Today was the Microsoft Heros Happen Here product launch in Sydney and I had the honour of presenting the “Visual Studio 2008 and Application Lifecycle Management” session.

Most of the features I covered in the session are built into the product naturally but here’s a few of the links I promised I would blog about.

• Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image (Trial)
  • Martin Woodward’s Build Wallboard sample</ul> At the time of writing the trial VPC that is currently downloadable is due to expire on 1st April 2008. There is a new VPC due in the next couple of weeks that will have a 6 month trial period and include sample data and a number of hands on labs to help you learn more about VSTS. Well worth keeping an eye out for.

  The Australian launch events will run over the next five weeks and finish just in time for me to head over to Seattle for the MVP Summit in early April. If you’re planning on attending the event in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane or Canberra, be sure to come up and say G’day.

  Tonight I’m lucky enough to be off for an influencers dinner with Steve Riley to round out a fantastic day.

I read with interest a post on Rob Caron’s blog entitled New Team System Blogfather! I must admit that I’ve sorely missed the information that Rob shared with the VSTS community in his previous position. Rob’s blog was an invaluable resource especially in the early years of VSTS. Proof of this was the honorary title of “The Blogfather of VSTS” which was how he was described in a TechTalk interview back in December 2005. Things on Rob’s blog haven’t been quite the same due to his promotion into a different role back in September 06.

The New Blogfather of VSTS

Rob has officially passed on the title of Team System Blogfather to none other than our very own Charles “Chuck” Sterling who has recently returned to Seattle after a 7 year stay here in Australia. Chuck’s been my local Microsoft DPE for years and was instrumental in helping me get the QLD VSTS Users Group up and running. All those times he did the hour long commute from the Gold Coast to Brisbane for a 7:30am start were *very* much appreciated.

Anyway, being crowned the new Team System Blogfather is some big shoes to fill but Chuck’s got the passion and enthusiasm to do it!

While not exactly a topic for a VSTS-focused blog I couldn’t help but help spread the word that Windows Server 2008 has been released to manufacture! TFS can of course be installed on Window Server 2008 and the installation guide includes all the steps you need for this.

In addition to my work with VSTS I am also the lead Microsoft Technical Readiness Instructor in Australia for Windows Server 2008:Developer and Architecture so this is something that interests me quite a lot.

Read about the release on the Windows Server Division blog.

• Vista SP1 is due to RTM *very* soon now as well.

This two-day partner technical readiness event is designed to introduce developers to many of the new features in Visual Studio 2008. Now that Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008, it is time to start learning how to use these great enhancements in the applications you write and deploy. Learn how Visual Studio 2008 provides a compelling development environment for building rich client and web applications.

Topics include

• Introducing VS2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
• What’s new in the languages? Visual Basic 9.0 & C# 3.0
• A closer look at what’s new in .NET Framework 3.5
• Introduction to .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
• Building Web Applications with VS2008
• Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX
• WCF Web-Centric Capabilities in Visual Studio 2008
• Introduction to Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0

Course Format

This course is presented with an equal mix of classroom presentations and hands-on lab exercises.

Prerequisite

• As a prerequisite of this course, students *must* already be working with Visual Studio 2005.

Dates and locations

Sydney	25 & 26 February
Melbourne	5 & 6 March
Perth	17 & 18 March
Canberra	31 March & 1 April
Brisbane	7 & 8 April

Price

$ 790 ex GST

Registration

Register on the Microsoft Events site at
https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=356298&linvitation

Upgrade your skills in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server to the latest 2008 release during this one-day hands-on event.

This course focuses specifically on the changes and enhancements between the 2005 and 2008 versions of Visual Studio Team System & Team Foundation Server. By attending this event you can be sure you’re taking advantage of all the new features right from the outset!

