Mike Vincent's Blog

MSDN Developer Conference VSTS Presentation

I really enjoyed the opportunity to present "A Lap Around VSTS 2010" Monday in San Francisco at the MSDN Developer Conference. Here's the link to my slide deck. For those who want to get their hands on the bits, here's a link with some guidance on how to work with the timed out Virtual PC image.

Accentient VSTS blog aggregator

Accentient has just refreshed their web site that now includes a cool new community page featuring a VSTS blog aggregator.

Lab Management with VSTS

Development, Test and Build/Release need clean environments for deployment. For complex multi-tier applications this is not a trivial task, especially when implementing agile processes like continuous integration.

Virtual Machines allow you to configure your target environments but it still takes time and effort for setup and provisioning when you are doing potentially many builds a day and deploying for multiple purposes including development, QA testing, UAT, etc. This is where lab management comes in.

I recently returned from a client engagement where their data center has a heavy investment in VMware and they have added VMware vCenter Lab Manager. We were quickly able to provision multiple target environments for our build destinations. The nature of their products requires a significant amount of hands-on testing so reducing setup and tear down time makes a big difference.

Lab Manager provides a lot that can be leveraged including capturing and reproducing software defects. There is out of the box integration with Borland Silk Central Test Manager and HP Quality Center but I haven’t found any posts about integrating with MSBuild. Checking out the documentation SOAP API Guide, it all looks straight forward with several C# examples.

With VSTS 2010 we’ll be getting all the cool lab management goodness built into Team System, all nicely integrated. Lab Management is built on top of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and thanks to SCVMM managing VMs on multiple hypervisors, Lab Management supports both Hyper-V and VMware ESX out of the box.

Build automation will be able to automate complex virtual machine provisioning, build deployment, and build verification; dramatically speeding up the Develop – Build – Deploy – Test cycle. The deep integration will allow testers to file “rich bug reports” with links to environment checkpoints. With one button click, developers will be able to launch a virtual environment that exactly matches the one that the bug was found in.  

Check out these links for more detail on lab management.

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/12/12/lab-management-in-vsts-2010.aspx

http://www.vmware.com/products/labmanager/

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/11/12/visual-studio-2010-lab-management-uses-virtualization.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Lab-Management-coming-to-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

Lynn Langit's New Book Released

Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 

Here’s the description and link from Amazon.com. Way to go Lynn!

Get expert guidance on SQL Server 2008 technologies, processes, and procedures and accelerate your proficiency developing smart, business intelligence solutions. This book provides practical, end-to-end coverage on how to envision, plan, develop, test, and deploy a complete SQL Server 2008-based business intelligence solution. First, you’ll build a foundational knowledge of business intelligence systems and components, including case studies of the most common scenarios. Next, you ll work through the physical and logical design of a business intelligence solution, examining SQL Server tools including SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Integration Services, and SQL Server Reporting Services and the problems they solve. Finally, you ll master core reporting and data-mining techniques. Throughout the book, real-world scenarios and examples illustrate essential concepts and demonstrate the most effective ways to implement the platform. The author brings pragmatic perspectives valuable to the range of business intelligence implementers from business decision makers and administrators, to beginning and advanced level developers and architects.

GeekSpeak Followup

Thanks to all those attended our GeekSpeak discussion yesterday on Visual Studio Team System 2008. Here are the links based on the questions recorded by Lynn and Mithun.

Hierarchical work items

We are looking at VSTS 2010 for rich support of hierarchical work items. Here are a couple of good links from Cameron Skinner and Grant Holiday:

http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2008/11/25/model-and-work-item-integration.aspx

http://ozgrant.com/2007/08/05/tfs-rosario-feedback-hierarchical-work-items/

Pex link

                http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/Pex/

SQL Server compact supported

Yes,

http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2008/10/01/visual-studio-team-system-2008-database-edition-gdr-september-ctp-is-now-available-for-download.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2008/10/01/visual-studio-team-system-2008-database-edition-gdr-september-ctp-is-now-available-for-download.aspx

Links for versions / editions of VSTS

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/teamsystem/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/default.mspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscriptionschart.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/dd408380.aspx (check out 2-for-1 offer)

Link for ROI calculator

http://www.msftroi.com

URL for web client

             http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb980951.aspx

URL for power tools for VSTS

             http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb980963.aspx

StyleCop == FxCop? Integration

StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis

http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/

For links to everything Team System go to

             http://www.teamsystemwidgets.com/

So Cal Code Camp Fullerton

I’m about a week behind in getting this posted, but the So Cal Code Camp held at California State University, Fullerton January 24 & 25 was a big success. Attendance over 300 on Saturday and 200 on Sunday.  Great Geek Dinner on Saturday night at the Cantina Lounge. My presentations are posted here at What You May Not Know About Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Making SAO a Success.