This morning at the QVSTSUG meeting, we took the opportunity to congratulate our vice president, William Bartholomew, on being newly awarded the Team System MVP title. William is the second Team System MVP here in Brisbane and I have had the pleasure of knowing and presenting with William for a few years now. William and I also teamed up to present a session at TechEd Australia this year on what’s coming up in the Rosario Architecture edition.

The Team System MVP community is much richer for having William join our ranks.

Here’s a photo of William with the MVP mudcake we arranged for him, wearing his new VSTS MVP polo shirt as well 🙂

I was just reading Brian Harry’s teaser blog post about what’s coming up with the October Power Tools release and I’ve got to say that I’m impressed.

As per Brian’s blog post they are looking at the following three major features;

• Team Members – We’ve added a new node to the Team Explorer called “Team Members”.  It appears under each Team Project and is used to identify who are the people who work on the project.  It serves as a “pivot point” for information about and operations on people and teams.
• Windows Shell Extension – We’ve built a Windows shell extension that allows you to do the core version control operations directly inside the Windows Explorer without using the Team Explorer.
• PowerShell Support – We’ve started working on a PowerShell pipeline and commandlets for TFS.  Our initial set support basic version control operations but over time we plan to add work item tracking, administration, build and more.

Here’s one of the screenshots from to whet your appetite.

 

Make sure you read all the details on Brian’s blog post. If you’re a team system user today, you won’t help but be impressed.

For anyone interesting in learning more about what Microsoft are rolling out in Visual Studio Team System 2010, it is definitely worth visiting the new Channel 9 site focused on Visual Studio. At http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ you’ll find new videos focusing on VSTS 2010 every day during the week of 29th Sept through to 3rd October.

Brian Keller has posted the following exciting agenda for the week.

Monday, September 29th:

– Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

Architecture Day (Tuesday, September 30th):

– Cameron Skinner: Visual Studio Team System 2010 – Architecture

– “Top-down” design with Visual Studio Team System 2010

– “Bottom-up” Design with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect

– ARCast.TV – Peter Provost on what’s coming for Architects in Visual Studio Team System

Business Alignment (Wednesday, October 1st):

– Achieving Business Alignment with Visual Studio Team System 2010

– Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010

– Enterprise Project Management with Visual Studio Team System 2010

– Requirements Management and Traceability with Visual Studio Team System 2010

Software Quality (Thursday, October 2nd):

– Better Software Quality with Visual Studio Team System 2010

– Manual Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010

– Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010

Team Foundation Server (Friday, October 3rd):

– Brian Harry: Team Foundation Server 2010

– Branching and Merging Visualization with Team Foundation Server 2010

– Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management with Mario Rodriguez

– Team Foundation Server 2010 Setup and Administration

– An early look at Team Foundation Build 2010 with Jim Lamb

– A first look at Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2010

– Update on Team Foundation Server Migration and Synchronization

The next meeting of the QLD VSTS Users Group is scheduled for this Friday morning, 3rd October.

Topic:

Scrum:  A hands-on look at Scrum for Team System.

Abstract:

In this session James Brett will be introducing  Conchango’s Scrum for Team System (SFTS) plug-in for tracking a Scrum project. Tracking progress is an essential part of Scrum as is making this progress visible. We can use a number of tools to help automate this process however, we must remember that using a Scrum tool does not mean we are doing Scrum AND that Scrum requires no tools to run successfully.

With that said, SFTS can take some of the pain out of the administrative duties of the Scrum master for those that are using VSTS as their work item repository.

We will walk through creating a SFTS project, entering Sprint planning data, burning down a sprint and completing the release, and look at how SFTS automagically produces our Scrum artefacts such as the Sprint and Product Burndown charts.

Date:	Friday, 3rd October, 2008
Time:	7:30am Breakfast 8:00am Presentation 9:00am Finish
Where:	Microsoft Office Theatre 1, Level 9 Waterfront Place 1 Eagle Street, Brisbane
RSVP:	Reserve your free ticket by registering here

 Speaker: James Brett

James Brett is a Software Development Manager for Maxgaming part of the Tattersalls group of companies base d in Brisbane, Queensland.

James has over 14 years experience in software development and has worked with a number of European blue chip companies such as Conchango, Volkswagen, Boots, Play.com and various leading financial organisations.  Having experienced a wide range of software development methodologies and frameworks he now concentrates his efforts solely in the Scrum and Agile camp as he believes strongly that contemporary software development requires high speed, flexibility and quality in an ever changing world of requirements.

James has recently taken on the role of Software Development Manager at Maxgaming and is in the process of rolling out Scrum throughout the development teams within the company.  Also acting as a “Scrum Coach” James delivers Scrum training and advice to other companies within the Tattersalls group, facilitating amongst other things an organisation Scrum Community group.   James has worked on numerous Scrum projects prior to this with Conchango, the developer of “Scrum for Team System” and leading providers of Scrum process guidance.