Some of the topics being covered in this course include:

• Code Metrics and hotpathing – make your code run like its never run before!
• Performance baselining and changes to the Code Analysis rules
• Changes in Team Build – CI, Scheduling, Build Definitions
• Web test recorder support for AJAX and Javascript
• Improved load test result management and load modelling
• Improvements to the installation and deployment of Team Foundation Server
• and much more…

Prerequisite

• As a prerequisite of this course, students *must* already be working with VSTS2005 & TFS2005.

Dates and locations

Sydney	29 February
Melbourne	7 March
Perth	20 March
Canberra	3 April
Brisbane	4 April

Price

$ 395 ex GST

Registration

Register on the Microsoft Events site at
https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=688714&linvitation

Good friend and fellow Team System MVP Grant Holliday has been busy of late putting together a create community site to share Build recipes including MSBuild and Team Build scripts.

From the website…

“As a Build Master you’ve been put in charge of coming up with a central build system for your team. It can be quite daunting at first and you wonder “Where do I start?”.
The purpose of this site is to create and share build recipes with other build masters so that we can all learn and benefit from each other’s experience.
Since the site is called TFSBuild.com, there is a particular focus on MSBuild and Team Foundation Build scripts. But if you have a NAnt script or similar that you think others might find useful post it up.
The site is published as a wiki and the idea is that anybody can register to add & update content.”

Grant also talks about what led to the creation of this site and what he hopes it will turn into on his blog – TFSBuild.COM build recipes launched.

Check it out TFSBuild.com now at http://www.tfsbuild.com

Now that the TFS media is starting to show up in our MSDN subscriptions and product keys are orderable, many sites will need to know how to upgrade from the TFS2008 trial version they have been using to the full release.

For details on how to upgrade, check out Brian Harry’s blog post on How do I upgrade to TFS 2008?

 

The New Year is off to a great start with an email from Microsoft congratulating me on receiving the Microsoft MVP award for 2008. This is my second year as an MVP and I’m looking forward to being even more active in the VSTS community during 2008.

The official launch of Visual Studio 2008 is only a couple of months away and I’m getting ready to present the following session at the Wave Launch events around the country.

Visual Studio 2008 and Application Lifecycle Management

Managing the Application Development Lifecycle complexity is always a challenge and Visual Studio 2008 Team System picks up where Visual Studio 2005 left off and provides development teams with sophisticated tracking, profiling, analysis, configuration, testing and work load profiling tools.

The tools and procedures provided by Team System are essential to ensuring teams operate productively and that solutions are well designed and released on time with a consistent high quality metric.

Dates and Venues

• Thursday 28 February – Sydney
• Tuesday 4 March – Melbourne
• Thursday 13 March – Adelaide
• Wednesday 19 March – Perth
• Wednesday 26 March – Brisbane
• Wednesday 2 April – Canberra

As they have with previous versions, Microsoft has released pre-configured Virtual PC images (VPC’s) with trial versions of the recently released Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008. These VPC’s are a great way to evaluate the new and enhanced features available in these new versions without the headache of installing and configuring the software.

You can download two different VPC’s depending on your needs from the Microsoft download site using the following links

• Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image (Trial)

(7 part download ~4.4Gb)

• Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server VPC Image (Trial)

(4 part download ~2.6Gb)

NOTE – Both virtual machine images are set to expire on 1st April 2008.

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 Team System about a month ago, many people have been busily installing or upgrading their development machines and TFS servers. One thing that we have been eagerly awaiting is an update to the TFS Power Tools to offer full support for VSTS 2008.

Well the good news is the team have managed to get the updated version out the door before Christmas. Not only are our favourite tools and check-in policies available for our use, but they have managed to include a number of new tools such as “Find in Source Control”, “Quick label” and a “Build Notification” tool.

Download the VSTS 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools (~6.5Mb)

Remember – If you want to install the Best Practises Analyzer, you’ll need to download Powershell if it is not already on your machine. Don’t worry too much about this as the installer will detect if Powershell is missing and give you a download link you can easily use.

If you’re not using VSTS 2008 yet, you can still access download the VSTS 2005 Team Foundation Server Power Tools.