Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management – Released!

The final update for Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management has been released (click here for the download).  This update contains fixes and updates to the Lab Management functionality to improve performance, stability, usability and diagnostic information.

Here’s a list of major fixes for Lab Management included in this update:

• Improves performance for Lab Management Workflow Wizard.
• Improves performance for running automated test cases on Network Isolated Lab environments.
• Fixes an issue in which a Test Controller service account that is the same as a Lab Service account causes issues with environment capabilities.
• There is a new Expression Encoder 4.0 based Video Diagnostic data adapter to collect video recording when you perform tests. This diagnostic adapter replaces the Windows Media Encoder base video diagnostic adapter. This functionality is also available as a separate update.  For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 2160831

However, there is more than just Lab Management updates and fixes in this update.  There are numerous fixes for Team Foundation Server and the Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 client as well.  Click here to see a list of other fixes included with this update.

If you run the update on your development machine (applies to Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Ultimate only), you should see the update (KB983578) referenced in the Visual Studio 2010 About dialog – for example:

This update applies to the following:

• TFS 2010 Application Tier servers
• TFS 2010 build machines
• Client machines (i.e. machines running Microsoft Test Manager and/or Visual Studio 2010)
• Test Controller Machines
• Lab Virtual Machines (VMs)

For more information, check out these links:

• Download the Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management
• Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010 is Now Final!
• TFS 2010 updates coming to a download site near you

LightSwitch Beta 1 – Released

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced Visual Studio LightSwitch – a new addition to the Visual Studio family of products.  Today, Microsoft made LightSwitch Beta 1 available on the MSDN subscribers downloads site (look under New Downloads->Visual Studio 2010).  The beta will be made available to the public on Monday, August 23rd, on the LightSwitch Developer Center.

Check out these links for more information:

• LightSwitch Beta 1 Documentation on MSDN
• Vision Clinic Application Walkthrough and Sample
• LightSwitch Forum
• LightSwitch on Channel 9

TFS 2010 Backup Power Tool – Coming Soon

As with any software system that stores its data within a database, you need to have a sound backup/restore process to protect your data.  Team Foundation Server is no different.  Considering the number and types of artifacts stored within TFS, every TFS installation should have a sound backup strategy.  This sounds easy enough, but if you’ve ever read the MSDN documentation, “Backing Up and Restoring Your Deployment”, then you know there are numerous steps involved with creating a backup strategy for your TFS installation.  If you’re in a small shop, then you may not have dedicated database administrators who are comfortable following these steps ensuring the databases are backed up.

Today, Brian Harry posted a blog entry (here) announcing a new power tool, to be included with the next release of the Team Foundation Power Tools, that allows you to easily implement a backup strategy for your TFS installation.  The entire process is wizard driven allowing you to quickly and easily setup a backup strategy and schedule.  You do not need to understand all the ins-and-outs of the underlying database backup jobs.

Creating a backup strategy is only half the equation.  The new power tool will also allow you to easily restore your backed up databases in one of two ways: 1) By team project collection (TPC) or 2) the entire set of TFS databases.

There is no release date set as of yet but it is expected to be released within the next couple of months.

You can read the full post here.

Lab Management to RTM – and other News

If you’ve been following VSLive this week, there were some exciting announcements regarding Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management yesterday.  Including:

1. RTW: Lab Management is now scheduled to RTW by the end of August.  This is great news if you have been waiting for the final release version before implementing Lab Management.
2. Updates: In relation to the above, a set of updates will be released that will update your TFS 2010 server, Test Professional client, and your build/lab agents.  This set of updates not only include the Lab Management updates but all TFS improvements that have been made since its release several months ago.
3. Licensing: Finally, what may be possibly the biggest/best announcement, is the price… Originally, Microsoft was considering charging a per-processor license for the lab agents.  However, after various feedback, they decided that would complicate licensing too much.  Therefore, they have decided to make the lab agents available (i.e. included) with TFS 2010 as well as Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional with MSDN.

If you’ve been waiting for the final release of Lab Management, then your wait is almost over.  If you’ve been on the fence about Lab Management because of the potential cost of the agents, then your problem has been solved.

Read more:

• Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management
• Lab Management News (Brian Harry)
• Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management is coming later this month (Brian Keller)

Visual Studio LightSwitch Announced

Today, Microsoft announced a new Visual Studio product, LightSwitch, scheduled for Beta 1 release on August 23rd.

“Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta helps you solve specific business needs by enabling you to quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family.”

You can loosely relate the idea of LightSwitch to that of Microsoft Access – but better.  LightSwitch will allow you to perform data mash-ups from various data sources (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Azure, SharePoint, WCF RIA Services, etc.) and present the resulting data on (skinnable) professional looking screens that get generated automatically by LightSwitch.

