New Team System Stuff - 2005-04-25

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Visual Studio Team System

Beta 2 is out and thousands of you have downloaded and installed it with varying degrees of success [Visual Studio Team System & SQL Server 2005 (April CTP) and Visual Studio Team System Beta 2]. The best place to go for support is the Team System Forums. If you’re installing on a computer that previously held earlier bits, you’ll be interested in the Updated cleanup tool that fixes package load failures in VS 2005 beta 2. Be sure to Register your Beta 2...get a free book! For those that are curious about the delay shipping Beta 2, see this post from Soma that explains the extra care to support the Whidbey Beta 2 “Broad Go-Live”.

Architecture

At the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas last week, Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Enterprise Management Division, referred to the System Definition Model (SDM) as “the DSI’s [Dynamic Systems Initiative’s] ‘secret sauce’…” Of course, SDM is also the “special sauce” for the Distributed System Designers. Last we also launched the SDM SDK workbench in the Team System workshop, which you can read about in Rick LaPlante’s blog and Harry Pierson’s blog. See this eWeek article, too: Microsoft Makes 'Huge Strides' in Systems Management.

Development

Eric Jarvi has a great post explaining how to profile ASP.NET applications in Beta 2. He also has a post about profiling ASP.NET apps with the help of external load and Web tests. Keep an eye on David Gray’s blog for posts about profiling with Team System, too.

Software Factories

The Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) is a new offering from the patterns & practices team, which you can learn about in this webcast (slides). You should also see this post in Harry Pierson’s blog and this one from Daniel Cazzulino. To learn how GAT relates to DSL Tools & Software Factories, see this post from Stuart Kent. In the DSL Tools Forum, this post by Valérie Prieur announced that Modelisoft has created a tool to simplify some of the manual XML work associated with the DSL Tools. Harry Pierson & Pedro Silva blogged about it, too. Keith Short recently blogged some Examples of Software Factories, both big and small. Alan Wills has a post that looks at the various understandings of what a model is, and a post on model taxonomy. Alan links to this post from David Ing with his observations on DSLs. Adam Gallant shares his opinion about DSLs and UML. Catch-up with the latest posts from Steve Cook and Jochen Seeman.

Project Management

Rick LaPlante is blogging about our recent participation in the SEI conference that was held here in Seattle. If you have experience with the SEI/CMM audit process, he’d like to hear from you. In Tidbits from Randy Miller's Webcast, Dave McKinstry provides a synopsis of Randy’s webcast. Adam Gallant has a post about customizing Team System to accommodate your process.

Per usual, David Anderson has been a prolific blogger:

Team Software Development

Along with Beta 2, we also shipped an update to the Team System Extensibility Kit. See John Lawrence’s post for more info. In the Team Foundation team blog, you’ll find an overview of checkin policy. As Paul D. Murphy notes, 64–bit is not supported in Beta 2 for Team Foundation Server. There are quite a few posts related to Team Foundation version control. Both Jason Barile and Adam Singer are seeking your input on a couple of issues. Adam also has a post that describes baselines. James Manning has a post that explains how renaming is harder for us, but easier for you. Buck Hodges has posts on reporting permissions, data tier load and some new Ask Burton FAQ posts. Dave Bost and Adam Gallant share their installation experiences.

Testing

Dave Bost ran into the issue of unit testing and antispyware software. Rusty Miller blogs about some recent reading on test styles and predicting bugs. Brian Button [via Peter Provost] shares his impressions of unit testing in Team System.

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