an general-purpose engine that allows for a user to analyze settings in their systems to quickly identify problematic or sub-optimal configurations. The BPA tool comes preinstalled with an example plug-in for analyzes an ASP.Net 2.0 server and website's system.web configuration settings for problematic configurations.

VS 2005 IDE Enhancements

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd7c6e48-e41b-48e3-881e-a0e6e97f9534&DisplayLang=en

Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements are a set of Visual Studio extensions that are designed to make you more productive. These enhancements are directly integrated into the Visual Studio IDE. This set of enhancements includes Source Code Outliner, Visual C++ Code Snippets, Indexed Find, Super Diff and Event Toaster tools.

TFS Power Toys

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/09/07/744993.aspx

We're trying something new with this Power Toy release. It's the first time where we have new features that integrate seamlessly into the VS2005 IDE and are virtually indistinguishable from any other TFS feature in the IDE.

Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa701259.aspx

The Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 is a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .NET WinForms in a Visual Basic 6 application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time.

VB Power Pack

https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0&siteid=223

Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs may contain Add-Ins, Controls, Components, Tools or Samples for you to use with Visual Basic 2005 to make developing great applications even easier!

TFS Administration Tool

http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin

The TFS Admin Tool allows a TFS administrator to quickly add users to all three platforms utilized by Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services, all through one common interface.

Update#1 IronPython!!

http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython

IronPython is a new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET. It supports an interactive console with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the .NET Framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers, while maintaining full compatibility with the Python language.

Let me know if I missed anything!

What do you think about CTPs?

jledgard — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:28:00 GMT

Brian Harry wants to know. We've always had a concern about the quality of the CTPs we release, but are torn between increasing the quality, but reducing the frequency.

What we found with the monthly frequency of CTPs as opposed to the classic "wait for beta quality" approach is that we received more valuable real time feedback on features in development that allowed us to make changes.

How would you like to see us walk this line?

I've been interviewing for two days now

jledgard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:25:26 GMT

Late last week I was asked if I would be interested in interviewing Monday and Tuesday in Vancouver. For whatever reason I decided to fly... it's a choice I won't make again. I really don't know why I choose to fly. I was bumped off of one flight and just missed making an earlier flight on the way back, but this is getting off-topic.

It was a really cool albeit fast-paced and tiring adventure. Forty-five minute, almost sprint like, interviews followed by 15 minute de-briefs and straight into another 45 minute interview... rinse repeat, rinse repeat, etc for two days.

Thankfully I was on the side of the interviewer rather than the interviewee. I found this style actually refreshing compared to the normal, on campus, interviews. Each candidate would meet with 3 of the 5 interviewers. We ran 5 candidates in the morning and 5 in the afternoon. After each interview the group would meet as a team to chart and discuss the plusses and minuses of each candidate, look for trends, and decide on a strategy for the next interviewer.

The candidates received real time feedback from the recruiting staff at the end of their interviews and in the two days we've actually had some of candidates that were given offers accept on the spot!

Working interviews this fast with a consistent group was also good because you really began to understand what one persons bar for saying "+test" really means and the having two people in the group not talk to the person, but listen and read notes also helped bring an outside view to the decision being made.

All in all it was a lot of fun and I thought the recruiters did a great job finding talented people and getting them pre-screened for us. Unfortunatly I didn't get to benifit from the people we were hiring since my group didn't have any openings. But the Team System groups will be getting some great hires when the folks graduate this spring.