For anyone thinking about attending the Australian ALM Conference, today is the last chance you have to get the Early Bird price of $525 and save $129 on your ticket price.

Remember, Microsoft’s launch event (9am-11am) is completely free (launch registration) but if you act today you can upgrade to a full conference ticket for just $ 525 (conference registration).

NOTE: If you register for the conference you don’t need to register for the launch event.

 

For more information visit the Australian ALM Conference website.

On a recent visit to Microsoft Australia’s head office in North Sydney, I had a quick talk (3mins) to Joerg Lindner about the upcoming Australian ALM Conference.

You can check out the video on YouTube

The conference is coming up on the 13th & 14th April so register now.

Does the title of this blog post sound interesting?  This is just one of the sessions being presented at the inaugural Australian ALM Conference. The conference is running in conjunction with the Microsoft Australia official launch of Visual Studio 2010 on the 13th & 14th April. You can read more about the 18 great breakout sessions and interviews with the speakers on the Australian ALM Conference blog. Find it at http://australianalm.wordpress.com

Ram Cherala, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation, has recently provided an update on what’s happening as far as support for Silverlight testing goes. If you’re not aware, the Manual test “record and playback” feature and the Coded UI tests do not currently support Silverlight. Here’s what Ram had to say.

Whenever we talk about platform coverage for UI automation one of the frequent requests is support for Silverlight app testing. We have been hard at work trying to cater to this need and I wanted to update you all on where we are with this effort and provide a roadmap.

We are working on adding support for Silverlight controls for “Fast forward for manual testing” and “Coded UI Tests”. The focus is on line-of-business applications built with Silverlight 4 for both in-browser and on the desktop. The initial investigation is in progress and we are working with the Silverlight team to close on the overall design. We are planning to release a CTP version of a plugin by Q2CY2010. This will be delivered out of band to active MSDN subscribers (Test Professional, Premium or Ultimate) only. I plan to send a quarterly update till Q3CY2010 and a monthly update after that to keep you informed on this effort. We are establishing the final release timeline and will let you know of that in one of my future updates.

The inaugural Australian ALM Conference is due to kick off in a little over 4 weeks and there is a great group of local and international speakers lined up to present at the event. Over the next few weeks you can read an interview with a different presenter each day. Find out what they are talking about and why they wanted to be part of this exciting new event.

Check out the Australian ALM Conference Blog. The second interview has just been posted.

 

Last weekend had some of the most glorious winter days I have ever seen in Seattle and rather than enjoy myself outside looking around, I chose to spend it with Ken Schwaber. Ken is a very well-known industry figure and one of the founders of Scrum. He has recently founded Scrum.org to allow him to further pursue his goals and vision for helping advance the adoption and use of Scrum.

His new venture, Scrum.org takes him down the path of having new courses, new assessments and new certifications. It is the assessment-based certification that largely differentiates Scrum.org from some of Ken’s previous endeavours.

A few years back, I attended a Certified ScrumMaster course. It cost me somewhere between $1K and $2K and after spending two days in the classroom I was magically endowed with the the title Certified ScrumMaster or CSM for short. The certifications from Scrum.org are quite different in that they require you to do an online assessment and achieve over a certain result to gain the certification. Attending the course, Scrum-in-Depth, will certainly assist you in passing the exam (Professional ScrumMaster I), but just attending the course does not in itself give you a certification. Professional ScrumMaster II is the next level up and it promises to be quite a tough and challenging certification. Initial estimates suggest as few as 20 people will achieve the required grade to attain this certification during 2010.

One of the most exciting things that Scrum.org is delivering this year is an assessment-based certification called Professional Scrum Developer (.NET). This certification is designed to show that a certified individual not only understands Scrum but has the practical knowledge to use Scrum in their everyday projects. In preparation for the exam, you can attend a new course called the Scrum Developer training. This has been developed by Richard Hundhausen from Accentient and is a five day course that covers Scrum but in the context of teams using Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. During the course you work in teams and complete four or five sprints where you have to produce a potentially shippable increment of value. The lessons learnt on the course are fantastic and give you the skills and knowledge to greatly improve the likelihood that your adoption and use of Scrum will be successful.

