On top of what I've mentioned here and here, there are even more cool features on VSTS2010:
- Rich text editor when editing work items
- Test case runner which allows a tester to pull the test case from TFS, follow the steps and flag them as pass/fail. But even better, this is all being recorded as video, so when the bug is sent back to the developer, he can replay the exact steps to reproduce it.
- Creating bugs will also log the exact system information of the machine the tester was running on
- TFS will even log a call stack to allow developers to analyze and reproduce the bug
- Test Impact View: once you do a code change, it will identify which unit tests
- Gated check-ins: no changes are committed into the repository until the change is verified. TFS will queue a build in the build server, will get latest version and it will verify that it is valid before commiting the change.
- UML: VS can now generation sequence for the application's methods, to help analyze the impact of a change
If you haven't upgraded from TFS 2005 to 2008 yet, I'd recommend you do it now. The transition to 2010 will be much easier from 2008 according to the guys in the VSTS team. Also keep in mind that VSTS2010 will only support SQL 2008.
I listed this session in my pre-pdc rant, and Jamie Cool definitively delivered an interesting presentation.
The first part of the session was dedicated to Silverlight 2 (recently gone RTM) and the toolkit announced this week.
The Futures section of the presentation was around topics like navigation, data pagination, authentication and business logic.
I'd recommend you see these features in action. Check out the session video on this link
Besides the integration of a Silverlight designer into the IDE, there were a couple of announcements that sneaked into the Keynote. First support for configuration files for multiple environments (dev, stage, uat, production). Second, Visual Studio's UI will be rebuilt using WPF. Scott Guthrie demoed a custom WPF extension for VS2010, that not only rendered the comments from methods in a very user friendly way, but also added extra functionality to retrieve WorkItem information from TFS.
On day 2 of PDC2008, the Silverlight toolkit was announced. This release features a series of controls that were only available on WPF and adds charting controls (both static and dynamic). These charts are part of Microsoft's open source program, so the source code will be shipped with the controls as well.
Another announcement was the tighter integration between Silverlight and Visual Studio. VS2010 will ship with a fully integrated Silverlight designer and WYSIWYG editor.
I attended to the "Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features" session on Day 1. Two of them really caught my attention:
- Improvements on Builds: One of the "cool new features" is the new workflow based builds. It comes with a rich editor to customize all the actions of a build and, because it is built on top of WF, you can create your own activities.
- Branching tools: branching, merging and tracking changes is one of the crucial tasks of the everyday developer life. With TFS 2010 you will be able to visualize changes and the mergers in branches. For example, if a change is lost after several merging several branches and you find out months after this happened, you can visualize in which branch this got lost and what merging order was followed.
This session fell into the "too much information too little time" category, which seemed to be the common denominator among the sessions at PDC. There are lots of things coming on the ASP.NET world and MVC, which has recently been released as Beta, is only one of them.
MVC has been very well received by the community and definitively shows promise. Microsoft has made it very clear that one of the main objectives with MVC is to appeal to the Ruby crowd.
The other main aspects that will be the focus of ASP.NET 4.0 will be Dynamic Data (which will feature improvement to what has already been shipped in SP1), Core, AJAX and Forms.
In this last area, the main features are around more control over what it is rendered, cleaner HTML and improved JQuery integration (you can get a glimpse of the integration here)
There were 2 other interesting things mentioned: The new buzz word is "hybrid applications", where a web app does not have to be 100% MVC, Web Forms or Dynamic data but a mix of them using the right technology when appropiate. The second one was a brief mention of "Silverlight server controls". I wonder if more info about this will be available of day 2's keynote
Earlier today Ray Ozzie, announced Microsoft's initiative on cloud computing: Windows Azure. In a nutshell, Azure is an OS for the cloud. Yes very buzz wordy, but it is technically true. Azure will take care of all the management task associated with publishing, managing, upgrading applications and resource consumption in the cloud.
So far 5 different families of services have been announced:
- Live Services
- .Net Services (which is an evolution of the previously announced BizTalk .NET)
- SQL Services
- SharePoint Servces
- Dynamic CRM Services
During the CTP period, which starts today, the first three will be available in one form or another. In the upcoming months more features will be activated. Microsoft is planning a rapid evolution of the services, with several incremental releases instead of one major upgrade to Beta or RTM.
For more information go to Azure.com and MSDN
I've just landed in LA, and after a quick walk around Belverly Hills I decided to go back to my PDC agenda and try to finalize what sessions I'm going to attend to.
There are 3 of them I'm really looking forward:
- Microsoft Silverlight Futures: Building Business Focused Applications: Can we deliver enterprise level applications on Silverlight? What's Microsoft's stance on this? These are some of the answers that I hope will be answered on this session
- Architecture without Big Design Up Front: up to 70% revolves around designing applications and writing specifications. I'm really curious about what features will be introduced by "Rosario" that can help me with my job.
- ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap: What can I say? We are really excited about MVC and we need to understand Microsoft's direction with ASP.NET if we want to stay ahead of the game.
I guess I'll have to wait and see how the sessions turn out during the week :)
Last month the first meeting of the WVSTSUG was held at Microsoft's office in Wellington. The session was hosted by Mark Carroll who talked about Team Foundation Server, VSTS and Project Management.
On next week's second session, Pablo Garcia will be presenting on TFS API's. Here's the blurb:
"Pablo Garcia is a senior developer and architect with Provoke solutions. He has considerable experience with TFS and will share some of his knowledge of how you can access and update TFS through the various API’s and services available. This is a huge subject both in terms of interest and content so Pablo will restrict himself to key features and then show a proof of concept he did integrating Provoke’s internal time tracking tool with TFS. Key areas of functionality will include the ‘Event Subscription model’, getting work-items, creating work-items and more. If you either are or intend integrating a cost or tracking system with TFS (includes time sheet systems) this session by Pablo is a must."
If you are interested in the subject, I suggest you subscribe to the distribution list by emailing nzvstsug-at-microsoft.com with the word subscribe in the heading line.
I hope to see you next week around 5:30pm at Microsoft's offices.
There are a couple of things that people forget or miss when setting up Team Build to run a series of Build Verification Tests.
· Test tools need to be installed on the Build Server: Get you Visual Studio installation media. The only option that needs to be installed is “Team Developer and Tester tools”.
· Once you have setup a series of tests and they are added to your “Test Manager”, you still need to create the BVTs in a new “Test List” or the build you configure won’t pick them up.
And just in case, you can run tests without an .vsmdi file. Check out this blog