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.