Omaha ALM User Group–Inaugural Meeting

The Omaha ALM User Group, formerly known as the Omaha Team System User Group, is having its inaugural meeting tomorrow night, Tuesday, January 15th, 2013.  The Omaha ALM User Group is a technology agnostic group focused on utilizing tools and automation to support the people and processes across the complete application lifecycle.  The group is co-lead by Jeff Bramwell and Mike Douglas.

Our first talk is Creating a deployment framework with TFS and custom PowerShell Cmdlets by Andy Bayer:

As testing and release cycles continue to shorten for developers, automating application deployments becomes almost a necessity.  TFS and WebDeploy provide some very powerful tools to simplify application deployments, but have limits to what can be done.  An excellent way to extend the out-of-the-box deployment tools is with PowerShell, but that can carry a learning curve and become a maintenance headache very quickly.  Enter custom PowerShell Cmdlets - a way to hide all of that 'evil' PowerShell scripting and deployment logic from view, and at the same time, provide one location to maintain for any number of deployments.  If done correctly, this can result in a fairly simple, yet very extensible deployment framework for any organization.

If you would like to join us as we kick off our first session then bounce on over and RSVP.  This meeting is being hosted and sponsored by Farm Credit Services of America and is located at:

4979 South 118th St.
Omaha, NE 68137
Map

You can enter at the north building on the west side.  The meeting will begin at 6:00pm with the food (pizza :-) arriving around 5:45pm.

For more information:

• Check out the details for this event here
• Follow us @OmahaALM
• Visit us on-line – www.OmahaALM.org (website update in progress)

We look forward to seeing you there!

OTSUG Meeting: Kinect + TFS = Kinban

Although the Omaha Team System User Group has not met in several months we had a great meeting tonight.  As always, our meeting was hosted by Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica).  This time, however, we had the privilege of meeting in the brand new building that just opened last month.  The new building is outstanding and the meeting space for after-hours events just can’t be topped!  Thanks again to FCSAmerica for sponsoring our user group!

Tonight’s topic, Kinban, was presented by Jeremy Novak (side note: Jeremy presented once before for the OTSUG about two and a half years ago).  Kinban is a product that was born out of an internal initiative at FCSAmerica called GeekFest 2011.  Kinban adds life to your planning meetings and morning stand-ups by allowing the project team members to move user stories around with hand gestures – via Microsoft’s Kinect device.  Jeremy covered how the Kinect SDK, Reactive Extensions (Rx), AutoIt, and the TFS APIs were all combined to give the project team members a hands off experience with TFS.  He also covered various lessons learned along the way providing some helpful insight for those who might be thinking about integrating the Kinect device into their own applications.

You can download Jeremy’s presentation here.  The code for Kinban is available on CodePlex here.

Call for User Group Speaker/Topics

For those of you that regularly attend the Omaha Team System User Group meeting (in Omaha), you’ve no doubt noticed that we missed the last couple of meetings.  It turns out we had scheduling conflicts that prevented us from having the March meeting and the arrival of my latest son (see: Getting Back On-line) prevented us from having the meeting last month.

Looking forward to the next meeting on July 26th, we are in need of a speaker.  If you have a topic that you would like to discuss and are willing to present on, please let me know.  If there are topics you would like to discuss but do not want to present on, let us know about those as well.  If we receive enough topic ideas, we may just have an open discussion group in lieu of an actual presentation.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the next meeting!

NOTE: Due to some recent server changes the normal Omaha Team System User Group site is not currently functioning (www.otsug.org).  For the time being, we are making use of the Omaha Microsoft Technology Group site for providing event and scheduling information.  We hope to have the original site up and running again soon.

OTSUG – What is Visual Studio ALM?

Please join us on Tuesday, March 22nd as Mike Douglas presents on “What is Visual Studio ALM?”  If you are not familiar with the various ALM features in Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010, this will be a great opportunity to see these features demonstrated.  You will also have the chance to ask any questions that you may have regarding the Visual Studio ALM tools.

