Thursday (4th) was a big day for me with two breakout sessions scheduled for the day.

Breakout #1 – Rosario Architecture Edition

My first breakout saw me team up with William Bartholomew from Technology One in Brisbane to deliver a session on the upcoming Rosario Architecture Edition. Presenting a 8:30am session is a tough call but when the topic is Architecture, it makes things even tougher. William did a great job running through the new UML diagrams and the Architecture Explorer that will be available in Rosario. I had the pleasure of showing a few post-Rosario April CTP changes including the new Layer Diagram and a few updates to the Architecture Explorer. Make sure you keep your eyes open for the next Rosario CTP due out around PDC time frame. This will be a significant CTP release with many new and yet-to-be announced features you’ll love.

Here’s a photo of William setting up for our session.

Breakout #2 – ALM with Rosario

My second breakout session kicked off around 3:45pm and was entitled “Application Lifecycle Management with VSTS ‘Rosario’”. This was a repeat of a great session that Sam Guckenheimer did at TechEd Developers in Orlando this year. I was honoured to have been asked to present this session and I hope I managed to present it as well as Sam. After the session there were about 20 people lined up with questions so the level of interest in Rosario is definitely on the rise here in Australia. Boon Tiong was also on-hand with his camera to take a few photos of me presenting.

 

 

Attendee Party Thursday Night

Thursday night was the much anticipated TechEd attendee party which was held in the convention centre itself. I wasn’t very impressed with the TechEd party in Sydney a couple of years ago and this year things were definitely better. For me the party is all about catching up with friends and finding out what everyone’s been up to. Given both my breakouts were over and I only had one more session to deliver the next day, I was finally able to start relaxing and chatting with friends. Here’s a photo of a few of us at the party.

Wednesday (3rd) was the first full day of TechEd Australia following registration and the Welcome party the night before.

This year was the first year we have had something called the MVP Theatre which MVP Leads, Rose and Nick created to allow MVP’s to present sessions of their choosing to small, interested groups of attendees. The theatre was located in the exhibition hall and had seating for only 30 people. This was a nice convenient size when compared to some of the much larger rooms used for breakout sessions.

MVP Theatre Session #1 – VSTS Tricks and Tips from VSTS MVPs

For my first session, I chose to present a short 20 minute session of Tricks and Tips from VSTS MVPs. Fellow MVP, Brian Randell, had a great idea to ask each Team System MVP to submit a powerpoint file with a single trick or tip from their experience in the field. His plan is to combine the slides for a session at PDC. With his permission, I ran through the slide deck in my first MVP theatre session and shared as many of the tips as I could with the audience in the time allowed.

Here’s a photo of me presenting my first MVP theatre session. Notice the fashionable lab coat I was wearing 🙂

(Click photo to enlarge)

MVP Theatre Session #2 – Making TFS Scrum-tastic with Lightweight Scrum Template

For my second MVP theatre session, I joined forces with James Brett from ScrumMaster.com.au to discuss the benefits of using Scrum and how you can use the Light Weight Scrum 2.1 for TFS 2008 template from CodePlex to bring Scrum to TFS. Good friend and fellow MVP, Mike Azocar, presented a similar session at TechEd Developers in the US earlier in the year and I was lucky enough to be able to have attended the session. Mike is one of the main contributor’s behind the Light Weight Scrum 2.1 for TFS 2008 template and has a number of YouTube videos on the topic as well.

Last week I was busy with TechEd Australia and while it would have made more sense to blog about the event in real-time, there simply wasn’t enough time. I have decided to try something a little unorthodox and blog about things a week later. Why not? 🙂

So the first two days before the official TechEd start were spent delivering a pre conference event entitled “Building quality .NET 3.5 applications using Visual Studio Team System 2008”. While the title was rather long and unwieldy, it was an accurate and descriptive title so I went with it. The Microsoft Readiness team set the capacity for this event at 40 people and it was fully booked out a few weeks before the event which is a good sign. My good friend and fellow MVP, Boon Tiong Lim made the trip over from Singapore to be my lab assistant as 40 people is a bit much to handle on your own.

The level of interest from class was fantastic and this interest led to many questions over the two days. As an instructor it was difficult to balance the number of questions with the amount of content I was planning on delivering over the two days. I kept asking myself if answering everyone’s questions offered better value than making sure I covered as much of the material as I could. In the end I chose to answer as many of the questions as I could and adjust the amount of content accordingly.

Based on the evaluations at the end of the event, the majority of people found the two days to be very valuable. We had a few issues such as catering and a hot room on day one but these were fixed on the second day.

Thanks to everyone who attended and I hope you’re all using new features and techniques you learnt on the course back at your workplace.

Here’s a photo of the group that Boon Tiong took on the second day.

