New Team System Stuff - 2005-01-09
I’m not off to a good start this year when it comes to blogging. In fact, this is probably the longest I’ve gone without a post. People are starting to notice a drop-off in Team System blogging (Pssst, Scoble! Over here!), which won’t last for long. If you don’t think blogging about something has an impact, see this post (Microsoft is proving again and again that they are listening to customers...). Excuses aside, here’s a dump of what’s in my queue since you’ve probably seen most of it by now…
Upcoming Chats
- VSTS Enterprise Dev & Test Tools – Chat with members of the Enterprise Development and Test team of Visual Studio Team System. We'll be answering questions and discussing our new tools: Static Code Analysis (FxCop/PREfast), Dynamic Code Analysis (Profiler), and Test Tools (Unit, Manual, Web, Load, etc)
- VSTS Team Foundation – Chat with members of the Team Foundation team of Visual Studio Team System. We'll be answering questions and discussing our suite of source control, work item tracking, Excel and Project integration, reporting, WSS integration, and build automation tools.
Visual Studio 2005 Team System – December 2004 CTP
- As Buck Hodges notes in this post (December CTP is available!), be sure to check-out the newsgroups and Ask Burton blog for tips & tricks on installing and using this release.
- If you’re creating a private domain using virtual machines, go see this step-by-step guide (Step-by-Step Guide to a Common Infrastructure for Windows Server 2003 Deployment).
- Paul Murphy isn’t ecstatic over our choice of terms (Team System December CTP -- IV [Comments]), which are still subject to change and quite a few haven’t been “scrubbed”, yet. For those of us writing documentation, it’s always a challenge to dislodge terms that have become ingrained in the product team lexicon.
- Scott Lee managed to uninstall Beta 1 Refresh so he could install this release (Beta 1 Refresh Uninstall -> Dec CTP Intsall and Successfull Install of VS Team System).
Team Foundation
- Brian White is going to use his blog to solicit feedback on areas of the product that are still subject to change (Using Blogs to Drive Product Direction). His first post is about which operating systems we need to support for Team Foundation Server (Visual Studio Team System Operating System Requirements).
- Lori Lamkin, Group Program Manager on Team Foundation, has posted to the new Team Foundation team blog. In her post (New Features in Team Foundation), she gives some insight into how we’re using some of the Team Foundation features internally and some of the features (Team Build and Team Reporting) that should be available in the next release.
- Once upon a time, Jim Presto posted the first step for creating a checkin policy (Create Policy - Step 1). He just posted the next step (Create Policy - Step 2). See this post (Checkin policies and the December CTP) from Buck Hodges, too.
- Chris Rathjen has returned to blogging (< / hiatus >) and needs help, for which he’s offering a reward (I need a subtitle!).
Architecture
- Ali Pasha, a Program Manager working on the Distributed System Designers in Team Architect, has launched a blog:
- Martin Fowler on:
- Incremental design vs planned design (SpreadingIncrementalism)
- Principles of application layering (LayeringPrinciples)
Project Management
- David Anderson has returned to blogging, too. In fact, he’s been really busy:
- Happy New Year
- The Line Manager Squeeze (When it rolls downhill…)
- Joel On MSF (David’s response to the Joel on Software post about MSF)
- One Manager at a Time (How to change the current management paradigm)
- Management by Reality - Fired on the Tarmac (A comparison of management styles in The Apprentice and Rebel Billionaire)
- Channel FDD
- Roy Osherove has an article (see this post for the link: The case for staged delivery and Agile methodologies) about a portion of a recent class he took from Juval Lowy on .NET development that focused on software project management using Staged Delivery.
DSL Tools
- There’s a lot going on in this department. First, take a look at the tools themselves and what you can do with them:
- There are these posts from Stuart Kent:
- And several more posts from Gareth Jones:
- Second, there’s a debate in full-swing over Software Factories vs MDA (TheServerSide Debates: Software Factories vs. MDA). See these blog posts, too:
Development
- Another blogger, Matt Pietrek, is returning from a brief absence of blogging:
- Eric Jarvi has assembled a few links on writing code that doesn't require admin privileges.
Testing
- JS Greenwood has another post (When TDD Goes Bad #2) in his series of posts on TDD gone bad.
- The Braidy Tester responds to a reader’s question on how test work is assigned at Microsoft (You Gotta Work!).
- Steve Rowe writes about what it takes to become a test developer (So You Want to Be a Test Developer).
- Dinesh Bhat, a Test Manager on Team System at Microsoft’s India Development Center, has started blogging his perspective on testing:
- Michael Kaplan (who has rapidly become a rather prolific blogger with 66 posts in < 2 months) takes one Dinesh’s post a bit further when he writes about the art of international testing (Why international test is an art (and why there are few fine artists)).