A Developer's Life » Software Development, 42, and everything in between

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…

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…

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.

13 Jul 2010

PDC 2010

Conferences

Just announced, there will be a Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year after all. And, for the first time, it will be on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond. The PDC has always provided direct access to the people behind the technologies, but this year we’re upping the ante by providing access to the places, too. For the first time ever, our most influential customers will converge on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond for the PDC, this October 28 – 29, 2010. We’re opening the doors to our buildings and labs, and providing unprecedented access to Microsoft’s leaders and engineering teams on…

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…

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…

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…

15 Jun 2010

Removing “Stuck” TFS 2008 Build Controllers

How To:, TFS

When migrating from Team Foundation Server 2008 to Team Foundation Server 2010 the TFS 2008 build controllers are included. Even if you’ve setup and configured new build controllers for TFS 2010, you will still see the old (TFS 2008) build controllers in the Manage Build Controllers dialog (note: to display the Manage Build Controllers dialog, expand a team project’s node in Team Explorer, right-click on the Builds node, and select Manage Build Controllers). In the screen shot below, you can see the Default Build Controller for TFS 2010 at the top along with ten build agents below (spread across five…

28 May 2010

Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy (2008)

Check-in Policies, TFS

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on an update for the Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy for Visual Studio 2010 / TFS 2010. This version was posted here on the Visual Studio Gallery. Since then, I’ve received some questions about an update for the Visual Studio 2008 / TFS 2008 version of this check-in policy as the one I posted last September had an issue when checking in source code from the command line. I have now also posted an updated version of the Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy for Visual Studio 2008 / TFS 2008. If you’re still…

26 May 2010

OTSUG – Migrating to TFS 2010

ALM, TFS, User Group

Last night, Russ Wagner and I met with the Omaha Team System User Group to present on “Migrating to TFS 2010: Lessons Learned”. Once again, Farm Credit Services of America hosted the event and provided pizza for the attendees. Here’s the description of the talk we gave: In this presentation, Jeff Bramwell and Russ Wagner will discuss the steps taken to upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2010. The talk will cover up-front planning, tasks that need to be completed in the process, and how to plan for contingencies. They will also cover various lessons learned along the way. After the…