I’ve been a bit quiet lately as I prepared for the Microsoft Ready Launch events here in Australia. I had the priviledge of being asked to join the team to present at the Canberra and Brisbane events.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend much time at the community launch event on Wednesday night in Canberra as it was off to rehearsals with the team. Chuck & I eventually called it a night just before midnight. One of the things I was most looking forward to was the opportunity to meet Rob Caron who was in Australia to present at the launch events in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Unfortunately he was unable to stay around for the Perth and Brisbane events as he is due to fly back to Redmond on Saturday after spending two weeks here in Oz. Anyone using VSTS will be familiar with the name Rob Caron whose blog is an indispensable resource. Hopefully I can help persuade Rob & his wife to include Queensland on their next trip

My first session for the business launch event on Thursday was a team effort with Rob, Andrew, Chuck and I each playing a different role within the software development lifecycle. The role play went well and I think the audience really appreciated the benefits VSTS offers development teams. My part of the presentation was going well right up until the final part where I tried to show the project portal. For the first time ever, ol’ faithful project portal failed and displayed an error on the screen. Oh well .  Rob later found the cause was an outdated version of Windows Sharepoint Services on the Virtual PC I was using was the cause of the problem.

Chuck and I then teamed up to present the ASP.NET 2.0 later in the afternoon and as is Chuck’s way, we dispensed with the powerpoints and made the session 100% demonstration. Chuck & I both had a ball presenting this session and everything went off without a hitch. Andrew closed out the developer track of the launch event with a great session on smart client development. As the last session of the day, the numbers started to drop off a bit but if you can hang around for it, it is well worth your time.

Anyway, Canberra’s behind us now, Andrew & Joe are off to Perth at the start of next week before I meet up with Andrew & Chuck for the Brisbane event next Friday. If you’re planning on being in Brisbane on 8th Dec, register now and come and join us.

Me and Rob	Chuck and I	Chuck & Andrew

If you are currently using Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Refresh or considering installing it, Allen Clark (PM – Team Foundation Server) has a few pointers for you on the Team Foundation blog. His main points are as follows;

• If you customize work item types, don’t create work item field reference names that have more than 70 characters, or that begin with a number.
  • If it’s not too late, deploy Team Foundation Server on the hardware you’re going to use at RTM.
    • If you are going to deploy to new hardware, go ahead and install Team Foundation Server on the new hardware and try it out just to make sure you don’t have configuration issues. You can uninstall Team Foundation prior to upgrading.
      • Keep track of the customizations you’re making to the process templates; you’ll need to do these again before you’ll be able to create new projects with your custom process templates.

        </ul>

      Read his post here

One of the most requested features for MSBuild is the ability to have it build not only .NET Framework 2.0 projects, but version 1.1 projects as well. Robert McLaws has had some success with his MSBuild Compatibility Toolkit but he acknowledges that it has limitiations including;

• Resolving COM References
  • Generating resources
    • Resolving .NET version-specific managed references Enter into the picture MSBee (or MSBuild Everett Environment), which is a project being worked on by Craig Lichtenstein in the MSBuild Team. Here’s Craig’s scenario on what he is hoping to enable.

    “I’d like to set some expectations upfront regarding what this solution will do. The scenario we’re envisioning is a user converting an Everett project to a Whidbey project. If a user is interested in targeting .NET 1.1, he can add an extra import to the project file. Then, when invoking MSBuild, he can set a property on the MSBuild command line which will import the necessary targets file during the build. When building this project for .NET 1.1, the ResolveCOMReferences and GenerateResource tasks will function. Additionally, a best effort is made to map assembly references from .NET 2.0 assemblies to their .NET 1.1 equivalents (if possible). In other words, if A.dll in Whidbey maps to B.dll in Everett, we will automatically replace A.dll with B.dll before invoking the csc task. You will also be able to add your own mappings. There will be additional documentation that goes over exact scenarios we’ve tested and what functionality we’re providing, and consequently what scenarios we don’t enable.”

    Read about Craig’s progress on his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/clichten/default.aspx 

Team Foundation Server Beta 3 has a bug in supporting cross-forest trusts (and potentially trusts between domains in different forests) which the product team is looking into. They are currently looking at supporting trusts across forests (explicit trusts and cross forest trusts), as well as one way trusts (as long as the trust goes in the right direction), for RTM.

On a Work Item, the “Assigned To” field displays a list of usernames, not the display name from Active Directory. If you are like on of my clients, it means the list contains things like (r345987, o001928, etc). This may be OK in small teams of people where you tend to recognise each others ID, but in larger or more dynamic teams this can be quite annoying. Well the good news for this one, is that the TFS team have reviewed this and from the next CTP of Team Foundation Server, we will see this field display fullnames from Active Directory.