If you need to modify the application above and beyond what gets generated for you, you can use Visual Basic or C# to customize the code to your needs.

Once everything is to your liking, you can deploy the application to the desktop or a browser (support for cloud deployment will be available post beta 1).  The beauty of LightSwitch is that you don’t have to worry about the deployment platform while you’re building the application.  And, since LightSwitch generates Silverlight-based applications (running on the .NET Framework 4.0), it supports multiple browsers and/or operating systems.

This will be an exciting product to watch over the next few months!

For more information, check out these links:

• Visual Studio LightSwitch
• Introducing Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch
• Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch
• Announcing Visual Studio LightSwitch!

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance now in Spanish

Francisco Fagas, Microsoft Most Valuable professional (MVP) and Visual Studio ALM Ranger, has localized the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance for the Spanish communities. Find the latest bits in both English and Spanish here, whereby you need to select “View All Downloads” to see the “Spanish - Quick Reference Guidance” download package.

Check out this post to see a list of other languages that will be available for various guidance in the near future.

Also, check out this post for a list of all guidance provided by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers.

PDC 2010

Just announced, there will be a Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year after all.  And, for the first time, it will be on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond.

The PDC has always provided direct access to the people behind the technologies, but this year we’re upping the ante by providing access to the places, too. For the first time ever, our most influential customers will converge on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond for the PDC, this October 28 – 29, 2010. We’re opening the doors to our buildings and labs, and providing unprecedented access to Microsoft’s leaders and engineering teams on their home turf.

Registration for the conference is now open.

• Learn more about PDC10 at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/
  
• Join the PDC email newsletter for the latest information about PDC10

Visual Studio 2010 VM and Hands-on-Labs

Brian Keller recently posted the availability of the new Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs.

This virtual machine (VM) includes Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, and a sample application along with sample data which supports 9 hands-on-labs. This VM includes everything you need to learn and/or deliver demonstrations of many of my favorite application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities in Visual Studio 2010. This VM is available in the virtualization platform of your choice (Hyper-V, Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and Windows [7] Virtual PC).

This is a great download for anyone wanting to learn more about TFS, experiment with new features, or even for giving presentations.

Check out Brian’s post for the full details.

Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have just released the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance.  Here is the description of the guidance:

Practical guidance for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, focused on modeling tools. This release includes common usage scenarios, hands on labs and lessons learned from community discussions. The scenarios include understanding and reverse engineering an existing solution or starting a new solution from scratch. These are both common challenges that any dev lead or architect faces. The intent is not to give you an in-depth tour of the product features, but to present you with examples that show how these tools can support you in real world scenarios, and to provide you with practical guidance and checklists. This guidance is focused on practical ways of effectively using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and other tools to create a new or revised design as part of application lifecycle management (ALM).

The Rangers involved with this project are: Alan Wills (MSFT), Bijan Javidi (MSFT), Christof Sprenger (MSFT), Clemens Reijnen (MVP), Clementino de Mendonca (MVP), Edward Bakker (MVP), Francisco Xavier Fagas Albarracín (MVP), Marcel de Vries (MVP), Michael Lehman (MSFT), Randy Miller (MSFT), Tiago Pascoal (MVP), Willy-Peter Schaub (MSFT), Suhail Dutta (MSFT), David Trowbridge (MSFT), Hassan Fadili (MVP), Mathias Olausson (MVP), Rob Steel (MSFT) and Shawn Cicoria (MSFT).

There are three separate packages available for download, including:

• Common Questions and Scenarios --> Start here
• Common Questions and Scenarios Visual Studio Extension Guidance Package (forthcoming)
• Hands-On-Labs (HOLs), including:
• New Solution Scenario (HOL)
• Reverse Engineering Scenario (HOL)
• Extensibility Extensions (HOL)
• Extensibility Layer Diagrams (HOL)
• Reusable Architecture (HOL)
• Validating an Architecture (HOL)

For more information, visit the Architecture Tooling Guidance site.

WCF Load Test (Beta) for Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers have released an update to the WCF Load Test Tool.  Apart from some bug fixes, the main difference is that this version integrates with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition.  After this release, the Rangers plan to convert the code to the .NET Framework 4.0, so future releases will only work with Visual Studio 2010 or later.

If you’re not familiar with the WCF Load Test Tool, here’s a quick description:

This tool takes a WCF trace file and a WCF client proxy, or a WCF interface contract, and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of calls found in the trace file. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing.