Visit the Omaha Team System User Group web site for complete meeting details.

We hope to see you there!

OTSUG–A Look at Visual Studio 2010 Testing Tools

Last night, Russ Wagner and I met with the Omaha Team System User Group to present on “Creating Quality Software: A Look at Visual Studio 2010 Testing Tools”.  Once again, Farm Credit Services of America hosted the event and provided pizza for the attendees.

Here’s the description of the talk we gave:

Visual Studio 2010 provides application lifecycle management (ALM) tools that enable teams to create quality software.  In this presentation, Jeff Bramwell and Russ Wagner will demonstrate the new testing features of Visual Studio 2010 including Microsoft Test Manager, Test Runner, Coded UI Tests, Load Testing capabilities, and more.  If you've never had a chance to see some of the new testing features in Visual Studio 2010, or if you simply have questions regarding the use of the testing tools, this meeting is for you.

If you’re interested in the PowerPoint slides, you can download them here. 

For more information about the Omaha Team System User Group:

• Visit us at www.OTSUG.org
• Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/OmahaTSUG
• Subscribe to the OTSUG Announcements RSS feed

OTSUG – Migrating to TFS 2010

Last night, Russ Wagner and I met with the Omaha Team System User Group to present on “Migrating to TFS 2010: Lessons Learned”.  Once again, Farm Credit Services of America hosted the event and provided pizza for the attendees.

Here’s the description of the talk we gave:

In this presentation, Jeff Bramwell and Russ Wagner will discuss the steps taken to upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2010.  The talk will cover up-front planning, tasks that need to be completed in the process, and how to plan for contingencies.  They will also cover various lessons learned along the way.  After the session, they will open it up for questions and answers to give attendees a chance to ask questions as well as share experiences with each other.

It was a small group but everyone came prepared with questions which made for a great and interactive discussion.  We enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the lessons we learned from our experiences while migrating from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010.  All in all, it was another great user group meeting!

If you’re interested in the PowerPoint slides, they’re available here.  For more information about the Omaha Team System User Group:

• Visit us at www.OTSUG.org
• Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/OmahaTSUG
• Subscribe to the OTSUG Announcements RSS feed
• Subscribe to the OTSUG and Other Events RSS feed

OTSUG - What’s New for Testing in Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010

Please join us on Tuesday, March 23rd as Mike Douglas presents on "What’s New for Testing in Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010".  As we near the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, this is a great opportunity to catch up on some of the new features being made available.

Visit Omaha Team System User Group for full meeting details.

Hope to see you there!

Omaha Team System User Group Meeting Next Week

Next week will be our first Team System User Group meeting of the year and will start the third year for the Omaha Team System User Group!  I am looking forward to yet another great year and with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 just around the corner, there is going to be more new material than we could possibly cover!  So, if you have any specific topics that you would love to see covered in the user group, please let us know.  Also, if you have a topic that you would like to share with the group, we would love to have you.

Next week’s topic, Making Transparency Work—Reporting in Team Foundation Server 2010, will be presented by Michael Querimit (Quilogy) - As application development teams interact with Team Foundation Server 2010, a tremendous amount of information is instrumented and recorded. Explore how the new reporting features of TFS 2010 make transparency work by providing quantitative metrics in meaningful reports and dashboards to help you make better business decisions.

Visit the Omaha Team System User Group site for more information.

Omaha Team System User Group RSS Feeds

Due to a recent server failure/web site makeover, the RSS feeds from the Omaha Team System User Group web site have changed.  The new RSS feeds are as follows:

• Announcements – OTSUG announcements
• Events – OTSUG and other events

As always, please contact me if you have any questions regarding the Omaha Team System User Group or if you are interested in presenting a topic at an upcoming meeting.

Omaha Team System User Group Site is Back!

If you have visited the Omaha Team System User Group site within the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably noticed one of two things - the site was either down or the site looked a lot different than it used to.

