Today is the start of Microsoft TechDays 2012 in Sweden. TechDays is probably the largest IT conference in Sweden this year, three days filled with great content covering everything from IT operation to cloud-based development.
I’m proud to get a chance to talk at the conference again and this time on the following topics (yes, Visual Studio 11 ALM as expected):
- Build Lab in the Sky
- Continuous Feedback
And as if this is not enough, Brian Keller from Microsoft DPE will give the big picture presentation on ALM:
- What’s new in Visual Studio 11 for Application Lifecycle Management
- Software Testing with Microsoft Test Manager 11 and Lab Management 11
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Another great thing about TechDays is that you get a chance to connect to the smart people in MEET (Microsoft Extended Experts Team), a group of technology experts, MVPs and MCTs I happen to be a part of. Here are some of the MEET members blogs if you want to learn more about the MEET members:
Andreas Stenhall Alan Smith (Azure) Björn Axell (System Center) Cecilia Wiren (.NET) Chris Klug (.NET) Daniel Bugday (Sharepoint) Hasain Alshakarti (Security) Henrik Nilsson (FIM, ADFS, Security) Johan Arwidmark (System Center) Johan Åhlén (SQL Server) Magnus Björk (Exchange) Magnus Mårtensson (Azure) Patrik Löwendahl (.NET) Mathias Olausson (ALM) Jörgen Nilsson (System Center) Ola Skoog (IT Pro Evanglist) Anders Olsson (Security) Joakim Nässlander (Windows Server, Cluster) Martin Lidholm (Unified Communication, Lync) See you at TechDays 2012 I hope!
If you want to know more about what’s coming in the next version of Visual Studio then here’s an event for you. I’m giving a presentation next week on what’s new in Visual Studio 11 with focus on the ALM tools and there are lots of interesting new capabilities coming, from storyboarding and feedback tools to improved version control and simplifications in lab management.
Register to the event here: http://www.informator.se/utbildningar/seminarier/seminarier/nyheter-i-visual-studio-alm-11.aspx
If you want to have a sneak-peek go to http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/downloads and download the beta!
Today I’m happy to bring news about the beta release of the Visual Studio Lab Management guide, second edition. I’ve been working with this project since the beginning and this time around I’ve had the opportunity to lead the work for this release. It’s been great fun to work with an active product owner from the Lab Management product group and of course a committed and knowledgeable team!
This time around the focus has been around the new features coming in Visual Studio 11 Lab Management, the document has been revised to reflect that content. We have also spent a significant amount of time to add content to support the build-deploy-test workflow in TFS and Lab Management. This work includes
- Guidance on lab process template customization
- Guidance on how to implement a continuous integration process using lab management
- Guidance on database deployment
- Guidance on SharePoint deployment
- Hands-on lab on Lab Management 11 Standard Environments
- Custom Lab Activities (included in the TFS Build Extensions project)
Take a look at the beta release here: http://vsarlabman.codeplex.com/ and give us feedback on things you like as well as things you’re missing!
In a previous post on the TFS Build Extensions I mentioned the new Community Build Manager and that I will write a post and explain more what it does. But who can do it better than one of it’s author’s Jakob Ehn so take a look at his fine post on the subject:
http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2011/12/30/introducing-community-tfs-build-manager.aspx
Download and try it out, I really like this nice Visual Studio/TFS add-on!
The new year brought this pleasant mail to my inbox:
Subject: Congratulations 2012 Microsoft MVP!
Dear Mathias Olausson,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Studio ALM technical communities during the past year.
This will be my fourth year as a Visual Studio ALM MVP and I’m honored to be a part of this group of brilliant people!
We’ve just released a new release of the Community TFS Build Extensions.
This time it’s a pretty big release many new activities as well as a new power-tool, the Community TFS Build Manager. I will come back to the Build Manager later but here’s a sneak-peek at what it looks like:
In short it’s a Visual Studio extension that allows you to things you can’t to in the regular Build Explorer, such as batch updating build definitions and clone a build definition to a branch.
