Ranger Flash – September 2013

Related Announcements

• Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012
• Testing Mobile Applications using Perfecto Mobile's MobileCloud
• Planning your TFS deployment for TFS 2013 with the latest planning guide
• Practical guidance on the concepts of DevOps, continuous delivery and release management

New and updated family members

• Please welcome the following new Associate ALM Ranger: Marcus Fernandez and Dave McKinstry who re-joins the Active ALM Rangers.

“Shining Associate ALM Ranger” Award

• Gordon Beeming recently joined the family as an associate ALM Ranger, sweeping through projects such as the Upgrade Guide and the Version Control Guide like wild fire, showing amazing passion, tenacity and delivering at such a rate that we wonder where he takes the time and energy from. We just had to introduce a new annual award to recognise his efforts and will get the plaque and stamp to him at the earliest opportunity. CONGRATULATIONS Gordon on winning the following new award:  

UserVoice Idea Triage #5

• Triage #5 results were published, see ALM Rangers Triage #5 - What happened to your idea in UserVoice for details.
• Triage #6 is planned for mid-October, so get your ideas and votes captured in Visual Studio UserVoice.

TFS RC 2013 Upgrade Weekend

• Under the great leadership of Brian Keller a family of subject matter experts delivered a phenomenal TFS Upgrade Weekend for TFS 2013 RC in September, with more weekends planned.
• A special thank you for the volunteers across engineering, CSS, marketing and ALM Rangers for investing their weekends helping customers with upgrades: Abhijit Chakraborty, Abhilash Owk, Andrea Scripa, Chandra Sekhar Viswanadha, Ed Blankenship, Erin Dormier, Ewald Hofman, Francisco Xavier Fagas Albarracin, Gordon Beeming, Hosam Kamel, Kris Lankford, Nipun Jain, Pradeep Narayan, Romit Gulati, Venkata Narasimhan, and Anantha Ramasubramanian. 
• Last but not least, thanks to Buck Hodges, Munil Shah, and Aaron Hallberg for their leadership and helping to rally so much support for this idea.

Other interesting ALM Rangers / Community News

• J.D. Meier, Principal Program Manager, did a roundup of PM posts, which included the Rangers.
• Richard Hundhausen is doing another TTT (this time in Germany in December).
• Pretty cool trick for Debugging TFS Web Access Extensions by Alexander Vanwynsberghe.
• Perform Java code analysis with Team Foundation Server and SONAR by Hosam Kamel.
• The hunt for stealth tasks … what happened to my task on the TFS task board?
• TaskTop announced the latest release of Tasktop Sync and Tasktop Dev in their newsletter.

ALM Ranger Shirts

• The new ALM Ranger shirt has been dropping into mailboxes, creating great excitement and some interesting anomalies.
• Some of the excitement …
  • Just received my ALM Ranger shirt. They look awesome!
  • I've got it too, cool!
  • Agreed! I'm actually wearing mine as I type this :-) The shirt looks awesome! My wife even liked it and she's generally not a big fan of "geek" shirts :-)
  • I wore it at the NYC code camp last Saturday. I got more compliments on the shirt than the presentation.
  • I will be using mine tomorrow when presenting at the TFS Austin User group :-)
  • I have been wearing mine onsite at my customers :)
• Interesting anomalies …
  • Thanks for sending the Rangers shirt, it arrived today curiously packaged in a FedEx bag inside a DHL one.
  • Customs $15.3, VAT $16.2 and forwarding services $40 … symbolically, this shirt is worth much more for me than these $’s, but isn’t it cost too much for one shirt?

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?