A couple of weeks ago, the server that hosts the OTSUG web site crashed and took everything with it.  Although I had various backups of various files, I did not have any (recent) backups of the entire partition.  After bringing a severely out of date backup on-line (it was four years old!) I had quite a bit of configuration to take care of.

The OTSUG web site was originally hosted within Microsoft SharePoint utilizing the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS): User Group Edition.  In fact, this was the only site on this server that made use of SharePoint.  Rather than install SharePoint and CKS to host a single site, I decided to look for something simpler and easier to maintain.  I decided to give DotNetNuke a look.

DotNetNuke has a little bit of a learning curve, but once you get past that, it’s very quick and easy to add and configure new pages to the web site.  Specific functionality, such as support for Announcements, Document Management, Links, etc., are provided via DotNetNuke Modules.  There are quite a few of these modules readily available for download with the ability to create custom modules if so needed.  In my case, I was able to get by with the modules currently provided.  Another great thing – it’s open source (under the MIT license).

So, I’ve learned (at least) two things with this experience:

• Sometimes, simpler is better.
• Backup, backup, backup!

At least I got to learn something new from this experience!

VSTS: What’s in it for Me?

I just completed a presentation on “VSTS 2010: What’s in it for Me?” for the Omaha Team System User Group and Omaha .NET User Group (original post).  The venue was once again sponsored by Farm Credit Services of America and the food and give-aways were sponsored by QCI – thanks Jodi!  I haven’t reviewed the sign-in sheet yet to get the exact count but we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 attendees for tonight’s talk – a great turn out.

There are so many new features in VSTS 2010 that it was a challenge keeping the presentation within the time constraints of the meeting.  I managed to squeeze it into about an hour and twenty minutes.

Here’s a quick overview of the features covered in tonight’s session:

• TFS Installation & Administration
• Scalability Options
• Branching and Merging Visualization
• Gated Check-ins
• Hierarchical Work Items
• Query Folders
• Excel-based Reporting
• New TFS Reports
• Dashboards
• Microsoft Test and Lab Manager
• Manual Test Runner
• Test Lab Management
• Unit Test Improvements
• Historical Debugger
• Test Impact Analysis
• Database Features
• Architecture
• Layer Diagram
• Architecture Explorer
• New UML Diagrams
• Activity Diagram
• Use Case Diagram
• Logical Class Diagram
• Component Diagram
• Sequence Diagram
• Other Miscellaneous Items

As you can see, the list is pretty long.  Great stuff!  A big “THANKS” to all that attended.

If you’re interested in the PowerPoint slide deck, you can grab it here.

Omaha Team System User Group

I have been somewhat behind posting lately (I hear new babies in the family will do that ) so it only seems right that I post about the next Omaha Team System User Group meeting 12 hours before it starts.

This month, the Omaha Team System User Group and the Omaha .NET User Group are combining their efforts into a single meeting.  Tonight, I will be presenting on “VSTS 2010: What’s in it for me?”.  This will be a presentation that covers the major, new features that have been added to Visual Studio Team System 2010.  There are a LOT of new features to cover so it will be a challenge getting through them while still spending enough time on each of them to do them some justice.

As a side note, the server hosting the Omaha Team System User Group site, www.otsug.org, crashed last week so the site is currently down.  My goal is to have the site restored by the middle of next week.  In the meantime, please visit Omaha .NET User Group for details concerning the Omaha Team System User Group.

Here are the details for tonight’s meeting:

Please RSVP via the Omaha .NET User Group web site if you plan on attending.