The backup plan for TFS Beta 2 was quite a manual process involving 7 databases and a few sharepoint sites. This was definately not what I wanted to tell our Operations guys. The good news here is that we should be seeing some new documentation very soon detailing how you can backup TFS Beta 3 Refresh installations using a straight forward SQL Maintenance Plan which can be automated for nightly backups nice and easily.

 

My good friend and VSTS MVP Boon Tiong sent me a link to a very interesting article on Bink.nu this morning. It interests me very much as I used Virtual Server 2005 SP1 Beta (as it was then named) for almost all of my evaluation of the early beta’s and release candidates of Team Foundation Server.

According to the article, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia announced the release of Virtual Server 2005 R2 at the Microsoft IT Forum in Barcelona. Being on the Beta program for this product I am well aware of the great new features this release has but what has caught my eye in the article are the prices that have been quoted.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 Standard edition 99 USD
Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprice edition 199 USD !!

That is an incredible price point for such a rich product! Read the article at http://bink.nu/Article5338.bink

Microsoft’s Ready Launch events are just about to kick off in Australia and developers are invited to come along and join the Party! Launch events will be held around the country with a community party in the evening and then the business launch the following day.

Frank’s got the dates/times and the links to register so don’t delay!

In what must be one of the most unusual uses I have put Team Foundation Server to, I decided to use it to help me prepare for the “71–528: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Web-based Client Development” Beta exam which I am sitting this week. (The exam will be released as 70–528 in February next year)

I started by heading to the Microsoft exam preparation guide for 70–528 . I copied the HTML table that listed each of the skills being measured and pasted it into Excel. I did a bit of clean up to the spreadsheet to give me a nice clean list and then fired up Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite.

I create a New Team Project called 71–528Prep and chose the defaults for the rest of the Team Creation wizard. The next task was to Query all Work Items and then choose to update the work items using Excel. I copied and pasted my clean list of exam study tasks into the spreadsheet and Published the list back into TFS.

I then created a new ASP.NET Project and I am working through the work items one by one making sure I cover as much of the examinable content as I can. When I feel I am happy with my knowledge of a particular topic, I update the work item to Resolved and move onto the next one.

You can see in the following screenshot that I created each of the work items as Tasks. I did think about creating a custom work item type called “Study Task” but then I figured my time was probably better spent actually studying ASP.NET 2.0 instead of playing with TFS

Rob Caron has again pointed us in the direction of some very useful VSTS content. This time he has found some great VSTS posters from VSTS MVP Willy-Peter Schaub.

The .NET Specific poster area has some great content including;

• Microsoft Team System Source Control
• Microsoft Team System

The Under View poster area includes;

• Microsoft Team System Single Server Install
• Microsoft Team System Secuirty Mapping

Presumably the “Under Review” posters will move to .NET specific at some stage so you might need to check there for the last two. I think these are very useful posters and I look forward to the next set of posters the guys release.

 While not exactly VSTS specific, I thought I would post this anyway, becuase the snippet editor is really quite handy

The Visual Basic Snippet Editor is shared source project, so contributions from members of the VB developer community are welcome and encouraged. If you stumble across an annoying bug or you think of a cool new feature, don’t hesitate to download the source project, lay down some VB code, and check in your changes so that others can benefit from them. The source code can be accessed at the VB Snippet Editor Workspace on Gotdotnet

You can download the snippet editor from the Microsoft website here  (326kb)

I had an interesting TFS problem present itself this morning. As a trainer/presenter I often go into the field to deliver presentations on VSTS and TFS and I have my laptop configured such that VS2005 is installed on the host OS and I have a full Team Foundation Server running in a virtual machine on my laptop as well. If and when I need to use TFS, I start up the virtual machine, connect to it and away I go.

This morning I wanted to point the VSTS client on the host back to a full TFS setup in my office to do some real coding .  I didn’t need my TFS on my virtual machine so I didn’t start it up. So here’s the problem. When I started Visual Studio Team Suite on my laptop and went to the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” option expecting to be able to add this new TFS server, I get a “Failed to find abt-tfsR3b” message and the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” dialog box fails to display. I poked around a bit to make sure I didn’t miss anything and became a bit perplexed because I have been able to configure a client with multiple TFS servers in the past.

I did a search on the MSDN Technical Forums and even checked on Google with no luck. Stuck for ideas I started the TFS server on my laptop in the VM and then tried the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” option and low and behold, the dialog box is displayed and I can now add a new TFS server to the client. Once added I can shutdown the VM TFS server and get to work. The problem with this is that you cannot change any TFS server settings if your registered TFS server is unavailable.

I visited the Microsoft Product Feedback center to see if this was a bug and there it was – reported last month. I knew I should have checked there first .  Microsoft’s reply is that this is being fixed in the release version so people might experience this bug between now and the expected release in Q1 next year.