Rob Caron

New Team System Stuff - 2005-03-31

FYI – I’m not covering the pricing and licensing debate in this post. I’m still plowing through the large volume of blog posts, articles and e-mail I’ve accumulated on the topic. I’ll be blogging about it soon.

Visual Studio Team System

• Wolfgang Pleus recently attended training presented by Chris Menegay and Marco Bellinasco on Visual Studio 2005 (including Team System) and has this write-up on what he learned [Visual Studio.NET 2005 Enterprise Features].
• Speaking of Chris Menegay, he collected some questions during his training tour and has posted the answers to his blog [Team System Q&A]. And you’re welcome, Chris [Heaping praise on Rob Caron]. As Chris noticed, the Ask Burton blog has been a little quiet lately. That’s because I have my own Q&A queue to catch up on.
• And Jacob Cynamon has the Q&A from his Honolulu MSDN Event [I finished my homework!].
• Welcome to Kent Sharkey, who just took over from Christa Carpentiere on the Team System developer center [Meet the new boss, (not the) same as the old boss...]. Thanks for all your hard work, Christa!

My Team System Posts

• 3/23 – Team System Hands-On Labs at Tech·Ed 2005
• 3/24 – Qualify to Win a Portable Media Center
• 3/30 – Team System Webcasts
• 3/31 – A journey through the world of Microsoft Team System...

Architecture

• Jeff Welton has a guest post on his blog by Jon Liperi that sheds some light on the less glamorous aspect of the Distributed System Designers – the Settings and Constraints Editor [Good Heavens!!! How do I make all of those settings?]. This is part of what makes these designers more than just a pretty picture tool.
• Bill Simser is trying to utilize the Distributed System Designers to document an application built on top of SharePoint [Documenting SharePoint Solutions with Whitehorse & Visual Studio 2005 and SharePoint]. Part of the challenge is how to represent SharePoint in the diagram. I think this is where SDM extensibility comes into play. I’m hoping we’ll see more and more Microsoft products described in SDM. More on this soon.
• Martin Fowler blogs about PatternShare.org [PatternShare]. This new pattern sharing community is already stocked with hundreds of patterns from sources that include Martin Fowler, Microsoft patterns & practices and the “Gang of Four” (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides).
• Mike Champion is “trying to steer the conversation away from "REST vs SOAP" and toward "resource orientation vs service orientation.” See this post for more information [Service Orientation, the Hype Cycle, and a RESTaurant].

Development

• Ian Huff has the third installment of his ongoing analysis of Web sites that try to communicated large volumes of data [Reviewing Data Display Websites and Programs: ESPN.com’s NCAA Tournament Challenge], and his third installment on analyzing Team System profiler reports [Analyzing a performance report in Visual Studio Team System 2005 Part 3: The Object Allocation and Object Lifetime views].
• On a related note, catch this post from Raymond Lewallen on .NET garbage collection [Performance Monitoring - Garbage Collection].
• Matt Pietrek has been working on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) instrumentation for the Team System profiler components. In this post [ETW Tracing: How and Why?], he looks at what it takes to add tracing to your application.
• Undoubtedly, you’ve likely seen many Team System presentations that include significant coverage of the Visual Studio Class Designer, which has led many to believe that it is only available in Team System. Ramesh Rajagopal helps set the record straight [Class Designer availability]. However, do check-out this Channel 9 video interview with the Class Designer PM, John Stallo [John Stallo talks about Class Designer] and learn about Refactoring Support in Class Designer.
• Scott Bellware shares his journey to TDD and the challenges he met [TDD, Java, and the Microsoft Visual Developer].
• The Spring 2005 issue of Methods & Tools (PDF) has an article titled, Improving Application Quality Using Test-Driven Development.

DSL Tools & Software Factories

• Several posts related to the recent release of DSL Tools:
• VS Beta 1, DSL Tools and VS Beta 2 (Aali Alikoski)
• Is building DSLs fast, cheap and easy? (Aali Alikoski)
• Future releases of the DSL Tools (Jochen Seemann)
• What's coming next? Text templating improvements (Gareth Jones)
• More on consuming models (Stuart Kent)
• And on Software Factories:
• Software Factories - the human side (Steve Cook)
• Getting familiar with Software Factories (Edward Bakker)
• Software factories (the Short version) (Patrick Cooney)
• TheServerSide.net has an article [Software Factories: Refactoring an Industry] by Griffin Caprio that examines software reuse and its future in light of software factories.

Project Management

• Although David Anderson was on travel at the Lean conference, he had another prolific week on the Agile Management Blog before heading on vacation:
• A TOC Eye from the Lean Guy
• More thoughts from the Lean conference
• 5 Tribal Dimensions
• Tribalism Revisited
• Paradigm Shifts
• Joel Semeniuk on why you can’t even guess an estimate without having good requirements [Agile Estimating is great – but you still need good requirements].
• Keith Rowe has a brief introduction to MSF for CMMI Process Improvement [MSF for CMMI Process Improvement].
• Interested in scrum? See these posts:
• Capacity, Velocity, and Productivity (David Chesnut) – how my team is adopting/using scrum to manage our documentation project. Compare with Daily Meeting (Dave Froslie).
• Scrum @ Microsoft Meeting (Dave Froslie) –  A recent gathering of teams in Redmond shared their scrum info (with Ken Schwaber).
• Scrum and Productivity (Chris Flaat)
• Roy Osherove has posted downloadable recordings of a user group meeting at which Joanna Rothman spoke on moving to agile [[Recording]Johanna Rothman at Agile Israel: 9 steps to becoming more Agile].
• Part 1 (50 minutes, 32 MB zipped MP3)

• Part 2 (36 minutes, 23 MB zipped MP3)

Team Software Development

• Ling Bao has a post on the Team Foundation Team blog on what it takes to customize Team Foundation work item types [Customizing Work Item Types].
• Edward Bakker takes a look customizing check-in policies in Team Foundation version control [Extend check-in policies in Visual Studio Team System].
• Chris Rathjen is soliciting your input for merge scenarios you’d like him to illustrate with how it’ll work in Team System [The Merge Wizard is Wonderful, but not of Oz].
• David Lemphers is working on an Eclipse plug-in for Team Foundation and needs to cross the Java-.NET bridge [Code to make your toes curl]. He even has some additional help on the project [Eclipse Plug-In Update]. And Joe Sango has a quick status report [We keep plug-in away].

Testing

• Bruce McCleod has a new installment of his post series on the tenets of software testing [Tenet: A developer should never test their own software.].
• Soma has a post that talks about unit testing and some of the testing features in Team System [Unit Testing].
• Chris Szurgot is working to retrofit unit testing into an existing code base [Testing Legacy Code].