11 Sep 2010

HDC 2010–In the Books

Conferences, Visual Studio
For the past three days, the Heartland Developers Conference has been in full swing.  The first day was comprised entirely of hands-on classes (eight choices all together) while the remaining two days consisted of 45 sessions, 4 keynotes, and 2 receptions/after parties.  All this for a steal at $250 (plus a little extra if you signed up for any of the 1st day classes)!  Needless to say, Joe Olsen has once again put on a great conference. I attended several sessions over the past couple of days and there was some great information to be consumed presented by some great…
Read More
20 Aug 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management – Released!

TFS, Visual Studio
The final update for Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management has been released (click here for the download).  This update contains fixes and updates to the Lab Management functionality to improve performance, stability, usability and diagnostic information. Here’s a list of major fixes for Lab Management included in this update: Improves performance for Lab Management Workflow Wizard. Improves performance for running automated test cases on Network Isolated Lab environments. Fixes an issue in which a Test Controller service account that is the same as a Lab Service account causes issues with environment capabilities. There is a new Expression Encoder 4.0 based…
Read More
19 Aug 2010

LightSwitch Beta 1 – Released

LightSwitch
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced Visual Studio LightSwitch – a new addition to the Visual Studio family of products.  Today, Microsoft made LightSwitch Beta 1 available on the MSDN subscribers downloads site (look under New Downloads->Visual Studio 2010).  The beta will be made available to the public on Monday, August 23rd, on the LightSwitch Developer Center. Check out these links for more information: LightSwitch Beta 1 Documentation on MSDN Vision Clinic Application Walkthrough and Sample LightSwitch Forum LightSwitch on Channel 9
Read More
05 Aug 2010

Lab Management to RTM – and other News

TFS, Visual Studio
If you’ve been following VSLive this week, there were some exciting announcements regarding Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management yesterday.  Including: RTW: Lab Management is now scheduled to RTW by the end of August.  This is great news if you have been waiting for the final release version before implementing Lab Management. Updates: In relation to the above, a set of updates will be released that will update your TFS 2010 server, Test Professional client, and your build/lab agents.  This set of updates not only include the Lab Management updates but all TFS improvements that have been made since its release several…
Read More
03 Aug 2010

Visual Studio LightSwitch Announced

LightSwitch, Visual Studio
Today, Microsoft announced a new Visual Studio product, LightSwitch, scheduled for Beta 1 release on August 23rd. “Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta helps you solve specific business needs by enabling you to quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family.” You can loosely relate the idea of LightSwitch to that of Microsoft Access – but better.  LightSwitch will allow you to perform data mash-ups from various data sources (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Azure, SharePoint, WCF RIA Services, etc.) and present the resulting data on (skinnable) professional…
Read More
13 Jul 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance now in Spanish

ALM Rangers, Guidance, Visual Studio
Francisco Fagas, Microsoft Most Valuable professional (MVP) and Visual Studio ALM Ranger, has localized the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance for the Spanish communities. Find the latest bits in both English and Spanish here, whereby you need to select “View All Downloads” to see the “Spanish - Quick Reference Guidance” download package. Check out this post to see a list of other languages that will be available for various guidance in the near future. Also, check out this post for a list of all guidance provided by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers.
Read More
29 Jun 2010

Visual Studio 2010 VM and Hands-on-Labs

TFS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010
Brian Keller recently posted the availability of the new Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs. This virtual machine (VM) includes Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, and a sample application along with sample data which supports 9 hands-on-labs. This VM includes everything you need to learn and/or deliver demonstrations of many of my favorite application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities in Visual Studio 2010. This VM is available in the virtualization platform of your choice (Hyper-V, Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and Windows [7] Virtual PC). This is a great download for anyone…
Read More
27 Jun 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance

Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010
The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have just released the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance.  Here is the description of the guidance: Practical guidance for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, focused on modeling tools. This release includes common usage scenarios, hands on labs and lessons learned from community discussions. The scenarios include understanding and reverse engineering an existing solution or starting a new solution from scratch. These are both common challenges that any dev lead or architect faces. The intent is not to give you an in-depth tour of the product features, but to present you with examples that show how…
Read More
18 Jun 2010

WCF Load Test (Beta) for Visual Studio 2010

ALM Rangers, Utilities, Visual Studio
The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have released an update to the WCF Load Test Tool.  Apart from some bug fixes, the main difference is that this version integrates with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition.  After this release, the Rangers plan to convert the code to the .NET Framework 4.0, so future releases will only work with Visual Studio 2010 or later. If you’re not familiar with the WCF Load Test Tool, here’s a quick description: This tool takes a WCF trace file and a WCF client proxy, or a WCF interface contract, and generates a unit test that replays the…
Read More
14 May 2010

Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy

Check-in Policies, TFS, Visual Studio 2010
A while back, I wrote about the Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy – a custom check-in policy that I had developed for Team Foundation Server 2008.  Yesterday, I published version 2.1, updated for Team Foundation Server 2010, to the Visual Studio Gallery.  The features are the same as the TFS 2008 version with a couple of exceptions: You now have the ability to restrict the set of warnings to Code Contract warnings only. The settings for the check-in policy are now stored as TFS properties (more on this in an upcoming post). Here are the details… Usage: To add this…
Read More