Location:
Farm Credit Services of America
5015 South 118th St
Map

Time:
6:00 PM

Omaha Team System User Group

Yesterday was a long day that ended on a great note – the Omaha Team System User Group meeting.  Mike Douglas, from Deliveron Consulting Services, presented on Installing and Configuring Team Foundation Server 2008.  Here is the synopsis:

This presentation provides an overview of TFS 2008 and demonstrates best practices, lessons learned, and “gotchas” installing and configuring TFS 2008.  The overview explains the architecture and components of Team Foundation Server 2008 and recommended server configurations.  The demonstrations will include using the Best Practice Analyzer, setting user permissions and using the TFS Admin Tool, and creating and configuring a team project from start to finish.  The configuration process will include recommended settings, source control folder structure, and creating appropriate notification.  The presentation will conclude with techniques and lessons learned for troubleshooting problems with installations.

Mike covered a lot of information in an hour and 45 minutes answering lots of questions along the way.

The meeting was co-sponsored between Farm Credit Services of America and Deliveron Consulting Services.  Deliveron provided the food and some great giveaways (including an Xbox 360, TFS books, and some gift certificates).

The slide deck from last night’s presentation is available here.

Visit the Omaha Team System User Group web site for more information or contact me if you have any questions.  We hope to see you at the next meeting!

Omaha Team System User Group

Due to the recent birth of our new son, Zachary, I am somewhat late in getting this post on-line.  Although I am a little behind in getting this posted, I still want to get the word out about our last presentation at the Omaha Team System User Group.

On March 24th, Farm Credit Services of America (FCSA) once again hosted the user group meeting.  Many thanks go out to Russ Wagner for his continued help and for accepting the position as co-leader of the Omaha Team System User Group!

This meeting’s topic was presented by Jeremy Novak, a developer at Farm Credit Services of America.  Jeremy presented on a new open source product called Remote Test Runner – or, RTR. RTR was originally developed at FCSA for internal use to aid in the automation of customer acceptance testing (sometimes referred to as service-level testing).  RTR was published to Microsoft’s CodePlex site following the presentation.

Remote Test Runner is a unit test assistance tool that allows the user to exercise Visual Studio-based test classes outside of Visual Studio. RTR reports on Data-Driven tests at the data field level as opposed to the unit test method level. Failed asserts no longer abort a test.

For more details about RTR, check out this previous post or the RTR project site on CodePlex (link below).

References:

• Remote Test Runner PowerPoint Presentation
• Remote Test Runner on CodePlex
• Omaha Team System User Group

Omaha Team System User Group

The next Omaha Team System User Group meeting is going to be held Tuesday, March 24th at Farm Credit Services of America.  Jeremy Novak will be presenting on Acceptance/Service Level Testing using Remote Test Runner.

Here are the details:

Presentation: Acceptance/Service Level Testing with Remote Test Runner – Using an automated acceptance testing framework allows you to separate the task of creating test data from the test framework.  Your business owners can concentrate on creating the test data that gives them the assurance the product being tested meets their needs leaving developers to create the associated unit tests.

This presentation will be covering a new automated testing tool for use with Visual Studio – Remote Test Runner (RTR).  RTR builds upon the data-driven testing features currently built into Visual Studio Professional and higher.  RTR provides a nice, intuitive interface for running data-driven tests, even if you don’t have Visual Studio installed.  The test results can be reviewed in a summary or detailed view.  The detailed view is similar to the output provided by FitNesse, if you’re familiar with that product.  If you’re making use of continuous integration, you can integrate the acceptance tests into your automated builds ensuring all tests are executed with each build.  If you have code coverage turned on, then coverage of your acceptance tests will be tracked as well.

Remote Test Runner will be released as an open source project on Microsoft’s CodePlex site the night of the presentation.

Speaker: Jeremy Novak, FCSA
Jeremy Novak has over 15 years of software development experience and is current employed as a Developer/Web Programmer by Farm Credit Services of America.  He is interested in learning about all things.

I hope to see everyone there!

Omaha Team System User Group

After having to postpone the session from September due to scheduling conflicts we had a great turnout for the Omaha Team System User Group meeting last week.  The speaker for our November meeting was Russ Wagner, an Enterprise Applications Architect at Farm Credit Services of America.

