I’ve just finished delivering my “Introduction to Visual Studio Team System” session with the help of friend and “Demo-dolly”, Shea Strickland. A big thanks to Shea for driving the laptop for me while I ranted about the many great features of VSTS. During the session I managed to demonstrate many of the great new source control features in VSTS/TFS and managed to fill the entire 55 minutes time I was given. I really had no idea how I expected to fit the Unit tests/Web tests and Loads Tests into this time 🙂

As promised to the people who attended the session, here are some of the links I mentioned.

• ASP.NET Design templates (from where we created Wagga Ski)
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite (180-day trial)
• Team Foundation Server (180-day trial)

As far as the rest of Code Camp Oz 2.0 goes, so far I have seen sessions from Dan Green on Windows Workflow Foundation, Darren Neimke on Vista Development Features and Mitch Denny has done a great session on LINQ. Lot’s of great sessions still to come this afternoon and tomorrow.

 

This morning I came across a blog post from Rob Caron entitled Mindjet Requirements Manager. I’ve been a big fan of Mindjet’s MindManager product for a little while now since Mark Michaelis demonstrated how very effective it could be in the classroom during some VSTS training in Seattle. In a typical classroom environment, you introduce yourself as the trainer and then go around the room and ask each person to introduce themselves. You also ask them what their expectations are for the course which allows you to record these and try to meet as many of the students expectations as you can during the training. While this is not always possible of course, it is a trainer’s responsibility to try their hardest to ensure the best value for each of the students in the class and this is most easily done by trying to at least meet their expectations.

As Mark went around the room, he had MindManager on the screen and he made changes to the course outline “on the fly” to better meet the “average” student’s expectations/requirements for the course. These changes involved both ordering of topics as well as the actual topics themselves. Basically he “added a little here and trimmed a little there” until it better reflected what the audience wanted to know. I thought this was a great way to do things and with a little preparation, you could have MindManager then produce the new powerpoint slide deck (PPT) for the entire course within minutes of the introduction session being completed. Obviously you’re still limited by the courseware, labs and machine builds but there’s usually still a bit of freedom that a trainer can always exercise. I should point out that this is just one of many uses you could put MindManager to.

So why do I bring this up now? Well Rob’s post is about a new add-in that allows me to use two of my favourite tools together – VSTS & MindManager! MindJet have released a free add-in called Mindjet Requirements Manager. This add-in allows you to “Use MindManager to create software requirements documents and turn those requirements into work items on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.  The requirements map then becomes a bi- directional link to the work items.”  Very cool!

To find out more about this add-in visit the Mindjet website. Mindjet website Mindjet Requirements Manager page

 

I noticed on Rob Caron’s blog this morning a post entitled “Managing Version Control Workspaces”. This is a new freeware utility from Attrice that provides a GUI to manage your TFS Workspaces.

The download is a convenient 337Kb msi file and installation was as easy as double-clicking the TFSVCWS_1.0.0.24282.msi file and clicking next a few times. (Oh yeah, I always read all of these screens )

Once installed you start the application from the start menu like most other applications I guess.

When you start it up for the first time, you are prompted for a few pieces of information as shown in the following screen shots.

This was where I hit my first problem…. the site I am trialing this utility on is still using TFS Beta 3 Refresh while they wait for new hardware to move to RTM. The program stops with the following message. “Failed to initialize (Method not found: ‘System.String…’) error as shown below.

A quick flick over the my laptop and an RTM version of TFS gives me much better results. This is a fairly clean installation so there’s not that many workspaces to play around with. The main screen does exactly what the website states it should do and allows me to easily complete the following tasks from the UI;

• View workspaces filtered by specific owner or computer name (owner and/or computer name may be selected from list of Active Directory users or just typed in)
• Delete workspaces
• Update workspace computer name (for local workspaces only)
• View specific workspace details and folder mappings
• Delete specific workspace selected folder mappings
• Specify application configuration parameters (TFS server name, Active Directory domain for lookup)
• View log of performed actions (successful and failed)

In summary, this is a neat little utility that will definitely be added to my “TFS Utilities” start menu folder.

Those people lucky enough to be covered by an MSDN Universal/Premium subscription often tend to forget that not every developer using Microsoft Developer Tools has the same ability to simply download the latest bits and pieces from the MSDN Subscriber download site. I know myself, I tend to assume that all developers I talk to have access to the Subscriber downloads site. Admittedly, the majority do tend to work for organisations that have enterprise agreements in place with Microsoft and therefore do have access to the site, but that shouldn’t be mistaken to mean everyone.

Rob Caron has posted some good news today for those people interested in using the trial version of Team Foundation Server, but aren’t able to download it from the Subscriber download site and don’t want to wait for it to be posted to them if they sign up for the trial. Here is an excerpt from his post…

Are you eager to try Team Foundation Server, but you don’t have an MSDN Subscription to access the download, or you don’t want to wait to order and receive a CD in the mail?

We just put the English 180–day Trial Edition on Microsoft Downloads to make it more accessible. We also plan to make localized versions (e.g., Japanese, French, etc.) available for download once they’re ready.