So back to my purpose in spending the last weekend with Ken.

Over the weekend Ken delivered the Scrum-in-Depth course on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. This is a prerequisite for someone wanting to become a Scrum Developer Trainer. I have already completed the Scrum Developer course and the assessments and this was one of the final steps towards my accreditation to deliver the course. If you’re in Australia and interested in attending this exciting new five-day course, I will be offering it as part of the post-conference training for the inaugural Australian ALM Conference. The course is a public course and you don’t have to attend the conference to sign up for the training.

Links:

www.scrum.org

www.australianalm.com.au

www.enhancealm.com.au

When you’re preparing your virtual machine for use in a lab managed environment, there are a number  of steps that need to be done to each virtual machine.

To enable testing, build-deploy-test workflow and network isolation capabilities on the Lab Environments, you need to install Visual Studio Test Agent, Visual Studio Lab Agent and Team Foundation Build Agent on VMs and templates that are part of the Lab Environments.

The good news is there’s a great tool that has just been updated to work with the RC release. This VM Prep Tool takes care of installing and configuring these agents using scripts that you can just sit back and watch while the work is being done.

The tool can update existing Beta 2 agents to the RC versions and now offers two modes of operation: Self Service Mode and Admin mode.

You can download the tool from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vslabmgmt

If you’re interested in looking at the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 and you have an MSDN Subscription, you’ll be pleased to know you can now download the RC from the Subscriber download site.

Microsoft Australia have now confirmed the revised date for the official launch of Visual Studio 2010 and as a result we’re now able to announce that the inaugural Australian ALM Conference has also been rescheduled and registration are now open.

The Australian ALM Conference

13th & 14th April 2010

Luna Park, Sydney NSW

Visit the event website for more details at www.australianalm.com.au

Earlier this week, the VSTS Rangers, a group made up of Microsoft Product Group people and MVPs, shipped the Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide. This guide is available on Codeplex for download and comprises a single 27 page XPS file inside a 1.32Mb ZIP file.

I have a special interest in this document as I was one of a couple of contributors from the ranks of the Team System MVPs who contributed to this document. It was great working with Pramod who lead the project and Bijan who leads the Rangers.

The contents of this document are as follows;

1 Introduction
2 Upgrade Process
3 Scenarios
3.1 Upgrading Projects from Multiple TFS 2008 servers into one TFS 2010 server
3.2 Upgrading severs when SQL Mirroring is enabled
3.3 Recovering system if upgrade fails midway
3.4 Updating Team Project Portal for an existing Team project
3.5 Splitting Team Project Collection into Multiple Collections
3.6 When I move a Team Project Collection, how do I move the reports?
3.7 Bringing Workgroup Machine inside Domain
4 Frequently Asked Questions
4.1 Can I use a TFS2008 Process Template to create team projects in TFS 2010
4.2 How can I enable Agile Workbooks in upgraded Projects
4.2.1 Enabling the Product Backlog Workbook
4.2.2 Enabling the Iteration Backlog Workbook
4.3 How can I enable Test Case Management in upgraded project
4.4 How can I enable Branch Visualization in upgrade projects
4.5 How can I enable Lab Management in upgrade projects
4.6 What is WIT Admin Tool
4.7 What happens to my custom reports created in TFS2008 post upgrade?
4.8 Will my old TFS2008 reports work post upgrade?
4.9 Can I add a new Database to my existing TFS 2010 farm?
4.10 Error bringing cloned Team Project Collection online
4.11 Move Team Project Collection Database from one Database server to another Database Server
4.12 How to enable the TFS reports if the WSS server is upgraded to MOSS server?
4.13 How to Move Team Projects from one Team Project Collection to another
5 References

Team
Pramod Vasanth, Bijan javidi, Willy-Peter Schaub, Anthony Borton, Neno Loje, Bryan Krieger, Aaron Bjork, Mario Rodriguez