New Team System Stuff - 2004-10-19 & 20

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Got a bit behind this week, but here goes...

Visual Studio 2005 for the SQL Server 2005 CTP - October 2004

For those having trouble installing this CTP version of Visual Studio (available from MSDN Subscriber Downloads), you should try clearing the check boxes for Testing Tools, Performance Tools, and Static Analysis Tools on the Options page. This release of Visual Studio is intended for evaluating SQL Server CLR development, not Team System stuff. In the mean time, we're investigating the root cause of the install problem.

Sam Gentile alerted me to this problem and blogged about it (Error 2337 in VS2005 October CTP Install). Like several others, he was using the CD download and encountered problems installing the Team System bits when he got to CD 2. After clearing the check boxes mentioned above, he eventually found success (Finally Got VS2005 October CTP Installed!).

Beautiful Models

Gareth Jones continues his virtual whiteboard analogy (On distributing my office whiteboard) in a post that discusses using color and layers to make models more beautiful and legible (On coloured pens).

Digital Gotham

Sandy Khaund from patterns & practices takes a cue from Pat Helland's Metropolis to create the suburbs in a recent post (Digital Gotham) that positions the p&p material as the "Do It Yourself" books for Digital Gotham homeowners tinkering in their homes. He also manages to extend the analogy to Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.

British Architecture

No, I don't mean Tudor. Eric Nelson has a post (Focus on Architecture and Architects in the UK) that contains links to a large number of webcasts and some good links you'll only find on the UK version of MSDN from the Modelling and Architecture Forum that was held last month.

Test-Driven Development an Alternative to Edit & Continue?

Sam Gentile (Unit tests, Refactoring not Edit and Continue) and John Robbins (C# Edit and Continue Announced) both think that Edit & Continue encourages developers to spend too much time in the debugger and less time being more intentional in what they do. Sam thinks developers that take a test-driven approach to development have little use for hacking through code using Edit & Continue.

Be sure to see the discussion that happened on James Robertson's blog in a post (Disconnect) that compares this with the debugger experience in Smalltalk. Don't miss the comment section.

Fredrik Normén has an article on Test-Driven Development and how it relates to Agile development (Test Driven Development) that was posted back in September if you need a quick primer.

Everything Old is New Again

David Anderson, a program manager on Team System's MSF team, has an extensive site (AgileManagement.net: Management Science for Software Engineering) on agile management. David was part of the team that pioneered Feature-Driven Development (FDD) in the late 90s. In a recent blog post (Back to My Roots), David discusses "new" discoveries in the Agile community that harken back to his experiences as a games programmer once upon a time.

Randy Miller has a substantial background in the Agile community, too, Randy currently works with David on MSF and previously worked with him on The Coad Letter ,  In fact, Randy is responsible for MSF Agile in Team System. He also has a site, AdvancedUseCases.com.

Scott Worley is updating his MSDN knowledge from v3 to v4 (Team System era) and likes what he sees (VS 2005 Team System supports a new AGILE MSF?). Scott even has some books in mind (I am working on a couple of possible new BOOKS :)).

Move or Rename

Korby Parnell has a post that explains how moving and renaming files in Team Foundation version control can accomplish the same thing, since they do the same thing (tf.exe Rename==tf.exe Move in Visual Studio Team Foundation).

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh

Mickey Gousset keeps us up to date on his progress with installing the Beta 1 Refresh bits...

He also has a follow-up post (More On User Interfaces) to the one that sparked John Lawrence's 'Broken Window' post (Shipping Software & Broken Windows).

 In the News

Upcoming Events (New Events)

Want to hear more about Team System? Here are some upcoming events where Visual Studio Team System is on the agenda:

OCT 2004

NOV 2004

FEB 2005

Got an event you'd like me to include here? Contact me.