New Team System Stuff - 2005-05-25

  • Article

Visual Studio Team System

  • Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the public announcement of Visual Studio Team System, which was announced at TechEd 2004 in San Diego [Visual Studio 2005 Team System!].
  • MOC 2631, the official Microsoft curriculum for a Team System workshop went through its first beta run on campus last week [MOC 2631 Beta is over!]. I attended part of the post mortem for the course. Steven Borg, one of the course authors, gave me a great quote. He said that demonstrating Team System without a process is like trying to demonstrate .NET without a programming language.
  • Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, "The Universe is Big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the Universe, that's peanuts." Team System is big. Really big. We have an internal demo script that is jokingly called the “60–Minute Demo”. Even those who have explored Team System for some time are frequently amazed by how much stuff there is to explore [Attended Memphis .NET User Group Meeting…].
  • William Sheldon of Windows IT Pro shares his thoughts in Team System in this article [Team System and the Team Foundation Server]. Thanks for the kind words, William.
  • Aaron Stebner has a post that provides the step-by-step for installing Visual Studio in administrative installation mode [Instructions for chaining installation of Visual Studio 2005 and MSDN].
  • Elona Tuomi, who many may know from the Team System newsgroups and now the forums, has captured her Tips and Tricks for Finding Help in the MSDN Library.
  • Team System is “Back in Black” for TechEd this year. Keep an eye out for the Team System ads when you get to Orlando and the Team System buses.
  • Developer Division VP S. Somasegar has a post on VS2005 and .NET FX 2.0 Application Compatibility.

Architecture

Development

Project Management

  • A new streamzine, Principles and Practices , is now available from Net Objectives. This presentation provides an overview of the critical Principles and Practices that enable Professionalism in Software Development.
  • Mickey Gousset: MSF Agile.
  • Grace Francisco, Technical Evangelist for Team System, has started blogging. In this post, she delves into Team System reporting.
  • David Anderson shares his FDD Benchmark Metrics.

Team Software Development

  • Kevin Kelly resurrects his blog with Delivering Work Items.
  • Grace Francisco has a tip for using Excel Pivots Tables with Team Foundation warehouse data [Don't be so square! :-)].
  • FinalBuilder ran a customer survey to get an idea of which source control systems people are using, or plan to use in the next 12 months. Team System did well considering we just released our first Beta last month.
  • Richard Hundhausen blogs about differences between RDL and RDLC files in SQL Server Reporting Services.
  • Langleyben Leon is using CQConverter and shares some insight.
  • Eric Jarvi has a tip on using Team Foundation Server with a proxy server [VSTS Tip: proxy moxie].
  • Marcel de Vries blogs about creating custom checkin policies. See his post for the article link.
  • The Team Foundation team blog has a post from Ling Bao on Customizing the Assigned To field on a Work Item Type.
  • As noted in this forum post, the Extensiblity Kit is available for download.
  • Jason Barile points you in the right direction for learning Team System using the walkthroughs in the product documentation, some of which are now available online [Forums and VSTS walkthroughs]. He also shares what his team has been doing lately.
  • Branching is a great alternative to the promotion model using labels. See Chapter 8 from Eric Sink on the subject.

Testing

My Team System Posts