New Team System Stuff - 2005-04-15
Visual Studio Team System
I’ve kicked-off a series of posts that I’ve dubbed “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio 2005 Team System”. In Part I, I describe the evolution of Visual Studio from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 to put things in perspective. Sometimes I don’t think people fully grasp the scope of what we’re doing in this release. In Part II, I’ll finally address pricing & licensing.
This is just a reminder that the Visual Studio Team System Forums are live and the Whidbey private newsgroups are going away. If you haven’t stopped by, do so now and you’ll know where to go for questions and answers when Beta 2 is available.
Architecture
In the May 2005 issue of MSDN Magazine, Aaron Skonnard’s Service Station column is on the subject of Contract-First Service Development. Towards the end he writes about tool support and mentions the Application Connection Designer as being “…a great step in the right direction and a good teaser for what a fully integrated and iterative contract-first experience could be like.”
Development
This month, Steve Carroll reinvigorated his blog with a number of posts answering FAQs and providing tips on code profiling before leaving for vacation. He also started a new Research category on his blog in which he’ll summarize “…interesting papers in Computer Science related conferences and journals.” See his April posts.
Although Class Designer is available in each edition of Visual Studio, I’d still like to mention two new posts by Frank Fan on the Class Designer Team Blog: Create overloaded members in ClassDesigner & Override Members Using Class Designer.
Roy Osherove shares some lessons from Enterprise Library unit testing in these two posts: Test usability and "runnability" and Separate integration tests from unit tests (and learn to know the difference).
Project Management
David Anderson has returned from vacationing in Japan for Hanami (cherry blossom viewing). A perceptive observer and master of finding examples of agile management in all aspects of life, he has several posts that show his mind was not on vacation:
Team Software Development
Adam Singer, a developer on Team Foundation version control, has a post [Alice in changesets] that explores changesets – what they are, how they behave, and what you can do with them.
Keith Hill posted an interesting question in the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Forum asking, “What are the irreversible decisions in VSTS?” John Lawrence has the answer and promises to blog more about it.
Testing
One of the benefits in Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers is that it comes with a licensed copy of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. See this interview on Channel 9 with Tony Donno to see why this is a good thing. Virtual PCs are good for development, too. See this blog article by Mark DiGiovanni for Optimizing Development with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.