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For anyone in the greater Brisbane area, I will be presenting the following session at the QLD VSTS Users Group next month in case you’re interested in coming along.

Eliminating No-repro Bugs

A look at the new Microsoft Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 product.

The next meeting of the QVSTSUG will see a return to our traditional “first Friday morning of the month” timeslot after a small trial of evening meetings. While this will not suit everyone, feedback we have received has been strongly in favour of our traditional meeting time.

Date:	Friday, 5th June
Time:	7:30am Brekkie 8:00am Presentation
RSVP:	http://qvstsugjun09.eventbrite.com
Venue:	Microsoft Office, Level 9 Waterfront place, 1 Eagle Street Brisbane  QLD  4001

Session Abstract:

This month’s QVSTSUG meeting looks at the recently released Microsoft Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Beta 1 product and how it can drastically reduce the “find and fix” time for bugs that are raised by your testers. Today, significant time is often wasted trying to reproduce bugs with limited success and labelling bugs as “No-repro” can be frustrating for both testers and developers.

Microsoft’s new Test and Lab Manager Application allows testers to create, manage and execute tests quickly and easily in a dedicated user interface.  Using Test Cases, Test Suites and Test Plans, testers will find the new features allow them to better participate as a full team member in Visual Studio Team System.

The session will touch on the following features of the Visual Studio Team Test 2010 product.

• Microsoft Test Runner
• Microsoft Test and Lab Manager application
• Bug Reporting and Data Collectors
• Unit Testing
• Coded UI Test
• Web Test
• Load Test

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for download for MSDN Subscribers!

I heard from Shuk Chan today that there are still some places available on the Visual Studio 2010 training in Sydney next week. If you’re available on 19th-21st May and interested in attending, email Shuk Chan before the places are gone…

I have also noticed that Coatsy has blogged the agenda for the three days as well. Check it out on his blog.

Now that my demonstration laptop has been rebuilt using the Windows 7 Release Candidate, I need to get my standard virtual machines up and running for a demonstration tomorrow. After a bit of pondering I decided to give Windows Virtual PC a go instead of Virtual PC 2007.

In case anyone is interested I thought I’d share my experience here.

I started with a freshly install Windows 7 RC (x64) on my Lenovo T61P laptop and followed these steps.

1. Download the beta release of Windows Virtual PC. (This is the latest one for Windows 7)
2. Install Windows Virtual PC and reboot when prompted
3. I expanded a fresh copy of the VSTS2008SP1-VPC onto my laptop HDD
4. To start Windows Virtual PC, select Windows Virtual PC from the Start menu and choose Virtual Machines
5. In the folder that appeared I chose Create virtual machine from the menu bar
6. In the Create a virtual machine dialog box I entered “VSTS2008SP1-VPC” and pointed the Location to the folder I had placed the VSTS2008SP1-VPC.vhd in before clicking Next.
7. I allocated 2048Mb RAM and pointed to the existing VHD file before clicking Create
8. I then chose to Start the Virtual machine by selecting the virtual machine and clicking Open
9. Once the virtual machine started I chose to install the Virtual PC Integration Components.
10. As you start the Virtual PC Integration Components install, make sure you IGNORE any Found New Hardware Wizard dialog boxes.
    * In case you need to know, it is CTRL+ALT+ to release the mouse from the virtual machine window.
11. Once the Setup Completed message appears, click Finish and restart the Virtual Machine when prompted.
    * During this step I did get once error dialog box appear which disappeared promptly as the VM rebooted
12. After the reboot the virtual machine, use the CTRL+ALT+END keystroke to bring up the logon dialog box
13. I logged in as the TFSSetup account and checked the event viewer. The event logs were clear of any red STOP messages but while looking through the logs I had the Found New Hardware Wizard dialog reappear and prompt me for the drivers to the Sound Blaster 16 card. I also needed to mount the Windows 2003 R2 ISO to install the Virtual USB Hub driver which appeared to error on install.

I’m publishing this to my blog before I have had much of a chance to test the VPC running under Windows Virtual PC but I have opened VSTS and connected to TFS without any problems. Switching back and forth between windows view and full screen worked well. I haven’t tried out the USB support in the virtual machine yet but I’m sure I’ll be trying it out soon.

Today I was working with a client that wanted to install the recently released SQL 2008 Service Pack 1 on their TFS Server. They were eager to know if the SQL Service Pack would be compatible with TFS 2008 SP1.

The good news is that you can install SQL 2008 SP1 onto your TFS server if you happen to have installed TFS with SQL 2008. Brian Harry has the details on his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/04/15/using-sql-2008-sp1-with-tfs-2008-sp1.aspx

NOTE: As stated in Brian’s blog post, if you are installing TFS 2008 onto a SQL 2008 instance with SP1 already installed, you will need to use the workaround in the KB article he references .

I am running one of my popular VSTS Essentials for Project Managers and Business Analysts courses in Brisbane as part of the Tech SummerFest events on Thursday 9th April. If you’re interested in attending this one-day course, you can view the course outline here and register online on the Portal Synergy website.

The course is also running as part of the Perth Tech SummerFest on Thursday 23rd April for folks in Western Australia.

The Tech SummerFest roadshow was held in Brisbane this week and as part of the Technology Showcase event on Monday we had a full copy of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite with 12mth MSDN Premium Subscription to giveaway to one lucky attendee.

Congratulations to Marinos who was the very happy winner of this great prize. We hope you enjoy using all the great features available in the Team Suite.

If you’re in the Perth area, don’t forget the roadshow heads to Perth on the week commencing 20th April 2009. Check out the web site for more details. www.techsummerfest.com

Fellow Team System MVP, Chris Menegay, and the guys at Notion Solutions have been busy creating a great set of utilities for Team System. You can see from the line up below that Chris and his team have come up with solutions for many of the most frequently requested add-ons for Team System today.

Here’s the announce from Chris I received this morning.

The next meeting of the Team System User Group – Virtual Edition will be held on Friday (16th) and Sunday (18th) January Australian time. For more information and times, visit http://www.tsug-ve.com/

Weekday meeting

Friday 16th (11am Brisbane, 12noon Sydney & Melbourne)

Intro Session:
– Extending the TFS Data Warehouse with Steve St. Jean

Keynote:
– Scrum and Team System with Trent Nix.

Weekend Meeting

Sunday 18th (3am Brisbane, 4am Sydney & Melbourne)

Intro Session:
– Simple command line database Deployment with Daven Finesmith

Keynote:
– Scrum and Team System with Trent Nix.

 

Keynote Session Overview

Scrum is an iterative incremental process of software development commonly used with Agile software development. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System has an active community of users that have used Team System to manage their Scrum projects and has a set of mainstream process templates that are Scrum-based. Join us for an examination of the process templates available for Team System that implement Scrum and for a discussion the merits of using Scrum to manage your software projects. This topic is intended to be accessible for people who are new to agile software development and intended to be informative even for the most seasoned Scrum advocate.

I woke up this morning to an email from Microsoft informing me that I have been re-awarded as a Microsoft MVP for 2009. Wahoo! I am honoured to be once again included in a great bunch of Team System MVPs, most of whom I will get to catch up with at the upcoming MVP Summit in early March.