New Team System Stuff - 2005-01-31
Visual Studio Team System
- Change of address – the Team System Dev Center is now located at: https://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem.
- Mickey Gousett has the December CTP of Team System up and running (Rob will be so proud! – yes, I am) and has a detailed walkthrough with screenshots in this post (My First Foray Into VSTS).
- Adam Gallant, a .NET Developer Evangelist in Canada, came to the same conclusion as Mickey, “Team System Rocks!” See this post (Good gaming...) from Adam to to see what he’s excited about.
Architecture
- Reminder (via Pedro Silva & Ali Pasha): More chats are scheduled for February, when you’ll have a chance to chat with the people that are building the Class Designer and Distributed System Designers:
- Visual Studio - Class Designer
Chat with members of the Class Designer team. Class Designer offers visualization features to help you understand, design, and refactor code. You'll learn more about what's coming in the tool for Beta 2, and have an opportunity to give feedback on what code modeling features you would like to see in the future. - Visual Studio Team Architect - Designing Service Oriented Systems and Logical Datacenters
Chat with Team Architect members of Visual Studio Team System. We'll be answering questions and discussing our suite of designers for designing service oriented systems as well as logical datacenters, deployment, and extensibility.
- Visual Studio - Class Designer
DSL Tools & Software Factories
- In this post (DSLs and customization), Stuart Kent addresses some questions he’s received from Fred Thwaites in the comments to an earlier post from Stuart (Why we view a domain model as a tree).
In the News
- Two items from eWeek, both from Darryl K. Taft:
- The Importance of Microsoft Being Transparent – An interview with S. "Soma" Somasegar and Prashant Sridharan that touches on a range of topics, including the recent debate over CTP releases.
- Can Microsoft Take a Page from Open Source? – Takes a closer look at our CTP efforts and includes a reference to this blog.
(btw, I’m a Programming Writer [aka Programmer Writer, Programmer/Writer, etc.], which means I write reference and conceptual documentation for the developer audience.)
Project Management
- David Anderson has a couple of new posts that dwell on bad leadership lessons from episodes of The Apprentice :
Team Software Development
- The official transcripts haven’t been posted to the Chat Archive yet, but Steven Borg has posted both the expert and guest chat transcripts to his blog from last week’s Team Foundation chat:
- Adam Singer has a great post (The Changeset at the Pend of the Universe) that delves into what a pending changeset is as they relate to Team Foundation version control.
- As I noted earlier, Team Foundation Extensibility Kit for VSTS Dec CTP Now Available.
- What can you do with merge in Team Foundation version control? See this post (Some more merge examples) from Chris Rathjen.
- Paul D. Murphy, not to be confused with Paul Murphy (I am not Paul D Murphy), takes a stab at dealing with Team System’s current (Dec CTP and earlier) limitation of only supporting Windows Server 2003 Active Directory domains (Team System Domain Structure Question). His solution seems workable to me, but I haven’t tried it.
Testing
- A dose of reality from The Braidy Tester (You Can't Fix Every Bug).
- In this post (The Changing Role of Test), Alan Page asks the question, “What happens to the role of test when these things actually happen widely and consistently?” He speculates “that test teams would (or could) focus more on metrics, analysis of trends, and increasing efficiency.” The metric gathering and reporting features of Team System seem to support that thesis.
- Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Steve Rowe addresses the limitations of automated testing (Too Much Test Automation?).
- Cameron Slade answers the question, “What does it mean to be a tester?”
- Scott Bellware provides his “2 cents” on the question of unit testing private methods in this post (Testable Designs (Answering Earl's Questions)), which questions the design of having “a big ol’ god method that calls a bunch of private methods”. Scott also addresses the use of mock objects when testing a class that depends on other resources.
Other
- As Bryan Bell notes, “One of the best kept secrets in .Net development is the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group.” Given the number of posts in the past few days about the release of the Enterprise Library, it’s probably not much of a secret anymore. Also, be sure to take a look at the first issue of the patterns & practices Digest (PDF). Keep an eye on Scott Densmore’s Enterprise Library feed for the latest info.