Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team

I’ve been meaning to have a look at some of the extensions available for VS 2010 in the Visual Studio Gallery for a little while. The WPF based editor in 2010 allows for all sorts of exciting editor level extensions and I’d had a little play with some with Beta 1, but I wanted to see what was available for Beta 2. The answer is a lot :-) there are 76 tools for 2010 (many more templates and controls). There are a good mix of free and commercial, and the following caught my eye:

• Yellow Marker – highlight lines of code with a mouse gesture. Useful when pointing out interesting lines of code.
• IntelliSense Presenter – a WPF, customisable IntelliSense UI. Looks great.
• Regex Editor – Syntax highlighting and more for regular expressions. I’ve been doing a little regular expression work recently and any help is good.
• Image Insertion – Allow images to be added and displayed inside source. Useful to help with documentation.
• Source Outliner – See a tree view of your source code elements. Helps understand and navigate the code.
• Power Commands – A collection of useful commands available from the menu.

I’m very tempted to try and write an extension myself – not sure what yet, but you can download the source for the IntelliSense Presenter and a couple of the others, so there’s something to have a look and see how it’s done.

A really good update on the release of the Power Tools for TFS 2010 in Brian Harry’s blog. Key points of interest;

• The Power Tools should be available within a week.
• Clarification of features that have moved from the Power Tools in 2008 into the core product for 2010.
• Summary of changes to the individual Power Tools in 2010.
• Note that the Power Tools for 2010 will only work with 2010.

I’m particularly looking forward to the Process Template Editor. Adapting the process template (work item types, default queries etc..) to suit your own process is key, and I’m looking forward to using the new Editor.

I’ll let you know as soon as they’re available.

Cheers,

Giles

A really interesting blog from Jason Neave on getting TFS Basic up and running on Windows Home Server. I’m inspired to do this myself now (I just need to replace my deceased Windows Home Server hardware):

http://blogs.msdn.com/jneave/archive/2009/10/30/installing-tfs-2010-beta2-on-windows-home-server.aspx

Cheers,
Giles

Very interesting and exciting news – Microsoft has acquired the Teamprise Client Suite that provides (amongst other things) access to TFS from Eclipse. Good blogs to read:

The official announcement

From the Visual Studio product group

From Teamprise

Cheers,

Giles

A quick “how-to” as the steps to enable code coverage are different in Beta 2. To enable code coverage (assuming that you have some unit tests defined already and that you have either Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Premium or Ulitmate):

• Open the Solution Explorer.
• Open the Solution Items folder
• Double-click the Local.testsettings file:

• Select the Data and Diagnostics option in the left hand list:

• Select Code Coverage and make sure that it is enabled AND (and here’s the obvious but easy to overlook bit) click on the Configure option at the top of the table:

• Select the artifacts that you want to enable code coverage for (in my case only the application code, not the tests themselves).
• Click OK, Apply the changes, run the Unit tests and view the code coverage results:

And that’s it – hopefully that might help avoid a couple of minutes of wondering where the configuration settings can be found.

Cheers,

Giles

If you have been looking at the new Test & Lab Manager with Visual Studio 2010 and you're wondering how you can import your existing test cases then take a look at the Test Case Migrator (Excel) Tool that has just been released to Codeplex.

 Rich

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .NET Framework 4 are declared as “go live” releases. What does this mean? A good overview from Jeff Beehler.

Cheers,

Giles

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available from MSDN now. It will be made generally available on the 21st October. A comprehensive “how-to” around where to get it, how to install it and other useful information has been published by Brian Keller.

I’m now running Team Foundation Server 2010 natively on my Windows 7 laptop in a Basic configuration, without SQL Server or SharePoint installed, and it’s looking great. I’m really enjoying not having to have a server operating system (running in a virtual machine) just to work with my own team projects. Fantastic for small teams, or make the most of the full version with SQL Server and WSS/MOSS.

Cheers,

Giles

Great post from Brian Harry on how TFS 2010 can be installed on client machines with minimal infrastructure, e.g. a Windows 7 netbook. So, if you’d like an easier install on a wider variety of OS’s (client and server, 32 and 64 bit) it’s a good article to read.

Cheers,

Giles

I’ve copied the blurb from the post for a LiveMeeting on installing TFS 2010 Beta 2 on the 15th October:

“The Team Foundation Server Setup and Admin team would like to help get you ready for Team Foundation Server Beta2 with a live presentation via live meeting.

While the session will focus on getting Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) up and running Ed will also be touching on the features that now enable TFS to “scale down” to the smallest development efforts from both resource and administration point of view. This will session be a little different than my normal presentations in that we will also be running a parallel chat session for people to ask questions in real time.“

Cheers,

Giles

I thought this was an interesting blog post from Martin Woodward at Teamprise discussing how they are working on mainframe integration via Teamprise into TFS.

Cheers,

Giles

On August 6^th, the first public release of Windows 7 will be to MSDN Subscribers, which is over two months ahead of the general availability date of October 22^nd for retail and OEM customers. To support the variety of languages and builds, 893 different images are being released to MSDN Subscriber Downloads in three waves through August 21^st.

Quest Software has released a public beta of “Project Fuze,” a database schema provider (DSP) for Oracle databases that can be used within Visual Studio Team System 2010. Project Fuze enables Oracle developers to manage schema changes, PL SQL, stored procedures, triggers and more right from within Visual Studio Team System 2010. All of this work can be done offline and then deployed to various servers. When it comes time to deploy, the Oracle developer can compare the offline schema model in Visual Studio Team System 2010 to the live database instance and create an update script to synchronize the two. Finally, all work items can be stored and versioned under Team Foundation Server source code control along with the rest of the application. This will enable the Oracle database professional to better integrate themselves with the development team, at the same time becoming familiar with Microsoft tools and platforms.

Details at:  www.teamfuze.net

There’s a new consolidated summary of the TFS migration and integration solutions available here. It’s a good, clear summary of the options available if you want to migrate from an existing product or are looking for integrations.

Cheers
Giles

I’ve put together a video on the automated build capabilities of Team Foundation Server. I thought it would be useful to step through running a build, looking at the results of a build and understanding what triggers you can set for automated builds.

You can download the video here.

Cheers

Giles