Please post your feedback on the Codeplex Discussions tab.

You can download the release here.

Removing “Stuck” TFS 2008 Build Controllers

When migrating from Team Foundation Server 2008 to Team Foundation Server 2010 the TFS 2008 build controllers are included.  Even if you’ve setup and configured new build controllers for TFS 2010, you will still see the old (TFS 2008) build controllers in the Manage Build Controllers dialog (note: to display the Manage Build Controllers dialog, expand a team project’s node in Team Explorer, right-click on the Builds node, and select Manage Build Controllers).

In the screen shot below, you can see the Default Build Controller for TFS 2010 at the top along with ten build agents below (spread across five build machines).  At the bottom, there are two build controllers left over from TFS 2008.  Note that the Status is set to “Offline”.  If you no longer need the old (TFS 2008) build controllers, you can select them and click on the Remove button.  In most cases, this works as expected – the build controllers go bye-bye.

In some cases, you might get a dialog like this:

This dialog is telling you that one or more builds were in a Queued state when TFS 2008 was migrated to TFS 2010.  Since it thinks a build is active/queued, it will not allow you to delete the old build controller.

So, how do you get rid of the build controller?  All you have to do is locate the offending builds (left over from TFS 2008) and cancel them.  Sounds simple, right?  The problem is that there is no built-in mechanism for viewing a list of all queued builds across all build agents for a build controller.  So, you have a couple of choices:

1. Go through the builds for each of your team projects one-by-one looking for queued builds.  This approach is simple enough if you have only a few team projects.  But what if you have dozens or hundreds?
2. Locate the queued builds by querying the TFS transactional database.  This option does require at least “Read” access to the Team Project Collection (TPC) database.

Following step 2 above, to get a list of queued builds, run the following SQL script (using the correct collection database name):

SELECT bc.DisplayName, bq.DropLocation, bc.QueueCount, bc.Status
  FROM [Tfs_DefaultCollection].[dbo].[tbl_BuildController] bc
  JOIN [Tfs_DefaultCollection].[dbo].[tbl_BuildQueue] bq ON
bc.ControllerId = bq.ControllerId
WHERE bc.Status = 2 -- Queued
ORDER BY bc.DisplayName

This will give you a list of results including all builds currently in a “Queued” state.  For example:

DisplayName       DropLocation         QueueCount  Status
OLD-Controller1\  \\DropMachine\Proj1  3           2
OLD-Controller2\  \\DropMachine\Proj2  3           2

Using the information above, you should be able to determine which project(s) have queued builds lingering around.

Armed with this information, expand the desired team project in Team Explorer, right-click on the Builds node, and select View Builds.

Click on the Queued tab, and if necessary, modify the filters to display all queued builds.  You should now see the queued build in the list.

To cancel the build, simply right-click the desired build in the list and select Cancel.  If there are any remaining builds in your list, simply repeat these steps until all desired builds have been cancelled.

Once the builds have been cancelled, you should be able to remove the old build controllers from the list as shown above (via the Manage Build Controllers dialog).

As an alternative to the “search-and-cancel” process above, you can also set the value of the tbl_BuildQueue.Status column to 16 – for “Cancelled” (for each of the builds to be cancelled).  This has the same effect as manually cancelling a build in the Build Explorer but it does require rights to update the data in the database.

Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy (2008)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on an update for the Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy for Visual Studio 2010 / TFS 2010.  This version was posted here on the Visual Studio Gallery.  Since then, I’ve received some questions about an update for the Visual Studio 2008 / TFS 2008 version of this check-in policy as the one I posted last September had an issue when checking in source code from the command line.

I have now also posted an updated version of the Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy for Visual Studio 2008 / TFS 2008.  If you’re still using TFS 2008 (and I’m sure a lot of you are) then you can download the updated check-in policy here.

Usage:

To add this check-in policy to your Team Project:

1. Download and install the Check for Compilation Warnings and Errors Check-in Policy.  NOTE: Anyone checking in code will need to install the check-in policy on their local development workstations.
   
2. Within the Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2008, right-click on the desired Team Project and select Team Project Settings->Source Control.
   
   
   
3. Click on the Check-in Policy tab, select Check for Compilation Warnings and Error Policy and click OK.
   
   
   
4. Click on the Edit button and select the level of Warnings and/or Errors to check for.
   
   
   
5. Click OK and OK to close the dialog windows.

Once installed and configured, the check-in policy works like any other.  You can check the Pending Changes window for violations as seen in this screen shot:

Compatibility:

This version of the Check for Compilation Warnings and Errors Check-in Policy supports Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008.  The Visual Studio 2010 version is available here.