Build 2011 – ALM Wrap-up

Microsoft had an outstanding //Build conference for 2011. It was held from September 13 to September 16, 2011 in Anaheim, California. For those interested in ALM, there were a lot of exciting new features announced for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 11 (Dev11). The following video’s concern not only ALM but also the tools in which to produce a well-tested and stable application. If you have seen any other //Build sessions that are of particular interest to the ALM community, feel free to post your comments with a link to that session.

What's new in Visual Studio 11 [ link ]

Microsoft Visual Studio 11 enable developers to take full advantage of the capability of Windows using the skills and technologies developers already know and love to deliver exceptional and compelling apps. Whether working individually or in a small, medium or large development team the Visual Studio 11 sets a new standard for development tools, helping teams deliver superior results for their customers that help set them apart from their competitors. In this session we’ll walk through the new features in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview to give you an understanding of the breadth of tooling available in this release.

What's new in Visual Studio 11 for Application Lifecycle Management [ link ]

Microsoft’s application lifecycle management tooling is all about enabling teams to deliver great software. In this demo-packed session, you will learn how to more effectively plan and track work by using the new Web-based project management tools; how to bridge the divide between development and operations by utilizing IntelliTrace in your production environments; and how to help keep team members on-task and “in the zone” with the new “My Work” and code review features. In addition to making your team more productive, we will show you how you can boost your overall code quality with new features such as code clone and an overhauled unit testing story in Visual Studio 11.

Taking your Application Lifecycle Management to the cloud with the Team Foundation Service [ link ]

You’ve heard about the brand new Team Foundation Service that brings together Team Foundation Server and Windows Azure and now it’s time to find out how to get started. In this talk we’ll start you off with creating your account, setting up projects, issue tracking and much more. We’ll also show you how Team Foundation Service differs from Team Foundation Server and what that means to you.

Working on an agile team with Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 [ link ]

Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 bring a valuable set of new features and capabilities to agile teams. In this talk we will take a ride through an example project and show you how an agile team can efficiently prioritize, plan, and deliver high quality software.

Developer collaboration with Team Foundation Server 11 [ link ]

This session is all about developer collaboration in Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11. We’ll cover integrated code review, the new “My Work” experience for managing your active tasks, and once you’re “in the zone” we’ll help you stay focused on the task at hand, no matter how much you’re randomized. We’ll walk the full gamut of collaboration improvements, from the newly revamped Team Explorer, to the version control & build improvements. Want to work offline seamlessly? Wish merging happened less frequently & was simpler when it did? How about find work items faster? We’ll talk about all this and more.

Improving software quality using Visual Studio 11 C++ Code Analysis [ link ]

Through this session, learn how to save time and improve customer satisfaction by finding and fixing bugs early in the development process. Visual Studio 11 C++ Code Analysis identifies critical defects that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities in your C++ apps and drivers at compile time, and gives you the information you need to quickly prioritize and resolve them. Code Analysis is now included in all editions of Visual Studio 11, including Express, and there are many new features to discuss. This session also includes demos, examples and best practices on how to improve the quality of your apps and drivers. Join us to learn how you can use code analysis to develop great software that will delight your customers.

Manual testing of Windows Metro style apps built using HTML [ link ]

How do you find bugs before you distribute your app to customers? If you’ve found one, how do you ensure that you’ve fixed it? Even if you write up test guides, how do you ensure that they have all been used and that every step was conducted? Are you one of the many developers that spend a lot of time writing Word documents and meeting with testers to try and get them to test consistently? With Visual Studio Test Professional, we gave you the tools to conduct manual testing and to make it easy to verify that you’ve fixed the bugs. If on the other hand, you are part of an Agile team which practices exploratory testing (XT), you have the tools to create a rich, actionable bug from an XT session. You can also create a test case to ensure that parts of your XT session can be executed as a formal test case. In Visual Studio 11, we’re bringing all of this technology to Windows Metro style apps using HTML. In this session, we’ll show how you can use Visual Studio 11 to do manual or exploratory testing and file rich, actionable bugs. We will also discuss guidelines for building testable Windows 8 apps.