Mike Vincent's Blog

The Ultimate Event: Visual Studio 2010 & Team Foundation Server 2010

Visual Studio 2010 ALM Pricing

I'm frequently asked pricing questions for Microsoft's Application Lifecycle Management products. As always, my response is check with your Microsoft sales representative for your specific case. Here's the suggested retail pricing. If you are renewing your MSDN Subscription, timing may be important so check it out soon.

* Subscription contents vary by purchased product.

SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp, January 30 and 31, Cal State Fullerton

The next SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp will be January 31 and 31 at Cal State University Fullerton.  Code Camp is a place for developers to come and learn from their peers. This community driven event has become an international trend where peer groups of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines band together to bring content to the community.

Who is speaking at Code Camp? YOU are, YOUR PEERS are, and YOUR LOCAL EXPERTS are…all are welcome! This is a community event and one of the main purposes of the event is to have local community members step up and offer some cool presentations!

Interest is running strong with almost 60 sessions already registered. I'm again doing my Scrum Fundamentals session. With sessions on all of today's hot topics you'll be able to get two days of great material on delivering successful projects and applying the newest technologies. You can get more information at http://www.SoCalCodeCamp.com. Sign up and if you also want to present a session, sign up for that as well. Hope to see you there.

Visual Studio 2010 Release Pushed Back

Microsoft wants to be sure they get it right with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET4. Feedback they've received from Beta 2 is being listened to and acted upon. In general, the new features are great but work is needed on performance. To that end, the release is being pushed back a few weeks and we'll have a public release candidate available in February. For more details, check out Scott Guthrie's blog post Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Update and Brian Harry's blog post  VS 2010 & .NET 4 Public Release Candidate Planned.

PDC Birds of a Feather Follow-up

I'm a month late following up on PDC but it was a real success in my opinion. I had a great time starting off with Monday's pre-conference hosting an MVP table at the lunch break to discuss the new Visual Studio configurations and deeper integration of ALM. On Tuesday, David Starr and I hosted a Birds of a Feather session "Agile Tales of Triumph, Tribulation, Tools and Teams". The discussion was great and carried over to the adjoining public area afterwards. We literally could have gone all day! Like many of the BOF sessions we had an overflow crowd and some people were turned away because of room capacity. Overall, the BOF sessions were a big success. Thanks to Stuart Celarier, Chris Pels, and Bob Goodearl for a fantastic organizing job.

Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Team Development for All

This was a busy week for new stuff Microsoft. Wednesday Oct 21 was the official release day for Windows 7. It also was the first day of public availability for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 from MDSN downloads.

You can download Beta 2 here http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx. Beta 2 includes a go live license. If you do consider moving toward production with Beta 2, check out Jeff Beehler’s blog “Going Live” with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

There are some significant product license changes. Application lifecycle management moves closer to full integration into the Visual Studio product stack and the stack has been simplified to 4 basic developer choices: Express, Professional, Premium, and Ultimate. The Express configuration is pretty much unchanged, here’s the overview for Professional and above.

You may notice that the Team System name has been dropped, it’s now just part of what you get. Teams of all sizes now have team development tooling available with Visual Studio Professional and above.

Also, we now have a launch date for Visual Studio 2010 on March 22, 2010.

LA Code Camp, November 21 and 22

The LA Code will be November 21 and 22, the weekend right after PDC 09 at the USC campus. Several teams from Microsoft including Team System, Languages (C# and VB.NET) and ASP.NET plan to be presenting sessions. I’m to entice some from the Windows Azure team to join in as well. This will be a great opportunity to catch some of the latest info on just released and soon to be released development tools. You can get more information at http://www.SoCalCodeCamp.com and http://www.lacodecamp.com. Sign up and if you also want to present a session, sign up for that as well. Hope to see you there.

PDC Birds of a Feather (BOF)

INETA is again organizing the Birds of a Feather (BOF) discussions at PDC. BOF sessions are a bit different from the normal formal presentations. They are discussions on topics originated by and facilitated by volunteers. They are a great way to get involved in topics you care about with your peers. I have submitted a proposed session on Scrum. Hope it is one of the sessions selected.

Title:  Can Scrum Help You Deliver Successful Projects?

Description:  Scrum is an increasingly popular agile framework for managing software development. Can Scrum help you deliver successful projects? This session will pragmatically explore using Scrum. We’ll talk about what how to get started adopting Scrum, what kinds of organizational commitments are needed and even how Scrum works with Team System.