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Trial Edition 

The download is a CD image file (.ISO) that is around 447 MB, so be sure you have a reliable connection with adequate bandwidth for a successful download. Microsoft Downloads doesn’t have a file transfer manager like MSDN Subscriber Downloads, which helps with files of this size.

[Team Foundation Server Trial on Microsoft Downloads]

Further to my last blog post, I have attempted to enter a valid Team Foundation Server Trial edition product key into the Maintenace dialog box on a TFS Workgroup edition installation and I receive a message stating…

“Trial Edition product keys are not valid. Enter a valid Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server CD Key.”

It’s not looking good as far as moving from the 5–user Workgroup edition across to the trial version of TFS…

 

A question popped up this morning on a local mailing list asking if it is possible to migrate from the TFS Workgroup Edition back to the TFS Trial version. On the surface I thought this a strange request so I did a quick search on the MSDN Forums and came up with nothing. I shot an email off to the team to see if they had any ideas on the matter and we’ll see what message comes back.

The background to the question is this. Let’s say an organisation has been evaluating the TFS product for quite some time and are eager to move over to the final version as soon as it becomes available. On St Patricks day the MSDN Subscriber download site shows two downloads, the time-bombed trial and the 5–user limited workgroup edition. We are told that both versions can be upgraded easily in-place by going into maintenance mode and entering you product key once you buy the full version. Armed with this information, quite a few organisations appear to have gone with the workgroup version with just 5–users knowing they are ready and raring to go with their chequebook to buy the full version and get down to business.

Any then the problem emerges… Mitch Denny responded promptly to the mailing list question and shared the news that you should not expect to be able to purchase the full version for potentially two months! Now in the past week or so I know some organisations have installed the Workgroup version and started uploaded their custom process templates and team projects, others have done the in-place upgrade from the RC release.Quite a few of them are now expecting to be able to purchase the product to remove the 5 user limit VERY soon. Faced with the prospect of now having to wait a while to be able to purchase the full version, it makes perfect sense to want to be able to move back to the Trial version which removes the five user limit, and then upgrade to the full product as soon as you can (and before the time bomb expires).

I will post an update as soon as more information about this situation appears…

This week saw me delivering the VSTS KickStart event in Canberra and then Melbourne. By a stroke of luck, this placed me in Melbourne at the same time as the VSTS User’s Group so I had the chance to not only see Jeff Beehler present a session on “10 things learnt shipping VSTS” but I had the chance to present a session as well.

For my session I decided to present on “Customising the Process Template”. One of the lab exercises I included in the VSTS KickStart event involves quite a few modifications to the default process template. For those of you not familiar with the process template, it forms the basis from which new team projects are created. You can give your team a great head start by making a number of changes to the process template.

In the lab, students create a new process template based on the “MSF for Agile Software Development – v4” template. They make a number of changes including changing the default work items, modifying work item type definitions, changing a number of the project defaults and much more. Feedback from each of the courses has been very positive and most students go away with the intention of getting to work editing their process template. Stay tuned for another blog post soon outlining a few more things concerning editing the process template.

As promised during my presentation, here are links to the resources I mentioned.

• Process Template Editor (VSTS Customization Toolkit workspace)
  • VSTS Work Item Type Designer
    • Visual Studio Extensibility web site (Download the VS2005 SDK here)</UL>  </p>

With the introduction and availability now of Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition, you’re likely to run into the following error that users of the CTP & Betas will not have seen before. The full error message is

TF31001: Team Foundation cannot retrieve the list of team project from Team Foundation Server. The Team Foundation Server returned the following error: The request failed with HTTP status 403: DomainUser is not a licensed user.

This is due to the new measures put in place to limit the numbers of users of the TFS Workgroup edition to five. What you need to do is add your user accounts into the “Team Foundation Licensed Users” TFS global group. Rob Caron gives us the full story on this in his post “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition”.

As a few of you will know, I’m in the middle of delivering a series of VSTS KickStart Workshops around Australia and I’m due in Canberra and Melbourne next week. I woke up this morning and thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be a hoot if we could run this week’s sessions using the RTM version of TFS”. So this morning I’m busily installing TFS RTM and let’s see how we go.

Installation

One of the first things you’ll notice is the Installation Guide has a couple of additional branches.

Team Foundation Installation Walkthroughs

As the name suggested two end to end walkthroughs to guide you through the installation of either the single or dual server installation. This is a nice addition and should help with issues in the previous installation guide where you needed to jump around a bit.

Overview of Repairing and Uninstalling Team Foundation Server

The other new addition to the installation guide is the documentation detailing how to remove and repair the various parts of TFS including the TFS Proxy and TFS Explorer.

The actual installation is almost identical to the process you would have followed for the Release Candidate installation with the exception of a number of new steps added to validate a few of the install points.

My next step is to see how many of the various tools and add-ons are going to play nice. Eg. TFS Admin Tool, Continuous Integration add-in, etc. I’ll try to post as soon as I have some news…

 

A quick check of the MSDN Subscriber download site shows the following good news

There goes another 448Mb from my download cap.