New Team System Stuff - 2005-01-21

Visual Studio Team System

• A week ago (New Team System Stuff - 2005-01-13) I mentioned John Cunningham is heading to Europe, where he plans to talk about Team System (The Beta2 push, and Team System in Europe). To learn more about the tour, see this event description (MSDN Technical Briefing: Visual Studio Team System Product Team - On Tour – Level 300) to get an idea of what’s being covered. Here’s the current list of tour cities & dates, but like all things it could change:
  • Netherlands (Amsterdam) - 3/2/2005
  • United Kingdom (London) - 3/4/2005
  • Italy (Milan) - 3/7/2005
  • Austria (Vienna) - 3/9/2005
  • France (Paris) - 3/10/2005
  • Spain (Madrid) - 3/14/2005
  • Czech (Prague) - 3/16/2005
  • Greece (Athens) - 3/17/2005
  • Germany (Munich) - 3/21/2005
  • Norway (Oslo) - 3/22/2005
  • Denmark (Copenhagen) - 3/23/2005
• Inspired by Mickey Gousset’s post (Compuware may be feeling a little heat...), David Boschman has a great post (Team System competition for DevPartner Studio) that takes a deeper look at what Team System means to a software development life-cycle tools company like Compuware.
• I need your input on a Team System documentation question (A Visual Studio 2005 Team System Glossary - Yes or No?).

Architecture

• R.Ramesh provides a glimpse of what’s in store for Class Designer in the forthcoming Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2005 (Class Designer Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 - Export Diagram as Image, Display Member Types).
• Pedro Silva notes that the registration doors are open for TechEd 2005 in Orlando, FL (TechEd 2005 in June).
• Ali Pasha responds to some questions raised in the CBDI Forum (free membership) about the Distributed System Designers (Supporting SOA Service Lifecycle Review).

Development

• Matt Pietrek has a quick tip for those using the Visual Studio debugger (Letting the debugger pick a debugging mode - Be cautious).

Project Management

• Yesterday, I helped Randy Miller (Program Manager for MSF Agile) get a blog up and running on blogs.msdn.com. You can find his first post here (A New Agile Software Development Process).

Team Software Development

• Learn more about the source control conversion tool we’re providing in Team System from this post (Converter Tools for Team Foundation Version Control) by Akash Maheshwari.
• Although the reporting features are not quite working in Team System, you can probably tell from the Project Portals that we’re currently using IFrames connected to the reports on Reports Server to display them. I think this post from Jan Tielens shows a better approach (SQL Server Reporting Services Web Parts Review).
• Another feature that’s not quite there is Team Build, which provides build automation for Team System. Vivek Nirkhe, the Group Program Manager for the parts of Team System being built in India (and J#) at the Microsoft India Development Center, provides a glimpse of what’s coming with Team Build (Build Automation in Visual Studio Team System). This also marks Vivek’s first post on blogs.msdn.com.

Other

• Damon Carr is speaking on the subject of Software Factories at an upcoming meeting of the New York Software Industry Association (Next Week Presentation for the NYSIA on Microsoft Software Factories). It appears there’s even a GotDotNet Workspace for Software Factories and DSL Tools.
• A post (Sysprepping virtual machines) from Megan Davis that links to an article she wrote about using Sysprep with Virtual PC images.
• A happy camper (People at Microsoft Treat Me Good.).