(Click photo to enlarge)

With Service pack 1 for VS2008/TFS2008 & .NET 3.5 shipping a few weeks ago, it’s now the turn of Team System Web Access 2008 to get the SP1 treatment. The team has been busy with a few new things for the SP1 release and I love the fact they have rolled what was previously known as WIWA (Work Item Web Access CTP) into the one product. Only one URL for people to remember 🙂

You can download the TSWA 2008 SP1 at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ECD00BA-972B-4120-A8D5-3D38311893DE

What’s New in TSWA SP1:

• Work item only view for users without a client access license. [Previously known as Work Item Web Access (WIWA) feature]
  • Run a single instance with multiple languages.
    • Create work items with initial values by using a URL.
      • Share ad-hoc work item queries by using a URL.
        • Find and view Shelvesets.
          • Improved work item search syntax. </ul>

Much like Mitch, I am putting the final touches to my presentations and session plans for TechEd Australia in Sydney this coming week. I have a busy week ahead as you can see from the schedule below but there’s still plenty of time for catching up with friends and chatting about all things VSTS, IT and, well, anything really 🙂

MONDAY/TUESDAY:

Present 2-day pre-conference training on “Building quality .NET 3.5 applications using Visual Studio Team System”

WEDNESDAY:

MVP Theatre sessions

TIME	SESSION	DETAILS
15:35-15:55	MVP313	Visual Studio Team System Tips, Tricks Best Practices from VSTS MVPs
16:30-17:15	MVP303	Scrum-tastic Development with Visual Studio Team System and Light Weight Scrum

* Some of my fellow VSTS MVP’s might see their influence in these two topics 🙂

THURSDAY:

Breakout Sessions

TIME	SESSION	DETAILS
08:30-09:45	DEV360	Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” Architecture Edition
15:45-17:00	DEV365	Application Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario”

FRIDAY:

Instructor Led Hands-on Lab

TIME	SESSION	DETAILS
11:30-13:00	DVP06-ILL	Team Development with MS Visual Studio Team System 2008

If you’re heading to TechEd in Sydney, make sure you drop by one of my sessions or come up and say Hi if you see me wandering through the exhibition centre.

Good friend and QVSTSUG vice-president, William Bartholomew has updated the Search Work Items tool to work with both Visual Studio Team System 2005 and 2008. This handy tool allows you to quickly and easily search your work item store to find work items containing the search string. You can find out more about the tool and download the latest release at http://www.codeplex.com/searchworkitems/

Another of William’s recent Codeplex projects is PowerShell Cmdlets for Visual Studio Team System. Well worth a look.

I have recently rebuilt my laptop and as I reinstalled all my applications I took the opportunity to upgrade my anti virus from AVG 7.5 to their latest release v8.0. I installed Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite and then the Team Explorer without any problems. I then went into Team Explorer, clicked Add Server, enter the server name and received the dreaded error TF31002 unable to connect. I checked my account settings, check all the connectivity settings, checked accessing the TFS web services directly in the browser and I couldn’t find the problem. I disabled the Windows Firewall without any joy and then noticed a few people on the web talking about removing McAfee. While I don’t use McAfee it made me look more closely at AVG. I had been using AVG 7.5 for months without any VSTS/TFS related problems so I figured I was on a wild goose chase. How wrong I was.

AVG 8.0 has a component called “Web Shield” with a feature called “Web Protection”. Once I turned this off, I was able to add my TFS server into Team Explorer without any problems at all. I haven’t dug any deeper into this yet and I’m curious to see if I can turn it back on once the server has been added. I just wanted to share this solution now in the hopes I can save someone else the hours I have just lost 🙂

Our next meeting of the Queensland VSTS Users Group, scheduled for 8am tomorrow morning [08/08/08 GMT+10], will be our first meeting to be webcast using Microsoft LiveMeeting and Microsoft Roundtable.

“Scrum: It’s all about Visibility, Honesty, Communication and Self Organisation.”
Presenter: James Brett
Friday 8th August 2008 from 7:30 – 9:00am [GMT+10]
Register to attend at http://qvstsugaugust08.eventbrite.com/
OR Connect using LiveMeeting Now

 

Session Details:
Scrum is a software development framework based on Agile concepts and practices. It concentrates on Visibility and Honesty and has a distinct lack of “Command and Control”.
This session introduces some of the key concepts of Scrum. We will start by looking at what Scrum is, some of its key artifacts and processes and then look at how we can automate some of this using Conchango’s Scrum for Team System.

About the presenter:
James Brett is a Software Development Manager for Maxgaming part of the Tattersalls group of companies based 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.

The July CTP of the Microsoft® Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR has just been released and is available for download now. Gert Drapers, Principal Development Manager – Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals at Microsoft Corp, summarises the most important changes:

• Project upgrade is now in place. For those of you who were kind enough to donate their database projects, thank you!
• Mixed projects are no longer supported, from now on server projects represent only server creatable objects and user objects that need to be deployed to “master”. Another change is that server options will not get deployed; we only validate the settings as pre-requisites for a deployment. As such server options (sp_configure) have been added to the project system.
• The interpreter now understands temporary tables, table variables and select into column sources.
• The Static Code Analysis MSBuild task was added
• XSD Reference user interface support is enable, but it does not yet create XML Schema Collections
• And lots of fixes since CTP14

You can download the CTP from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bb3ad767-5f69-4db9-b1c9-8f55759846ed&displaylang=en

Great job Gert & the team – downloading now 🙂

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The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is being held in Los Angeles from 27th to 30th October this year and I have decided to make this my first PDC experience. As a regular at TechEd in the US and Australia over the past few years, I am looking forward to seeing what makes the PDC conference different.

I’ve been looking at the PDC web site at some of the session titles and so far they look fantastic. While I keep myself across the changes coming up in the next version of Visual Studio Team System, I’m looking forward to seeing the audience reaction to some of the new features coming up that haven’t been publicly announced yet. The VSTS team have been very busy and “Rosario” promises to be a landmark upgrade over the current version.

There are also a number of pre-cons available including one from my good friend and fellow Team System MVP, Brian Randall. His pre-con is “Get more out of Visual Studio Team System 2008“. If you’re interested in learning how to make VSTS rock and you’re planning on heading to PDC then make sure you sign up for this session early.