According to this post by Brian Keller and another by Brian Harry, VSTS 2010 Beta 2 is “just around the corner” and will ship with a “Go Live” license which means:
Brian Keller also provides links to a Microsoft Word document and a PowerPoint presentation that can assist you in planning for the VSTS 2010 upgrade.
Early last year, I posted 10 Reasons for TFS with Small Teams that listed 10 reasons for using Team Foundation Server even if you thought your team may not be big enough to get any benefit from it. I still stand by those 10 reasons. However, reality has a way of overturning even the best of reasons. For example, cost of software licenses and hardware carry a lot of weight when it comes time to calculate ROI (whether real or perceived).
Yesterday, Brian Harry announced some major changes coming in TFS 2010 that will go a long way in bring Team Foundation Server to the masses – a new feature called Team Foundation Server “Basic” Installation.
Brian covers three aspects of this in his post:
So, what does the “Basic” installation option get you? Pretty much everything the “Standard” installation of TFS provides with the exception of SharePoint and Reporting capabilities. This means you have the following features:
And, as Brian mentions in his post, the nice thing about the “Basic” installation option is that you can always reconfigure the installation down the road as your needs grow.
Read more about this announcement in Brian’s post here.
A few days ago, Telerik announced the availability of two new free products built to provide an informational view into your Team Foundation Server projects. These products are TFS Work Item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard.
TFS Work Item Manager highlights:
TFS Project Dashboard highlights:
The following TFS process templates are supported out of the box: CMMI Process Improvement, MSF for Agile Software Development, and Agile Software Development with Scrum. Custom process templates are also supported.
I have to admit that my current favorite feature of these tools is the Task Board view. This view represents your work items as “sticky notes” that you can drag from one status to another. In our case, we are projecting onto an interactive Panaboard which allows us to physically move a work item from one status into another by pointing and dragging with our fingers. Very cool!
If you’ve been looking for another view into the information buried within your Team Foundation Server then these tools are worth checking out.
It was exactly one year ago today that I found out I was awarded with the Microsoft MVP status for Team System. Since then I have had the opportunity to interact with many of my fellow Team System MVPs as well as many of the VSTS Rangers and have learned a great deal. My first year as a Microsoft Team System MVP has been a great experience.
Earlier today, I found out that my MVP status has been renewed for yet another year. My thanks goes out to Microsoft for their support of this program. I look forward to the next year, broadening my technical horizons, interacting with the community, speaking at various events, interacting with other Team System MVPs, and meeting people passionate about technology.
Up until yesterday, Microsoft had two “Spark” programs:
Yesterday, Scott Guthrie announced on his blog the new WebsiteSpark program. This program is geared toward independent web developers as well as web development companies. Here is a list of what’s provided with this program:
Like the other Microsoft “Spark” programs, these licenses are available for use for a total of three years without any cost. There is, however, an exit cost of $100 once the three years have elapsed.
The only requirements for joining the program are:
For full details, check out the Scott’s post and the WebsiteSpark site.
A while back, I blogged about a new site that I created called TFSExamples.com with the intent that it serve as a community-based repository for examples showing how to make use of the TFS object model. Several great examples were added by various supporters over the last year or so.
Several weeks ago, the server hosting this site crashed and I have just now got the site back up and running again. The down side – my latest backup of this particular site (that was actually usable) was about 14 months old. I was able to restore a few of the examples but the site is missing several of the great examples that had been added. I was hoping that I could retrieve some of the examples from Google’s cached web pages and/or archive.org. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out either since I wasn’t able to find any of the missing pages cached on this site (some of the pages that I was able to restore were there, however).
I hope to recreate many of the examples that were on the site as well as add some new ones over the next few weeks. If you have any examples that make use of the TFS object model that you would like to share with the community, please check out the links below. If you happened to be one of the members that had added an example, and it’s no longer there, I would truly appreciate it if you would be able to take the time and re-add it to the site.
TFSExamples.com Links:
A few days ago a fellow co-worker asked if I knew of a TFS check-in policy that checks for Visual Studio compilation errors and/or warnings. I wasn’t aware of such a check-in policy (although it may exist out there somewhere) so I decided to go ahead and create it (who doesn’t love a challenge?!).
When active, this check-in policy will evaluate the current Visual Studio solution to determine if any build warnings and/or errors are present. If so, the check-in policy will fail and will prevent the code from being checked in (this can, of course, be overridden).
To enable this check-in policy:
Once enabled, you will see a list of policy failures in the Policy Warnings tab of the Pending Changes pane:
If you hover over the policy failure, the ToolTip will display the remainder of the filename along with the line and column number and project name of the failure.
UPDATE: You can now double-click on the policy failure to navigate directly to the location within code where the failure occurred (assuming the location information is available).
You can download the CheckForWarningsPolicy from here.
One of my favorite things about technology is having the opportunity to speak about technology. For whatever reason, it always seems like this time of year always keeps me busy. Here is a list of speaking engagements I’m scheduled for over the next few months:
The last two events in November are all within about an hour of my sisters and parents so I’m really looking forward to the trips.
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:
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.
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:
At least I got to learn something new from this experience!