I’ll write more about the goodies in this release in a later post.
Here’s a reminder to all using the “Brian Keller” demo VM for TFS: The VMs expired November 1 but Brian has once again updated the VMs to run for another six months (April 9 2012).
More details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2010/06/25/now-available-visual-studio-2010-rtm-virtual-machine-with-sample-data-and-hands-on-labs.aspx
A new patch for Visual Studio 2010 and MTM 2010 is now available that among other things brings a multi-line control to the MTM test step editor! This is a top request from most testes I’ve talked to so great to see it’s made it into the product in this release!
The patch is also gives improved support for the hosted TFS Preview (“TFS on Azure”) so if you’re using VS 2010 against the TFS Azure service you should get this update too.
Read more about this QFE here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/10/19/multi-line-test-steps-available-in-microsoft-test-manager-among-other-things.aspx.
Brian Keller has done it again! To help us all get to try out the Dev11 tools quick and easy he has put to together a VM with the Visual Studio and TFS tools.
And not only is the Dev11 bits on the machine, there’s also a demo project and sample data install. Plus a number of hands-on labs! From Brian’s post:
There are six hands-on-labs for you to take a scripted approach towards learning this content. These labs double as demo scripts in case you want to show off these features to others:
Get the VM here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/09/16/visual-studio-11-application-lifecycle-management-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx.
The second release of the TFS Build Extensions is out! This release contains a new activity for running Silverlight tests as part of a build, an significantly improved VsDevEnv activity and a number of minor improvements and fixes.
Richard Fennell has done a great job on documenting some of the activities in this release, I’ll try to do the same for the ones I’ve contributed with.
In the the next release we plan to add more support for deployment (Azure, Sharepoint) and Lab Management. This is also driven my the coming updates to the ALM Rangers project for Build and Lab Management.
The //Build conference is already sold out, something that I take as a good sign for us who booked in time to secure a seat. Still no agenda set so it sounds like it will be a good conference with lots of new stuff to talk about.
For those who cannot attend the full conference Microsoft Sweden is also hosting a one-day event with the "best-of” //Build in Stockholm about a week after the US conference (on 27 September)
Check out the event and register here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032490194&EventCategory=1&culture=sv-SE&CountryCode=SE.
Today the v.1.0 release of the TFS Build Extensions was released by Mike Fourie. I've had the opportunity to help out in the later part of this project and it's great to see the TFS build activities finally come out. I know these activities will be much welcomed by anyone working with the TFS 2010 build system! There are many great activities in this 1.0 release and more is to come in the next couple of months.
Release Notes
This is our first
Stable release providing in the region of 100 Activities / Actions
- This release contains assemblies and a CHM file.
- We anticipate shipping every 2 to 3 months with ad-hoc updates provided to the documentation.
- We welcome your candid and constructive feedback and look forward to improving the quality with and for you.
Go over to the project site and take a look and get your hands on the bits.
If you don't find the activity you're looking for don't hesitate to add it to the list in the discussion area. And should you encounter any issues with the release use the issue tracker at the project site (or leave a comment here).
I hope you find the activities helpful. I know I will!
This week there’s been lots of celebration for the Visual Studio ALM Rangers! Today the project site for the Lab Management Guide went live, which is really exciting. Now there’s finally a comprehensive document available that describes the many details of using the TFS Lab Management tools. Having worked with the project and the product for a good while I’m really happy to see this guidance come out.
So head over to the Rangers Lab Management Guide at Codeplex and take a look!
The v1 release contains the following:
The content is packaged in 3 separate zip files to give you the choice of selective downloads. The default download is the first of the listed packages:
-
Guidance, which includes scenario based practical guidance and frequently asked questions.
