Flash July 2015 – Summer break with a sprinkle of readiness events and other spices

You can find the latest flight plan snapshot at aka.ms/vsarFlightPlan

news

• Test Planning and Management Guide – Updated … our product owner was excited to announce a new version of this guide, that, in addition to focusing on the core aspects of test planning, also touches upon new product improvements to Manual Testing with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. You can download the guide by clicking here (or visit the Test Planning and Management Guide page).
• Version Control Guidance – Visuals to decorate your office wall or hide cracks in the wall resembling complex branches is a package of the new and one nostalgic poster from the Team System days.

what’s boiling over … watch the space!

• The following projects are in the final phases of bug fixing, reviews, validations and expected to touch-down soon: PowerShell DSC (guidance v1.1, resources v1.2 and scenarios v1.3), Technical Debt article, TFS Upgrade guidance, and VSO Extension learning's, guidance and extensions.

kudos

To Anthony Borton for this great gem: DevOps Video on Channel 9.

welcome our new associate rangers

The following Associate ALM Ranger who has joined us: Igor Shcheglovitov from Russia, and Derrick Cawthon from the USA.  Welcome and enjoy the adventure!

kudos to our new distinguished ranger

Etienne Tremblay has been a pillar of strength, especially north of the 49^th parallel, for the ALM Rangers since 2006, and an inspiration to many since he scripted the TFS 2005 installation. That’s 9 and 10 years of history!!! THANK YOU for sharing your passion, experience, energy and patience with the ALM MVPs, Rangers, and community!

Welcome to the circle of distinguished ALM Rangers

community gems

• Vinicius Moura and Ricardo Serradas created a “VSO Sprints Brasil” channel on YouTube. Their idea is to create a Webcast to show details of features released in every new Sprint for their community.   
• Richard Fennell did a session at the LeedsDevOps usergroup on DSC, a mostly Linux crowd it turned out. He was expecting the worst, but was surprisingly well received and got positive feedback. He pointed them to our materials and labs, they liked the idea of extending the reach of chef/puppet into Windows with DSC.
• Anthony Borton published the DevOps Video on Channel 9.

interesting reads

• Self forming teams at scale
• Identity Management Features in Visual Studio 2015
• Reporting on Work Items with Power BI
• Learn how to implement the DevOps model of expedited software development 
• Visual Studio 2015 RTM: What’s New in the IDE
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 5 RC Available
• Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released
• Why is DevOps one of the hottest topics?

anisha at work and in the channel 9 studio

You will usually find Anisha Pindoria at her desk or in the Channel 9 recording studio. This time she managed to interview Hosam Kamel and Jamie Cool.

getting together for a md workshop during techready

md? markdown language! Pizza + Rangers == interactive workshop!

snapshots from an recent internal readiness event

Not often that the ALM Rangers meet face to face …

tell us about your success stories!

Are you aware of a success story in which the Visual Studio ALM Rangers and/or their solutions have accelerated the adoption of Visual Studio, unblocked an engagement and/or resulted in a happy user? See Tell us about your success stories for details.

review our (your) solutions!

When you download one or more of our solutions please invest a few seconds to rate and optionally review the solution on CodePlex or the Visual Studio Gallery. We need your candid feedback and support in terms of ratings!

Overview About Publications Solutions Team

ALM Readiness Treasure Map T/Map App

Blogs VS TFS Team

Twitter ALM Rangers

Nuggets Brian Keller's VM Community Feed

Visual Studio Comparisons Downloads Marketing (ALM) Marketing (VS)

On July 15th we were 38628 downloads shy of getting to one million downloads. While looking at the stats, we also noticed that we have 78k+ and 199k+ views on our demo and monthly update video series on Channel 9. Based on the quick poll, the preference for events is between 08:00 and High-Noon (Pacific Date Time), for teams spanning numerous time zones.

We currently have 37 custom t-shirt designs, ranging from baby sized t-shirts to celebrate the BK VM, to the latest series of VSO Extension t-shirts.

Last, but not least. We turned nine years young as a community in July and are heading for double digits in 2016.