James is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM), MCSD and holds an honours degree in Microelectronics and computing.

PDC is traditionally a very exciting time for developers and Microsoft always has a wide range of new announcements lined up to tantalise even the most conservative developer. With PDC less than a month away, Microsoft has started delving into the goodie bag and sharing some of the news with us a little early. One of the first announcements is the official naming of the next versions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. You can read an overview of the newly named Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 on the MSDN web site.

If you’ve got a spare 30 minutes or can multitask, you should also watch Norman Guadagno, (Director of Product Management for Visual Studio Team System) talk about Visual Studio 2010 on Channel 9. So it is pronounced Twenty-Ten or Two Thousand Ten and what does it mean to democratize exactly?

To contact me

Anthony is the lead ALM consultant for Enhance ALM Pty Ltd, an Australian consulting and training company specializing in software development process and Microsoft Visual Studio. He has been working with Visual Studio Team System full-time since 2005. Anthony has worked with a variety of companies ranging in size from just 3 employees up to some of Australia’s largest companies and financial institutions. Anthony is the lead Microsoft Technical Readiness Instructor in Australia for Microsoft Visual Studio and has presented at the Microsoft launch events for both VSTS2005 and VSTS2008. Anthony is a Microsoft MVP (Team System), a Certified Scrum Master and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau. He is also the president of the QLD ALM users group and maintains a blog at http://www.myalmblog.com

I’ve just attended the inaugural meeting of the Team System User Group – Virtual Edition. The TSUG-VE is hosted in SecondLife and uses Livemeeting for demonstrations. I wasn’t sure how the experience would be but I followed the instructions, started up the apps and made my way to the appropriate auditorium on Microsoft Island. I found a seat and oriented my avatar towards the screen so I could watch the meeting get underway.

Here’s a screenshot of the stage area in SecondLife with our hosts [Chewing Glas](http://phacker.wordpress.com/) and Daven Finesmith.

SecondLife is great for the social interaction but not so good for doing demos and showing Visual Studio in all its glory. This problem has been solved by running a LiveMeeting session simultaneously and simply ALT-TABing between the apps when the presenters mention they are moving to Livemeeting or SecondLife.

Here’s a screenshot showing the Livemeeting experience during the user group. At normal size, the screen is quite clear and easy to read during the demos.

In summary, the experience of attending a virtual user group was much easier than I expected. The switching between the applications wasn’t a problem and so long as I kept the SL window maximised I could hear everything that was going on without a problem. I’d have to say that I was very happy with the overall experience and rate the meeting as a big success.

And finally…. Great work to both Paul and Dave for getting this idea off the ground. (and for making the timeslot Australian friendly, even if by accident)

Fellow Team System MVPs Paul Hacker and Dave McKinstry are kicking off a new TFS user group on the 18th September (SLT) and you’re all invited! The user group is the first virtual user group focused on VSTS/TFS and the meeting takes place online in Second Life. This means you can attend no matter where you live.

NOTE: Before the meeting, you should follow the instructions on the http://www.tsug-ve.com/ website and install both the Second Life software and Microsoft Live Meeting. The user group will use both products during each virtual meeting.

For Australian readers, the meeting time is Friday 19th September;
  11:00am Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra
  10:30am Adelaide, Darwin
  09:00am Perth

For all the details about the Team System Users Group (TSUG) Virtual Edition (VE), visit http://www.tsug-ve.com/

In the exhibitors hall

Friday 5th Sept was the final day of TechEd and I spent most of the day manning the Portal Synergy stand with my co-director, Peter Ward. It was great to spend some time in the exhibition hall and it was a great opportunity to meet lots of people and chat about all things VSTS & Sharepoint. We were giving away a free XBox 360 to one lucky person who put their business card in the fish bowl. The lucky winner was a guy from the Sunshine state who managed to win not only our XBox but a 22″ LCD TV from one of the other vendors as well! I’m sure he will have fond memories of TechEd 2008. Here’s a photo of Peter and I at the stand.

(Click Photo to enlarge)

Delivering my ILL

Between 11:30am and 1:00pm I presented an Instructor Led Lab (ILL). This was the same ILL I presented at TechEd Developer in Orlando back in July so I didn’t need to do any prep work prior to delivering it. There were around 42 computers in the lab and we ended up having to turn about a dozen attendees away once we were full. The session went well and was the highest rating ILL in the Developer Tools and Languages track, the 4th highest ILL overall and the 2nd highest rating for speaker effectiveness. I think the good results came from the fact I finally relaxed and had a couple of good lab proctors.

Post TechEd Speaker Party

After TechEd wrapped up, Andrew Coates hosted a speaker party in his recently renovated home. It was great to be able to catch up with other speakers in a relaxed environment knowing there were no more talks to do the following day. A big thanks to Mr & Mrs Coatsie for organising the party.