The VSTS team has been busy with an updated release of the TFS Powertools. This release (Sept 07) is the final power tool release for the TFS 2005 platform and includes the following two new features;

• TFS Work Item Templates

  • Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer (TfsBpa) The Team Foundation Server BPA is a diagnostic tool that performs the following functions:

  • Gathers configuration information from a Team Foundation Server deployment

    • Performs specific tests on the Team Foundation Server deployment
      • Analyzes the collected information according to specific rules and reports the findings as information, warning, or error messages
        • Provides links to articles to resolve warning and error messages</ul> Check out Brian Harry’s blog post for all the details

        http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/09/29/september-tfs-power-tools-released.aspx

This morning I had the pleasure of presenting a session for the Canberra VSTS Users group. It was great to see so many VSTS enthusiasts together and I hope everyone enjoyed the session. I just wanted to share a little bit of information about the session and some of the key messages I shared with the user group.

Topic selection

Firstly, Grant suggested the group would enjoy a talk on Process Template and Work Item customisation. This is a technical session I have delivered many times over the past two years but this time I wanted to deliver something a little different. Basically the session in the past has been a walk through of the XML files, a look at the process template editor (PTE) and a discussion about what you can do.

So why make this session different?

This was OK when there wasn’t much information available on the topic now there is a wealth of great articles on the MSDN site. Check them out here;

• Customizing Work Item Types on Team Foundation Server
• Customizing Process Templates

What I have found in my consulting work is that often a client tells me they want me to customise the pocess template and create/modify some of the work item types. I tell them this is not a problem at all and then ask them exactly what they would like changed…. This is where this gets difficult. Quite often a client simply doesn’t know what they can change and what benefits can be realised by making the changes.

A session more on WHAT & WHY, then just HOW

In doing some research on a What & Why type session I remembered Jeff Beehler’s great presentation (DEV336) at TechEd in Orlando earlier this year. After an email to clarify a couple of minor points, I had a great deck wth some fantastic examples of “What and Why” Microsoft customise much of their TFS implimentation.

If you can get you hands on the TechEd 2007 US DVD’s make sure you spend some time watching Jeff’s session. It is “DEV336 – Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (Part 2 of 2): Customizing Team Foundation Server for Application Lifecycle Management”

 

Mitch Denny pinged me last Friday to say that he has managed to work out how to get Team Build 2005 building .NET 3.5 applications. Mitch has posted this now on the TFS Now blog. Well worth a look if this is something you are needing to do. I’m keen to have a look at this myself for use on some of the .NET 3.5 applications I’m working on for the Windows Server 2008 Developer Essentials course.

 

While off the topic of this blog, I still wanted to share news of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 Developer Essentials Microsoft Partner Readiness training I will be delivering in the next couple of months.

Back in June I posted about this on TechTalkBlogs and while some of the dates have changed a little the event is starting to gain quite a bit of interest from the Australian developer community.

Here are the details;

Overview:

This two-day technical readiness event is designed to introduce developers to many of the new features of Windows Server 2008.  As Microsoft prepares to release the most advanced version of their server platform ever, now is the time to start learning how to use many of the great enhancements in the applications you write and deploy. Learn how Windows Server 2008 provides a compelling application foundation and makes huge leaps forward in the area of Microsoft’s DSI (Distributed Systems Initiative) and DFO (Design for Operations).

 

Price:     $790 ex GST

 

Audience:

This event is specifically focused on .NET developers that write applications to run on the Microsoft Windows Server platform. The hands on exercises in this course will require familiarity with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and either Visual Basic .NET or C#.

Prerequisites:

Attendees are expected to be familiar with Microsoft’s current server platform and be familiar with developing applications that run on these platforms using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Format:

This event is delivered as approximately 30% instructor delivery and 70% hands on lab exercises.

 

Topics:

During this 2 day course, developers will cover get hands on experience in the following areas;

·         Introduction to the Windows Server 2008 Application Platform

·         How to leverage the many new features and improvements in Internet Information Server 7.0

·         Developing custom modules and handlers for Internet Information Server 7.0

·         How to use Microsoft Management Console 3.0 to create standard administrative interfaces for your application

·         How to use the new Transactional NTFS capabilities in your application

·         Creating custom cmdlets for PowerShell

·         Improving your application’s reliability

·         Windows Eventing 6.0 & Performance Counters

·         Windows Communication Foundation

·         Windows Workflow Foundation

·         Windows CardSpace

 

Microsoft Partners can find out more information and register at the following address.

https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=188499&linvitation

Jeff Beehler announced this morning that the first public CTP release of Rosario is now available for download. For those of you not familiar with the name “Rosario”, it is the version of Team System that follows Visual Studio Team System 2008.

