I’ve had a few people email me following the final VSTSTechbrekkie asking if the slides and links are available for download anywhere. Well I’m happy to say “Yes they are!”.

Visit the Links page on the VSTSTechBrekkie site and you will see links to download all four slide decks as well as a list of links submitted by the presenter of each session.

While on the subject of the VSTSTechBrekkies, I should also remind people that there are still a few spots on the afternoon Hands on Lab session if you are interested. There is no cost for attending and you can register at http://www.vststechbrekkie.com/HOLRegistration.aspx. The spots will be allocated on a first come basis.

The Hands on Labs are running on Friday 10th November at New Horizons in Brisbane. A great big thanks to New Horizons for kindly providing the training room for our use!

One of the things that has caught my eye this morning is the DevDiv Hotfix Public Availability Pilot Program which is an initiative by the Microsoft developer devision guys to help make the VS2005 hotfixes more generally available. By available I don’t just mean you can now download them without going through the old process, but now you can simply learn that the hotfixes exist and apply them if needed. A big thumbs up to the guys for getting this setup and available for us!

Check out the hotfixes available now at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/content/content.aspx?ContentID=3705

• Note 1: Make sure you read the warnings on the site and read the associated KB article completely before trying to install each hotfix. Remember – if it’s not broken don’t much with it!

• Note 2: The first lot of Hotfixes on the site aren’t required if you are running the VS2005 SP1 beta

The Microsoft Technical Readiness team are running an advanced level 300/400 VSTS course in Sydney and Melbourne in November and there are still a number of seats available. The training covers 12 modules and includes detailed lab exercises covering things such as customising the process template, creating check-in policies and implimenting continuous integration to name just a few.

The dates for the current events are;

• Sydney 14th to 17th November
• Melbourne 21st to 24th November

The four day event costs just AUD$878.90 inc GST. (For this level training you would expect to pay over $2k, so it’s exceptional value as well!)

To find out more about the event and to register, visit the Microsoft Events website

 Expect to see dates for other capital cities in the New Year.

Well the VSTSTechBrekkie Series has nearly come to an end with only the Hands On Lab day to go on the 10th November. This morning, Chuck and Marty rounded out the presentations with an informative session focusing on driving up quality using the testing capabilities built into VSTS. Around 50 attendees filed into the Microsoft theatre for the brekkie session which was a great way to finish off the current round of presentations.

 

The Hands on Lab day sessions are filling fast so if you want to come along and get some hands on experience using VSTS, simply register on the VSTSTechBrekkie site.

Last Friday we had William Bartholomew come along and present a session entitled “End to end build automation with VSTS”. This was our biggest turnout yet with nearly 60 people coming along to our third VSTSTechBrekkie session. William presented an informative session with the slides and links now available in the links page on the VSTSTechBrekkie website. A big thanks to William and to everyone that come along to share and contribute to Brisbane’s growing VSTS community. Don’t forget our fourth and final VSTSTechBrekkie session on Friday 27th October. Charles and Marty will be presenting a session on “Best Practices – Driving up quality using VSTS (Test & Build)”

 

One of the third party addons for TFS that I find particularly useful is BizDev’s TeamPlain web access. I’ve been a fan of this since it’s early beta days and it fills a large gap in TFS by providing a good web interface into many of the VSTS/TFS features.

I noticed on the TeamPlain blog this morning that version 1.1 is now available for download at http://www.devbiz.com/down.aspx?f=TeamPlain-Web-1.1.msi&v=1.1.2482

The TeamPlain website hasn’t been updated yet with news of what ‘s in this new release but it should be updated very soon. I’m off to do an update now to see what I can find!

Keep up the good work Hakan and the BizDev team

I read a post this morning from Naren where he talks about deleting workitems. As he states this is a topic/request that repeatedly comes up in forums, blogs and training sessions and I have lost track of the number of times I have been asked about deleting workitems myself. While there is no technical way to delete work items BY DESIGN, there are a few things you can do to achieve a similar outcome.

Naren makes mention of a solution that Richard Berg offered whereby you simply Deny permission to everyone on the workitem. While this will incur the very small cost of disk space over time, it ensures the workitems don’t appear in any queries or reports. Worth a quick read!

The second session in the VSTSTechBrekkie series has now been and gone and we saw a good turn out of nearly 50 people turn up to listen to Greg Low talk about Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. Greg provided a good overview of some of the features in Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals and walked us through a number of demonstrations on how to use the product. Currently in CTP5 release, it is expected to ship before the end of the year.

