Its the day after TechEd US and I’m on the plane as I write this post, travelling at 39,000 feet above the Grand Canyon. A nice cloud band running up the centre of the country means I don’t get to see much of this landmark as well as ensuring that I grab the laptop every now and again to make sure it doesn’t jump off the tray table

I’m sitting next to fellow Aussie Martin Granell who is also on his way back home after his first presentation at TechEd US. He had a successful presentation entitled “How to get your grandmother building Missile Defense Systems”. The unusual title alone meant that there was standing room only in the 400+ seat theatre. His session combined DSL Tools, GAT, VSTS, TFS and FXCop to show how these tools can really help in the SDLC. While I didn’t get a chance to see this session personally, I would love to have seen how he managed to get through such a range of tools in the alloted hour timeframe. Maybe I’ll get to see it at TechEd in Australia where he will be presenting it next.

Source Fource The Source Fource team were out and about at TechEd and they were creating quite a bit of interest. Here’s a photo of fellow-Australian and BizTalk MVP Mick Badran and I with Visual Studio Guy and Virtual Labs guy. The following day, SQL Server Gal and MSDN Webcast Guy were walking about but I think that one photo was more than enough. I took the photo only because I knew it would entertain my wife who would have rolled her eyes and mumbled something like “Geek” when she open my email   I also managed to collect all four rubber Source Fource figurines so that will be her next surprise when I line them up above my monitor….

Party Time This year the TechEd party was held at Fenway Park, home of the Boston RedSox. It was an awesome experiece to be able to walk around the outfield of the oldest major league ball park in the US. The history in the place was just amazing and there were staff on hand to explain many of the things so we didn’t miss anything. A number of the RedSox players were also on hand as well. We basically had the run of the park and all the food stalls were open serving up a wide variety of food you’d expect from a ball park. Microsoft arranged a concert in the park featuring the band Train who played a number of their hits from a stage placed infront of the RebSox dugout.

One of the highlights of the party was convincing VSTS MVP, Boon Tiong that the batter actually ran around the outside of the field (not around the diamond) and that the net behind the catcher was there to prevent seagulls from distracting the pitcher 🙂 While I am no expert in Baseball, the rules of the game were completely foreign to a visting Singaporean 🙂

Well TechEd US is over for another year and it was a great event to be part of. This is the second year now that I have weighted up the time off and the travel time to decide if it is worth the trip and both times I haven’t been disappointed. I have the hope that in the next few years it might get back over to the west coast where I might be able to get away with just one flight instead of needing one or more connections within the US.

One of the best things about going to TechEd is the great people you get to meet while you’re there. On my list of things to do at TechEd was to purchase the newly released “Software Engineering with Visual Studio Team System” book from the convention bookshop. As a bonus, Rob Caron arranged a book signing with a group of VSTS authors. Sam Guckenheimer and Juan J. Perez where there to sign my copy of their new book. I about 4 chapters in already and the book is great! It is also appropriate that while I mention Juan, I remind everyone that Personify Design officially launched their TeamLook product at TechEd 2006.

Juan and Sam

Next in the book line, were three of the authors of the Wrox Press book entitled “Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System”. Christopher Bowen, Jean-Luc David and Noah Coad were all on deck signing copies of the book and it was great to meet the team and talk about all things Team System.

Richard Hundhausen rounded out the list of authors lined up for the book signing and he was signing copies of his “Working with Visual Studio 2005 Team System” book. Many TechEd US 2005 attendees will be familiar with Richard’s work as countless copies of his “Introducing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System” book were given away at the event to help promote VSTS & TFS.

The news is about a week old now but in case you missed it, the June CTP release of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK is now available for download from the http://www.vsipmembers.com/ website. The download is about 259Mb and I’m half way through the download as I type this.

