The Visual Studio Team System Big Event!

One of the great things about being a Team System MVP is you get to participate in many different types of events. I really have to hand it to Steve Lange and Microsoft on this one though, this looks to be a fantastic idea and should make for a fun and educational time.

The Visual Studio Team System Big Event is an invitation only event being held in several cities throughout the west. If you are involved with Team System at all, or if you’ve always wondered what VSTS was all about, this is an event you won’t want to pass up. Here is some more information on the Denver event, which is being held on April 22 at the Denver Office. This is an invite only event, but the good news is, well, here’s your invite! Click the “Register Online” button below, and when prompted for the secret code, use DD1A7F. Oh, I will be presenting the, “Bang for your Buck, Getting the Most out of Team Foundation Server” session. Hope to see you all there…

Register Online (Remember to use code DD1A7F when prompted)

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8:30 AM - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 5:00 PM Mountain Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 8:00 AM

Microsoft Corporation

7595 Technology Way, Suite 400
Denver Colorado 80237
United States

Language(s):
English.

Product(s):
Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Audience(s):
Developer, IT Professional and Professional Developer/Coder.

Event Overview

How do you take an idea from conception to completion? How can you truly do more with less?

Please join us for this unique, invitation-only event to discover how both product and processes help your organization succeed in today’s environment. We will explore how Team System assists teams across the board to be successful in today’s tough times. This “break through” event will not only provide you with best practices around development and testing, but will demonstrate key capabilities of both Visual Studio Team System 2008 and the upcoming 2010 release. It’s a day that promises to have something for everyone!

SESSIONS

Test Driven Development: Improving .NET Application Performance & Scalability

This session will demonstrate how to leverage Test Driven Development in Team System. We’ll highlight both writing unit tests up front as well as creating test stubs for existing code.

"It Works on My Machine!" Closing the Loop Between Development & Testing

In this session, we will examine the traditional barriers between the developer and tester; and how Team System can help remove those walls.

Treating Databases as First-Class Citizens in Development

Team System Database Edition elevates database development to the same level as code development. See how Database Edition enables database change management, automation, comparison, and deployment.

Architecture without Big Design Up Front

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. See how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of your code. Learn how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.

Development Best Practices & How Microsoft Helps

Sometimes development teams get too bogged down with the details. Take a deep breath, step back, and re-acquaint yourself with a review of current development best practice trends, including continuous integration, automation, and requirements analysis; and see how Microsoft tools map to those practices.

"Bang for Your Buck" Getting the Most out of Team Foundation Server

Today’s IT budgets are forcing teams to do as much as they can with as little as possible. Why not leverage Team Foundation Server to its full potential? In this session we’ll highlight some capabilities of TFS that you may or may not already know about to help you maximize productivity.

Registration Options

Event ID:
1032408398

Register by Phone
1-877-673-8368

There are other cities on the tour as well:

Mountain View, CA April 28, 2009
Click here to register with invitation code: 80D459

Irvine, CA April 30, 2009
Click here to register with invitation code: A86389

Portland, OR May 5, 2009
Click here to register with invitation code: 2DC0A9

Phoenix, AZ May 7, 2009
Click here to register with invitation code: 90BC47

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Rangers Ship New SharePoint guidance!

Before I get into the purpose of this post, it’s probably important to define just exactly what a “VSTS Ranger” is. The following definition was taken from Willy-Peter Schaub’s blog:

“Rangers are responsible for the creation of reusable “out of band” solutions for missing functionality in the TFS and VSTS family of products, striving for active community readiness knowledge sharing and are influencing VSTS.vNext … the next generation of the tools.”

There are Core Rangers and Extended Rangers. Members of the “Extended Rangers” team do not have to be Microsoft Employees. There are a number of non-Microsoft Extended Rangers. One of the cool opportunities that exist for MVPs in Team System is the ability to become part of the Extended Rangers Team. One of the cool benefits of being an Extended Ranger is participating on high-visibility projects that ultimately help make life easier for VSTS customers.

So, having said all of that (From an email I just received)….

In the last couple of days, Rangers shipped important guidance packages for MOSS TFS development. For maximum reach, we have simultaneously posted to the Team System Home and

Application Lifecycle Management Resource Center for SharePoint Server.

The two whitepapers are:

VSTS Rangers - SharePoint Server Custom Application Development: Document Workflow Management Project

Read about the real-world design, construction, and deployment of a custom SharePoint Server 2007 application to a mid-market enterprise customer using Team Foundation Server as an ALM platform.

and

VSTS Rangers - Using Team Foundation Server to Develop Custom SharePoint Products and Technologies Applications

Learn how to use TFS to support your SharePoint application development, and provide an integrated development environment and single source code repository for process activities, integrated progress reporting, and team roles.

 

The first article was created during a real world customer engagement and answers dozens of frequently asked questions and how-tos in a real world context vs. theoretical discussions. The article addresses very common questions around setting up and using TFS features for a MOSS development project.

Combined with the following guidance from P&P posted here, we have a good and almost complete story for our customers and partners. The two teams worked together to align these stories.

patterns & practices: SharePoint Guidance

The SharePoint Guidance contains a sample implementation of an intranet application based on SharePoint Server 2007 that demonstrates solutions to many ALM challenges.

The MVP Summit and Agile Arguments

I spent the earlier part of this week in Seattle and Redmond for the 2009 MVP Summit (I am actually somewhere in the crowd for this video, please don’t hold it against me…) and came away with a ton of stuff that I can’t talk about, but more importantly I came away with an understanding that the economy may be tanking, but there is a TON of opportunity out there for people in our space.. I talked with several of my peers, and to a person, they are all extremely excited about the opportunities that they see. Hopefully the optimism will continue through the coming months, but I suspect it will.

About a month ago I sent some comments to Visual Studio Magazine in reference to an article they printed on the longevity of Agile. They saw fit to publish an edited version of my comments here: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=3020