 

The next session sees William Bartholomew present on “End to end build automation using Team Build”. There are still some spare spots if you want to come along. It is running on Friday 20th October at 7:30am at the Microsoft office in Brisbane. Simply register at www.vststechbrekkie.com

One of the things I was eager to do this weekend was to download and install the Vista RC2 release (build 5744). I’ve documented my experiences below as I rebuild my laptop and you’ll see I have an interest in Microsoft developer tools .

Installation

I fired up my Toshiba Tecra M3 laptop and booted straight to the RC2 DVD. Microsoft has really done a great job on the installation now and I am pretty sure that every install I have done (Beta1->CTPs->Beta2->RC1->RC2) is getting faster and more troublefree as you would expect as the product nears release. RC2 asked the usual questions and was fully installed in approximately 30 minutes. My 16 month old lappie achieves a Windows Experience Index of 3.3 which means I get the Aero GUI enhancements!

AntiVirus – AVG7.5 rocks! (well sort of)

One of my main pain points previously since RC1 was getting reliable Anti-virus installed and running. As an AVG (www.grisoft.com) fan, I had unreliable experiences trying to run AVG7.1 on RC1 and eventually removed it altogether. I must say, today’s experience could not have gone better . I downloaded and installed the latest AVG 7.5 Professional version (trial) and the install was quick and painless. During installation I checked for updates and it reported, downloaded and installed the update without any problems at all.

[Update: My joy was short-lived… After two reboots while I installed other software, I received an error message saying “Could not initialize AVG Anti-Virus Kernel interface”. On the next reboot this error was gone again . I’ve just done a full scan to test things and it appears to be working OK. Not sure what gives with this one at the moment but it appears intermittently on startup now.]

VMWare Workstation 5.5.2

Yes that’s right. I am a VMWare fan as well. I ran the VMWare Workstation 5.5.2 install and it went nice and smoothly through the entire process, not even troubling me for a reboot at the end! When I ran the application for the first time, Vista warms you that an unrecognised application is trying to run but a quick click confirms that you trust VMWare and away you go. (FYI – I use VMWare to host a full Windows 2003 Server R2 virtual machine running Microsoft Team Foundation Server for presenting demonstrations at user groups etc and it runs quite reasonably. Note: 2Gb RAM)

Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite

The VS2005 Team Suite installation went like clockwork up until the SQL Server 2005 Express install which warned that you need to install the (currently unavailable) Service pack 2 before you can run SQL Server 2005 Express on Vista. I clicked continue to proceed with the installation and hopefully the SQL Server SP isn’t too far away.

Office 2007 Beta

The Office Beta was painless and I installed the Professional version without any hiccups at all. I installed the Office 2007 Beta Technical Refresh and again I had no issues to report.

Mounting ISO images

I Googled used Goggle to do a quick search and came across a blog post that talked about using MagicISO to mount ISO’s in Vista and how the author had it working with Vista Build 5536. I installed it and then installed MagicDisc as well. Unfortunately I did not have the same success than Rich spoke about in his post and I can’t seem to remove them cleanly either . [Update – cleaned them off now]

I have been a Daemon Tools fan for quite a while but have had issues with this product on previous Vista releases. I still needed to mount an ISO so I checked the Daemon Tools site and YIPPEE!!! A new release (4.0.6) which claims full support for Vista. Ok let’s run this puppy and see what happens…

OK.. Well it looks like Daemon Tools 4.0.6 does what it’s supposed to do and I’ve mounted an ISO and I’m installing the Team Explorer (Team Foundation Server Client) from the mounted ISO image now .

Team Explorer

The Team Explorer install went well from the mounted ISO image (see last point). I have connected to my Team Foundation Server running inside VMWare Workstation and this install seems to have been a success. 

In Summary

Overall the installation experience was pleasant and successful. Now all I need to do is resolve these two annoying startup issues…

NOTE – I haven’t started searching for any answers yet so fingers crossed  the answers are out there and not too far away.

Well the first session of the VSTSTechBrekkie series is over now and there’s only 3 more to go   We had around 45-50 people turn up for the session which is fantastic considering the size of the Brisbane VSTS developer community.

Unfortunately I managed to completely botch up my session timings and had to chop over half my content to fit into the hour timeslot but I will arrange a session sometime in the near future for people wishing to see the rest of the session. (Future session will look at Custom check-in policies, code review workflow and work item customisation)

One of the demonstrations I did manage to get through within the time was a brief look at stpSoft’s “stpBA Storyboarding for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System“. This addon for Microsoft Visio offers some fantastic  functionality for producing screen flow diagrams, HTML storyboards and much more. Best of all it fully integrates with Team System to produce task work items with attached specifications from your storyboard. Well worth a look at the 30 day trial.

 
Photos: Getting Ready…. and Underway

The next session (13th October) is Greg Low presenting “Introduction to Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals“. For more details and to register, please see www.vststechbrekkie.com