There have been a few discussions (Eg. Brian Harry, Martin Woodward, MSDN Forums) and even a session devoted to the topic at our recent TechEd Australia (Mitch Denny). As the title of this post highlights, I’m talking about Branching in TFS.

A scan through my RSS feeds this morning reminded me that Michael Ruminer posted a good concise blog post on this topic last week entitled “Recommendations in SCM Branching Patterns in TFS.” It’s well worth a quick read. We are in the middle of a discussion on this very topic at I client site I am consulting at. Thanks Michael for adding to my side of the argument

 

I took the opportunity last night at the Wardy IT Community Dinner to announce the VSTSTechBrekkie series. Before I get into the details, let me say a big thanks to Peter Ward for running these great monthly get togethers for the local Brisbane IT community.

Now onto the VSTSTechBrekkie series…

The VSTSTechBrekkie series is a series of free breakfast presentations held on each Friday in October in Brisbane. The goal of the VSTSTechBrekkie series is to bring together those people with an interest in VSTS and discuss how we can “get down to business” with this product set. During the series of four presentations we will focus on best practices for using VSTS/TFS, how to ensure a successful migration to TFS and we’ll introduce the soon to be released Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals product.

Local community members, Greg Low, Charles Sterling and I will present these hour long informative sessions from 8am to 9am each Friday during October and a light breakfast of coffee and croissants will be available from 7:30am.

I will also take this opportunity to thank Microsoft for allowing the use of their facilities to run the events, Chuck for helping get the event off the ground and for agreeing to present one of the sessions, Greg Low for his encouragement and agreeing to be a speaker and Breeze Training for volunteering to pickup the breakfast tab.

To find out more about the VSTSTechBrekkie series, please visit www.vststechbrekkie.com

Following on from the latest release of the TFS Power Toys yesterday, Rob Caron let’s us know that there is a new Forum available to discuss issues and provide feedback on the Power Toys. The MSDN Forums are a great place to ask questions and share experiences with people.

Check out all the Visual Studio Team System forums.

A couple of days ago Brian Harry posted that the new TFS Power Toys were due for release very soon. Well true to his word, he has just posted the news that the New TFS Power Toys are available for download now.

As part of this Power Toy release, we also get the great news that the TFS MSSCCI provider is now officially supported by Microsoft! This will make the MSSCCI provider a lot more palatable for large corporate organisations that are often unwilling to introduce unsupported applications and utilities into their environment.

One of my favourite features of the new release of the Power Toys has to be the TreeDiff which allows you to easily compare to directory trees, highlight the differences and resolve them. This release also sees the Power Toys become available as separate downloads instead of requiring you to download the entire VS SDK.

Download the new tfpt.msi file (946kb) from the Microsoft Download Center.

 

 

A couple of things caught my eye this morning as I read through my RSS feeds. I’m blogging about these as they have particular relevance to the work I am currently doing, especially the doco on configuring TFS to work with HTTPS/SSL. 

1. Brian Harry has posted a word document entitled “Golden Rules for developing TFS client applications” which contains some helpful advice. Thanks for posting this.
2. Susan (VSTS User Education) let’s us know that there is New and updated content is live on MSDN!.
   “This content includes (but isn’t limited to) new content on customizing process templates, configuring Team Foundation Server to work with HTTPS and SSL, and improved and expanded troubleshooting topics, all of which we know have been highly requested.”

 

I am happy to announce today that I will be delivering the VSTS Kickstart training series in New Zealand at the end of next month in association with Auldhouse Computer Training.

The venues and dates are as follows;

• Auckland 24th-25th October
• Wellington 26th-27th October
• Christchurch 30th-31st October
  View Schedule

For anyone keen to see what Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server can do for your organisation make sure you come along. The VSTS KickStart event is designed to kickstart you into VSTS and as such, it covers a very broad range of VSTS/TFS topics in a short period of time. The workshop includes both seminar style lectures and hands on lab exercises as well. To view an outline of the VSTS Kickstart workshop, download the outline from the Auldhouse Computer Training website here. (pdf format)

During my visit to New Zealand I am also hoping to be able to visit the local .NET user groups in each of these cities to deliver a VSTS session so please keep an eye on the NZ .NET User Groups web site for the details soon.

Stay tuned for more news soon…

While not really fitting into the VSTS/TFS subject, I can’t help but let people know that Vista RC1 has finally been released. I installed the pre-RC1 release last week and I was very impressed with the progress the team has made with this product. I had my favourite virtualisation software and VSTS installed in no time flat. Looks like I get to do it all again tomorrow.

As I type this, Vista Build 5600.16384 is being downloaded.

I just wanted to let readers know that after a recent upgrade from Community Server 2.0 to 2.1, I am having a few issues involving URLMapping and broken links. I will hopefully resolve this in the next 24 hours between work engagements

 [UPDATE: Links and site should be working fine now. Please let me know if you run into any issues with the site.]

Thanks

Anthony

I just wanted to say a big thanks to the folks down at the Gold Coast .NET User’s Group for their hospitality last night as Shea and I presented “A Day in the life of a VSTS Developer”. Micheal Rees kindly kicked off the first meeting to be held at the Griffith University campus and the venue was perfect for a nice informal user group get together.

I would also like to thank Shea who did an outstanding job driving the laptop and getting our demos running and of course who could forget to mention Chuck would braved the rainy weather to bring pizza and soft drink to the hungry audience.

   

Hopefully everyone enjoyed the night and managed to get a better understanding of some of the many great features that VSTS offers a .NET developer in their day to day work.