19 Oct 2007

What’s New in TFS 2008

Conferences, Orcas, TFS
I just completed my presentation on the new features of TFS 2008 at this year's Tulsa TechFest.  It was a relatively small session held in one of the classrooms here at the OSU campus which allowed me to more easily address questions during the presentation.  The topic I presented on is called What's New in TFS 2008.  Although the presentations run roughly 75 minutes, I had to skip over a couple of my demos because there are so many new features in TFS 2008.  It was easy to tell that I'm not the only one excited about some of the…
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18 Oct 2007

TFS 2008 Features in TFS 2005

Orcas, Team System, TFS
There are a lot of new features in TFS 2008.  So many in fact, it's difficult to list them all at once.  I will, however, do my best to cover as many new features as I can during this year's Tulsa TechFest when I present on What's New in TFS 2008.  There are a lot of new features that have been integrated into TFS 2008 that can also be had today in TFS 2005.  Some of these are listed below... Continuous Integration - there are several 3rd party solutions for implementing continuous integration in TFS 2005.  These include: A Microsoft…
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27 Jul 2007

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 – Released

Orcas, Team System, TFS, Visual Studio
As of a short while ago, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 was released.  This also includes the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2.  Silverlight 1.0 RC is expected to be released within the next couple of days. Also, these releases (Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2, as well as Silverlight 1.0 RC) come with a "go live" license that allows you to start development now and not have to worry about a supported upgrade path when the final versions ship later this year. Here's a list of the installation disc images that can be downloaded: Visual Studio…
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11 Jul 2007

Microsoft’s Largest Launch – Ever!

Orcas, Visual Studio
Microsoft announces today (July 10th) that Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 (formerly code-named "Orcas") will be officially launched together on February 27th, 2008.  Although it appears that Visual Studio 2008 is still set for release later this year, I have to say I'm a little surprised (although not too much) by the release date.  I had the impression these tools would be available a little sooner than this since the 2007 PDC in Los Angeles was canceled with this message: We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the…
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28 Jun 2007

Gearing Up for HDC 2007

Conferences, Orcas, Team System, TFS
It's that time of year again here in the heartland - preparation for the fourth consecutive Heartland Developers Conference.  Last year's conference went very well (Philip and Joe did a great job putting it all together) with a lot of great presentations and this year is looking to be even better.  A new track, “Manage It”, has been added this year which will focus on providing cutting edge content on topics like virtualization, technology driven project management, strategic process management, empowerment tools, and other topics that will help you to manage the development and implementation of your development projects. Although the speaker…
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21 Jun 2007

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Includes "Go-Live" License

Orcas, Visual Studio
I noticed in a blog post by Scott Guthrie that Visual Studio 2008 (formerly known as "Orcas") will include a "go-live" license allowing it to be put into production use with a supported upgrade path to subsequent releases. VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 will ship later this summer, and the Beta 2 release will support a go-live license for those who want to put applications into production using the new features immediately. Also, just in case you missed it, "Orcas" is now officially known as Visual Studio 2008 and the related .NET Framework is known as .NET Framework 3.5. …
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20 Jun 2007

A Quick eScrum Review

Orcas, Team System, TFS
As many of you have probably noticed, Microsoft has released a new product called eScrum.  This product adds a scrum-based process template to your Team Foundation Server along with related functionality (e.g. product management, backlog items, tasks, sprint management, and reports) allowing you to manage various parts of the agile software development process. eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a…
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06 Apr 2007

Updated Team Foundation Server Roadmap for "Orcas"

Orcas, TFS, Visual Studio
Brian Harry has just published a new post detailing the future "Orcas" release of Team Foundation Server. The post is fairly detailed and he attempts to point out what features are new as well as what will be in the Beta 1 release vs. the Beta 2 release.The features marked as new include:TFS Best Practices Analyzer - A tool that can be run against your TFS server that will help diagnose configuration errors and tuning possibilities.VSTS Web Access - There's been much written about this already but the new Web Access product from devBiz will be released as a Power…
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02 Mar 2007

New Orcas Features

Orcas, Visual Studio
Eric Lee has a nice post on some of the new features found in the current Orcas release. There is some really nice stuff coming out with Orcas, especially in the area of Team Foundation Server. Some of these features include:Code Metrics - view various metrics about your source code.Annotation View for Files under Version Control - lets you see who changed what & when?Team Foundation Server Build Definition Editor - quit messing around in all that XML!Build Retention Policy - automatically remove build files from your drop location.Continuous Builds - finally! :-)Build Queues - lets you queue up builds.Folder…
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