Rob Caron : New Team System Stuff

New Team System Stuff - 2005-03-02

Some of the items in this post are over a week old due to my recent aggregator debacle [Bitten by NewsGator].

Visual Studio Team System

I’m happy to read that Sam Gentile got his Team System environment up and running [Team Foundation Server and VSTS Finally Installed!!] using virtual machines. As Sam has discovered, performance can be an issue if you can’t allot the proper resources [Team Foundation Server Performance on VPC]. That post has links other posts about optimizing VPC performance.
Joe Sango wishes he had Dave Bost’s article [Installing the December CTP Release of Visual Studio Team System] the first time he tried setting-up Team System using VPCs [Back into VSTS].
Dave Bost shares a tip I gave him when installing Team System using Virtual PC [Supporting Multiple Networks In Your Virtual Machines].
Unfortunately, others like Don Browning are still struggling [VSTS Install: Is it me or the flu medicine?]. I’m trying to track down a solution for his issue.
Mario is convinced that using Team System will require developers to change they way they work [Something completely different ... my first steps with Visual Studio Team System]. Hopefully, this is for the better, but it should be noted that you can adapt Team System to fit whatever process you have in place today.
As Richard Hundhausen says, Don't forget about the Team System newsgroups ...
Saravana Kumar has a collection of links related to the December CTP release of Team System [Links related to Visual Studio Team System Dec CTP].

Architecture

All three parts of the Channel 9 series on the Distributed System Designers are now online:

How do you use the Distributed System Designers? See this post [As promised, a posting from another team member...] on Jeff Welton’s blog by his teammate, Thomas Delrue.
Via R. Ramesh [Class Designer Team Blog] and Harry Pierson [Speaking of the Class Designer], the Class Designer Team has launched a team blog . Check-out the first post from their program manager, John Stallo [A picture is worth a thousand words].
Chris Menegay on the Distributed System Designers [Clarification on my bashing of Whitehorse]. Truth be known, I’m not happy with how Team System was presented in the recent MSDN Events series either.
Michael Platt on the qualities software architects should posses [Architect qualities]. I have a couple of other posts from Michael in my queue, too:

Development

Ian Huff, who works on the performance tools in Team System, looks at another example of how to display large quantities of data in a manner that makes it easier to digest [Reviewing Data Display Websites and Programs: Football Outsiders].
Steven Pratschner has a post about some of the new features in .NET 2.0 to help with diagnosing problems in your .NET application [Better Diagnostics in Whidbey: Loader Logging].
Matt Pietrek shares the cardinal rules for creating a debugger [The Debugger Rules].
MSDN TV has an episode with Peter Sollich showing how to use the CLR Profiler [MSDN TV: Introduction to the CLR Profiler].
Eric Wise on refactoring do’s and don’ts [Refactoring Easy Assets .NET - Part 1 of ? & Refactoring Easy Assets .NET - Part 2 of ?]. Be sure to see the rest of the high-quality blogs on CodeBetter.com, too.

DSL Tools & Software Factories

Harry Pierson had a post last week that looks at how people are actually using UML for MDA and how domain-specific languages might hold the answer for what people want to do [MDA And Software Factories - Separated At Birth?].
Also, see these follow-up posts [Putting a Square Peg Model in a Round Hole Tool & Modeling vs. Visualization] from Harry Pierson and visit the ongoing debate [Software Factories (MDD vs. MDA] on TheServerSide.net [via Harald Leitenmüller]
Steve Cook clarifies what he means when speaks of metadata in the context of DSL & software factories [Metadata].
Raymond Lewallen shares his thoughts on software factories [Software Factories].

Events

In the News

Partners

Via Richard Hundhausen, there’s a site that’s listing Team System third-party products [A list of Team System third party products].

Project Management

Team Software Development

Chris Rathjen is desperately seeking feedback on his recent post about merging in Team Foundation version control [Anyone? Bueller?]. Can you help him out?
Khushboo Sharan, the program manager for Team Build, provides a first look at Team Build in her post on the Team Foundation Team Blog [Overview of Team Build]. See this post from Dave Bost, too [The 50,000ft. View of Team Build].
Recently, Chris Menegay posted some concerns he had about work item tracking in Team System [Latest VSTS thoughts]. Then he was pleased to hear [Update on Work Item Tracking problems & Hitchhiker's Guide] that his concerns are already being addressed as noted in John Lawrence’s post [Chris Menegay posts some thoughts on Work Item Tracking & Project Integration in VSTS] . And I agree, the new trailer for H2G2 is much better.
Chris Rathjen blogs about fixing conflicts when using Team Foundation version control [To magically fix all of your problems, type 'Resolve'].
Adam Singer has an extensive post on Team Foundation version control in this post [Welcome to the Hotel Team Foundation].
Vince Maraia, author of a forthcoming book on Microsoft’s SCM best practices, has a post about versioning [some Versioning ideas].
Amit Agrawal has a post in the Team Foundation Team Blog about the Team System converters [Converters for VSTS].

Testing

Roy Osherove provides his guidance for doing TDD in Team System [TDD and test generation in VS 2005 can be annoying and tricky if you don't watch out]. Here are several other posts from Roy that I have in my queue today, which I’ll just list for the sake of brevity:

Alan Page provides another perspective on testing at Microsoft [The Role of Test] and his hopes for a book on being a pragmatic tester [The Pragmatic Tester].
Darrell Norton tips his hat on the recent passing of Macintosh creator Jef Raskin with a quote from Jef about “…a piece of commercial general-purpose software in which no bugs were ever discovered…” [Test-Driven Development in 1985].
Grig Gheorghiu on Performance vs. load vs. stress testing [via Darrell Norton]
The Braidy Tester on the communication gap between testers and developers [Talkie Walkie Trustie].

Other

Via Eric Nelson, SQL Server 2005 pricing has been announced [SQL Server 2005 pricing and packaging announced today].
Via Ron Jacobs, the Enterprise Library Webcast Series schedule [Enterprise Library Webcast Series].