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

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…

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…

02 Oct 2007

NLarge Utility

Utilities

I've been putting the finishing touches on a TFS 2008 presentation that I'll be giving at this year's Tulsa TechFest conference later this month and came across a utility that promises to be extremely useful. It's called NLarge and provides the ability to zoom in and out of a presentation (or any other displayed materials) using a smooth scrolling effect. NLarge runs in the taskbar notification area and can be activated with a hotkey (Alt+1). Once activated, the zoom feature can be controlled with the mouse, tablet pen, and/or keyboard. Although I haven't used this utility during a presentation yet,…

29 Sep 2007

TFS (2005) Power Tools Final Release

Team System, TFS, Visual Studio

The latest and final release of the Team Foundation Server 2005 Power Tools have been released. This release includes two new additions to the existing Power Tool set: TFS Work Item Templates - work item templates allow you to define templates for existing work item types with specific fields already filled in. The work item templates are accessible via a Visual Studio add-in allowing easy access to your templates. This can be a great time saver if you fill out lots of work items - especially if they have a lot of fields that tend to use the same default…

07 Sep 2007

Tulsa TechFest 2007

Conferences, TFS

The second annual Tulsa TechFest is coming up next month on October 19th and 20th. There are currently over 50 speakers geared up to present at this years conference with around 15 tracks. Some of the current speakers include: Jason Zander - General Manager for the .NET Framework Sean Alexander - Director of Silverlight Michael Scherotter - Microsoft Developer Evangelist, San Francisco Wally McClure host of the ASP.NET Podcast Bill Vaughn - Awesome INETA Speaker RETURNSAnd, let's not forget myself :-) I'll be presenting on What's New with Team Foundation Server 2008 on Friday at 1:00. This will be my…

04 Sep 2007

Cool LINQ Utility

LINQ, Visual Studio

Like a lot of you out there, I've been spending a bit of time learning the new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) features available in the .NET Framework 3.5 (still in beta). LINQ provides some very powerful capabilities for querying not only databases but other data types as well (e.g. XML, .NET collections, arrays, etc.). Although the syntax is similar to SQL, it is not exactly the same which offers a bit of a learning curve. I came across a utility called LINQPad a few days ago that has been helping me get over the learning curve with LINQ. This utility…

17 Aug 2007

Missing Silverlight Assemblies in VS 2008 Beta 2

Silverlight, Visual Studio

If you happen to be one of the many that is giving Microsoft's Silverlight 1.1 Alpha version a trial run, you may have ran into the same issue I did. When I created new Silverlight projects in VS 2008 Beta 2, the Silverlight assembly references had a warning icon next to them stating that they could not be found. The fix is quite simple - Microsoft has released a refreshed version of the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. I uninstalled the old version, installed the new version, and everything worked fine.

09 Aug 2007

Team Foundation Server 2008 Feature List

TFS

Brian Harry has posted what he's calling the (most likely) final feature list post for TFS 2008. It is an impressive list with a few new features listed that won't show up until RTM (i.e. they're not in beta 2). He also re-iterates the compatabilities between VSTS 2005 and VSTS 2008.You can read the full list here. I've included the new (RTM) items below as well just to show what's coming.Enable support for Reporting Services on any server and any portSupport for SQL 2008 (aka Katmai)TFSDeleteProject now permanently deletes (destroys) version control contentNew role for many operations activities - You…

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…

25 Jul 2007

TFSInfo Updated

Team System, TFS

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the TFSInfo utility has been updated to also report the version number of the Team Foundation Server's data tier schema (per this post). TFSInfo now reports the TFS version based on the Application Tier as well as the Data Tier. You can read more about it here.