After having some tasty pizza and enjoying a little socializing, Russ presented on the TFS command line utilities and TFS Power Tools related to Team Foundation Server.  The presentation went very well (despite some pre-demonstration glitches) and proved to be very informative.  Although I've had the opportunity to use the majority of the command line tools and TFS Power Tools, it was nice to see them all covered in a single presentation.

Once the presentation was over, we raffled off some books and had some great Q & A with a few of the attendees.  As always, I'm looking forward to our next meeting after the start of the new year.

Click here to download the presentation in PowerPoint 2007 format.

Omaha Team System User Group

We’ve had yet another successful gathering of the Omaha Team System User Group.  After moderating one of the Birds of a Feather sessions at last month’s Tech-Ed conference, I decided to try something similar with this month’s user group meeting format.

Rather than schedule a speaker for this meeting I decided that we would open the floor up for any Team System-related topics for discussion amongst the group.  Being the middle of the summer and having changed the format to not include a speaker I didn’t expect the same turnout that we typically get at other meetings.  We ended up with a total of 15 attendees which was perfect for sitting around a few tables and having some conversation.

Some of the topics we discussed included:

• Certifications – are they important (i.e. do they really matter)?
• Training – what types of training resources are available for Team System.
• Gotchas – what kind of “gotchas” have other group members ran across while working with Team System.
• APIs – what type of experience do other group members have with working with the TFS Object Model.
• How is it being used – i.e. how is Team System being used throughout the community.
• FinalBuilder – just bringing an awareness to the group that FinalBuilder has some great TFS support.
• Etc.

We all had some great discussion for about an hour and a half and I think everyone in the room, especially myself, left with having learned something new.

The meeting format seemed to work out great so I believe this is something we’ll do at least once per year.

Developer Conference RSS Feed

A while back I created a conference calendar on the Omaha Team System User Group's web site.  As I come across (US-based) developer- or architecture-related conferences, I add them to the calendar.  So, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed if you're interested.  Note that you will also get notifications of user group events in Omaha :-)

You can also view that actual calendar page here as well.

Omaha Team System User Group

Well, the 2nd Omaha Team System User Group meeting is, as they say, in the books!  We had a great turnout with about 25 attendees that showed up to listen to Mike Douglas speak about TFS build automation and the coolness factor of incorporating (authentic) stoplights into the build process.

Mike also demonstrated his latest CodePlex contribution - Team Deploy.  Team Deploy is a set of custom MSBuild tasks that provide functionality for deploying MSI files as well as controlling X10 devices (e.g. stoplights, lava lamps, etc.).  Some of the tasks included are:

• Install Task - installs an MSI on a remote machine.
• Uninstall Task - uninstall an MSI from a remote machine.
• Kill Process Tasks - kills a process on a remote machine.
• Deploy Task - utilizes a deployment script to automate the installation of MSIs on a set of remote machines.  This is the most common task to be used in the collection.
• Start Service Task - starts a Windows Service on a remote machine.
• Stop Service Task - stops a Windows Service on a remote machine.
• Device Controller Task - allows you to control X10-enabled devices from your builds.

Once again, our meeting was sponsored by Farm Credit Services of America which provided pizza, pop, a great place to mingle prior to the presentation, and an excellent meeting room for the presentation.

You can download the PowerPoint slides here.

Omaha Team System User Group

The first Omaha Team System User Group meeting is, as they say, history!  The feature presentation, What's New in VSTS 2008, was presented by Bill Maurer (a Microsoft Developer Technology Specialist).  He also covered some of the new features coming in "Rosario".  The presentation was very interesting and information and was well received.

Our first meeting was held January 22nd and was sponsored by Farm Credit Services of America.  It was very well attended with 75 attendees.  Our next meeting has not yet been scheduled but I am looking forward to working with fellow Team System enthusiasts in the Omaha area.

If you happen to be in the Omaha area and have any suggestions for user group topics, please visit the OTSUG site and drop send me a message.

Links:

• Presentation PowerPoint slides
• Omaha Team System User Group