During the past few months, I have had several requests from people eager to try out VSTS and TFS. Now that TFS has shipped, people are starting to think much more seriously about what this product can do for them and their organisation. Many of you will remember the VPC image that was available for evaluation around the Beta 3 timeframes but we’ve not seen an update to this in a while.

Rob Caron posted today that the preconfigured VPC image for VSTS and TFS is now available for download from the MSDN Subscriber Download site.

You’ll need to allow a little bit of time for the downloads though. There are two parts you need to download to make up the self extracting RAR file that contains the VPC image.

• VSTSTFSRTM.part1.exe (3815Mb)
• VSTSTFSRTM.part2.exe (630Mb)

Remember the VPC image is for evaluation purposes only.

I’d like to start by welcoming a new member to VSTS. Microsoft have finally taken to wraps off the latest member of the Visual Studio Team System family, Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals. Learn more about this newly announced product from the press release or from Rob Caron’s informative post.

I’ll post more about this as soon as I finish my final MCPD exam in the next couple of days.

This news really caught my eye this morning on the Vertigo Software’s Team System blog… You can now download Microsoft Team Explorer for free and you can use that to interface with CodePlex!

“But the most exciting part of this announcement is that Team Explorer, the essential client-side piece of Team System that installs as a Visual Studio 2005 add-in, is now available for free download! That’s insanely great news! It certainly makes hosting your project on CodePlex a no-brainer. If you already have a Team Edition installed, here’s how to connect to CodePlex right now. “

[From Vertigo Software’s Team System Blog]

As someone that frequently installs, configures and administers TFS servers, the Team Foundation Server Administration Tool v1.0 is an absolutely fantastic tool. I’ve been a big fan of this tool as it passed through beta and I noticed this morning (Rob’s Blog) that the tool has finally been released and is available on the new CodePlex beta site.

While you’re on the site, you might also want to look at MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee”. This allows MSBuild to build assemblies that target version 1.1 of the .NET Framework.

I hit a snag towards the end of last week writing a series of data driven web tests using VSTS. I had decided to use SQL Express to allow me to store the test data in an MDF file in the test project. I recorded a new web test that executed perfectly. I then added the datasource to the webtest and bound the credentials to the appropriate feilds from the datasource. I then added a validation rule and bound the “Find Text” field to the field in the datasource containing the text I wanted to check was on the page. I ran the web test again and everything went exactly as expected.

Then the trouble started. I wanted to bind the “Pass If Text Found” property of the validation rule to a field in the datasource. The properties window only allows you to select True/False meaning you can’t type in the databinding syntax required to read the property value from the datasource. At this point I figured it was time to use the “Generate Code” button on the toolbar to convert the WebTest into code. This happened nice and easily but when I attempted to run the new “code” version of the web test, I received the following error;

“Could not run web test ‘ProfileControlTestCoded2’ on agent ‘vstsclnt’: Could not create instance of class ‘ProfileControlTestCoded2’ :Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. “

This proved to be quite an annoying error that initially I wondered if it was related to my choice of SQL Express for the datasource. There isn’t much documentation around that mentions using SQL Express for your test data.

Anyway, after posting this to the MSDN Forums, Josh Christie (MS) came to the rescue and pointed out this was a code generation bug and that the fix is to simply move the user credentials out of the constructor and into the start of the Run method. Here’s a screenshot showing the fix.

Back in March I delivered a series of VSTS Kickstart Workshops around Australia to Microsoft partners in four of our state capital cities. Since then I have had numerous enquiries asking me if and when I might run these events again.

Well the wait is over. In partnership with my good friends at Breeze Training in Sydney, the VSTS KickStart Workshops are now available to corporate customers in the Asia-Pacific region. The material has been enhanced and updated since March and the content now covers three days rather than two. I guess I should point out that this is a “KickStart” style event and not an in depth look into VSTS/TFS. (It’s only three days after all. ) That being said, I’m happy to customise the content should you have any specific requirements for the workshop.

You can check out the course outline on the Breeze Training portal.