Scrum is incredibly simple on the surface but touches profoundly on people, process and technology. While Scrum works for some, it isn’t for everyone. What should you expect if you do it right, and what if you don’t?  Join our discussion and see if Scrum is right for you.

Interested in hosting a session for a topic you are passionate about? You can get more information at http://microsoftpdc.com/WhatsHappening/Announcing-Birds-of-a-Feather-Sessions-at-PDC09.

Windows Azure at SoCal .NET Architecture

On November 17, Microsoft will be officially releasing Windows Azure. Now is the time to get up to speed on cloud computing and Windows Azure. A lot of industries and organizations are moving toward the cloud. For the September 17 SoCal .NET Architecture meeting I covered several areas including an intro to Windows Azure, SQL Azure, building applications, scaling out and more. I used material from the Windows Azure Training Kit (August 2009) that includes tons of good material for getting up to speed fast. I highly suggest downloading and going through the material at your own pace. You’ll find presentations, demos and hands-on-labs.

One of our members, Abhijit Gadkari, built this aspx page that pulls the data from the Azure cloud using SQL Azure - http://zimbatech.com/mycloud/Default.aspx. For October, we’ll be going deeper into Windows Azure. If you are in the Orange County area on October 15, hope you can join us.

INETA Windows Azure Train-the-Trainer Sessions

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.

Windows Azure is currently in Community Technology Preview. Commercial availability for Windows Azure will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009.

Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

To help developers and architects better understand how to leverage the cloud, Microsoft is offering INETA two "train-the-trainer" sessions for user group leaders, speakers and influential contributors. Here's a great opportunity to learn more and present back to your user groups and other community events.

LiveMeeting Sessions are:

·         Wednesday, September 9, 2009 5:00 PM-6:00 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

·         Tuesday, September 15, 2009 8:00 AM-9:00 AM (UTC-8:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Here's What You'll Learn

• Development tools for Visual Studio
• Local debugging
• Data storage services
• Security
• Running your ASP.NET applications in the cloud
• Service hosting
• Interfacing Non Microsoft applications such as PHP

You'll get demo code and PowerPoint content ready for presentation delivery.

Windows Workflow Foundation, Today and Tomorrow

Last night at the SoCal .NET Architecture meeting I presented a  look Windows Workflow Foundation (WF 3.5) as we have it today with a specific look at working with Windows Communication Foundation Services. I discussed ways you can harness the power of workflow in your applications. Then, I moved on to take a peek at what is coming with WF 4.0 where there will be a whole new stack to get your head around. I covered improvements that will make development more productive and changes that should significantly improve performance.  Plus you'll find workflow built in to next generation development applications like Visual Studio Team System.  You can download my presentation slide deck.

A Lap Around VSTS 2010 at SoCal Team System

The July 28^th meeting of SoCal Team System featured my presentation of “A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System 2010.” Here is the download for my presentation. We had a great turnout with lots of discussion. We were able to cover TFS administration, team collections, the Architecture Explorer, UML diagrams, and the Architecture Layer Diagram but just touched on test impact analysis, testing, builds and  reporting. We only touched the tip of the iceberg. VSTS 2010 is BIG.

Scrum and User Experience Presentation, LA Scrum Club

Last night, Patrick Neeman and I did a tag-team presentation on Scrum and User Experience at the LA Scrum Club. The turnout was good and most importantly helped make the presentation an engaging conversation. The presentation ended shortly after 9 but I stayed after almost to 11 with follow-up discussion. A big thanks to Amanda for making the event happen.

Here's a link to the presentation slides.

Team System presentations from Rock & Roll Code Camp

Here are the links for the slide decks from my Team System presentations at the San Diego code camp on June 27:

·         A Lap Around VSTS 2010

·          Maximizing Your Investment with VSTS 2008

The “Lap Around VSTS 2010” turned out to be a bit more challenged than I bargained for. I was testing my intended demos at around 11 pm the night before when the Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 crashed big time. While I able to create a nice detailed crash dump to send back to the product teams at Microsoft, my demos were not going to happen. I’ll be rebuilding the VM for the presentation and making another run at delivering it soon at SoCal Team System.

SoCal Team System off to a great start

On June 23^rd, we kicked off the inaugural meeting of SoCal Team System. After some opening comments from William Salazar, Microsoft Developer Technology Specialist, we had a great presentation from Richard Hundhausen on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Best Practices. A big thanks for Richard coming down from Boise to help us get this new group kicked off right! Here is the download for his presentation and bookmarks.