Make sure you visit the Rosario web page on MSDN to get the run down on what’s planned for Rosario. One of the first features I’m really looking forward to is Hierarchical Work Items (parent/child relationships between work items).

I was lucky enough to have a peak at some of the features of Rosario during the MVP Summit earlier this year and it looks great!

I’ve blogged about this a couple of times recently (1,2)and now it is finally available for general download! This is a must have addition to all Team Foundation Server installations.

Read about this release in more detail on Brian Harry’s blog post and download the Powertool here.

Note: Before you can download this, you must be able to say “Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access” five times fast! 

While I downloaded the TFS 2008 Beta 2 iso over the weekend, it wasn’t until today that I have had a chance to do the installation. Armed with the Beta 2 Installation guide I was ready to install my first Team Foundation Server 2008 Beta 2 server.

Here’s how my installation went.

1. I started with a fresh Windows Server 2003 build that I created by following Grant Holliday’s great scripts. In no time the server was on the domain and ready to continue.
2. My first step involved updating the SQL ini file as directed in the TFS installation guide. This was pretty easy and I made the following changes;
   • Added my name & company details to the top of the file
   • I kept the default instancename of “MSSQLServer”
   • I set the username and password for the various SQL components
     
3. I then installed SQL 2005 SP2 using the snippet from Grant’s script
4. Next was installing the QFE KB925673 for MSXML 6.0 Parser from the TFS installation media
   “D:TFSMSXML 6.0 KBmsxml6-KB925673-enu-x86.exe” /q
5. I decided to use WSS 3.0 which can be installed automatically during the TFS installation so there were no more prerequisite steps before moving onto the TFS setup.
6. The first thing you’ll notice with the new TFS setup.exe installer is a completely new UI
   
7. I selected “Team Foundation Server” and clicked the Install button
8. The install wizard asked the usual questions with a couple of new questions thrown in such as a wizard page to allow you to enter a named instance for your TFS database.
   
9. For the TFS service accounts, I selected the built-in NETWORK SERVICE account for this installation. I’ll investigate other options for a domain account another time.
10. I used my pre-created reporting services account when prompted.
11. The next page of the wizard was another new screen that provided options for installing WSS 3.0 on the server or point to an existing WSS 3.0 installation. I went with the default option to install WSS 3.0 on the local machine and provided an appropriate service account for WSS.
    
12. After the Confirm installation options page, the next page had a surprise as Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 was installed along with WSS 3.0 and then TFS.
    
13. A quick backup of the SQL Reporting Services encryption key and a check of the security settings and this part was all done…

Well that was all very straight forward and I must say, *so* much nicer than installing pre-release versions of TFS 2005 🙂

Now, after dinner it’s time to install the TFS Build Agent and then a new VS2008 Team Suite client.

Remember – If you simply want to evaluate Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and Team Foundation Server 2008 Beta 2, you can download a completely installed and configured VPC image from the MSDN web site using these links.

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Team Suite Beta 2 VPC
  • Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Team Suite & Team Foundation Server Beta 2 VPC

Well the blogosphere’s already running hot (Soma, Rob, Scott to name a few) with the news that Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is now downloadable.

The highly anticipated Beta 2 release is significant for a number of reasons including a Go-Live license that will be important for many. I’m sure everyone will be busy blogging about what they find over the coming weeks.

Plenty to download

MSDN Subscriber downloads shows lots of options for downloading. There goes my bandwidth for the day…

 

New Names

The following table shows the new names for many of the 2008 versions of VSTS products. (From Rob’s blog)

Visual Studio 2005	Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio Team System	Visual Studio Team System 2008
Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Team Suite
Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Architecture Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Development Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Test Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Database Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Team Foundation Server
Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent	Visual Studio Team System 2008 – Test Load Agent

TSS put me onto a comment reply on Scott Guthrie’s blog where he states “You’ll see Beta2 ship later this week – so only a few more days now.” He made the comments on 23rd July so that means it should only be a few more days now 🙂

On related news, Brian Harry just announced “.. we signed off on the release of the first CTP for our Rosario release of VSTS”. Read his blog post A Rosario Milestone for more information.

I happened across the news this morning that Microsoft have shipped the first Service Release for Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals!

The download (9.5Mb) is available from the Microsoft website at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9810808c-9248-41a5-bdc1-d8210a06ed87&displaylang=en