-
Hands-on Labs (HOL), which includes the HOL documents that provide walkthroughs of the technology, based on the guidance
The Epics included in the guidance are:
- Epic - Visualisation of the guidance using quick reference posters
- Epic - Advanced golden image management using the VM Factory for Lab Management
- Epic - Provide guidance on setting up Test environments with respect to pre-defined personas
- Epic - Provide Guidance to enable large and small teams to setup and configure both automated and manual tests
- Epic - Provide practical guidance for managing and maintaining a Lab Management environment
- Epic - Provide practical guidance to enable teams to quickly setup and configure their lab management environment
The Visual Studio ALM Rangers, which I’m a proud member of, today released v1.0 of a new set of guidance for TFS 2010 Build Customization. This is a project that has been under development for quite some time and includes lots of great material related to build management using the TFS 2010 build system. We’ve tried to focus on real-life scenarios so I think this guide will contain stuff interesting to anyone working with TFS builds.
If you just want to go and get the release then get it from the Rangers Build Customization Guide at Codeplex.
And for those interested in more about what’s in the release, here’s the overview from the project site:
The solution is divided in separate packages to give you the choice of selective downloads. The default download is the first of the listed packages:
- Guidance contains scenario based practical guidance, frequently asked questions and quick reference posters
- Selected PDF contains guidance and quick reference posters in PDF format only.
- Complete contains guidance, quick reference posters and localization files in all available formats.
- Hands-on Labs (HOL) includes:
- HOL documents that provide walkthroughs of the technology, based on the guidance
- HOL Package contains a HOL environment setup package allowing you to setup the HOL environment in your own environment
- BRDLite Build Process Reference Template walk-through.
- Samples contains sample build process templates used by the team as part of the guidance.
- Videos which showcase the guidance in quick 5-10min videos.
The Epics included in the guidance are:
- Practical guidance and tooling to simplify the customization of Team Foundation Build
- Practical guidance to use Team Foundation Build process templates to automate build and non-build scenarios in Microsoft environments
- Practical guidance to enable simple and flexible deployment of applications and their data stores
- Practical guidance for Activities to empower developers and build engineers
- Quality hands-on labs that complement the guidance and effectively guide the user through the features
- Visualization of the guidance using quick reference posters
If you’ve been working with TFS 2010 build workflows you might have come across a community-developed set of custom activities on Codeplex called the Community TFS Build Extensions. This is a great add-on to the built-in activities but the documentation is still under development so starting to work with the activities can be a bit more work that necessary.
The steps below should help you get create a new .NET project for developing custom build templates with the TFSBE activities:
- Download and extract the latest Community TFS Build Extensions release.
- Create a new Workflow Activity Library.
- Make sure target framwork is set to .NET Framework 4
- Add a reference to System.Drawing
- Add references to Microsoft Team Foundation Server assemblies:
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.dll
- C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\assembly\GAC_MSIL\
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow\v4.0_10.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.dl - C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TestImpact.BuildIntegration.dll
- C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TestImpact.Client
\10.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TestImpact.Client.dll - C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common.dll
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll
- Add references to TFS Build Extension components.
- Make a copy of the default build template and add it to the project.
- The completed solution should look something like this:
- Open the template and add a new Tab to the Visual Studio Toolbox
- Select the new tab and choose to add new toolbox items
- Browse to the TFS Build Extension component you want to use and add the activities to the toolbox tab
- The new toolbox tab should list the selected activites:
- Now you are ready to extend the workflow by adding new TFS Build Extension activities to the template!
A sample project with the above references added can be downloaded here: TFSBE.Template.zip.
Brian Keller has posted about an update to the virtual machines Microsoft provides for testing Visual Studio and TFS 2010:
The May 2011 refresh of the Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs is now available. This new version includes Service Pack 1 (of both Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010), 5 new hands-on-labs / demo scripts, and an extended expiration date of November 1, 2011. Please note that if you are using the last version of the virtual machine it will stop working on June 1, 2011
The images are available here:
Yesterday Microsoft released a beta of a new interesting extension to TFS 2010 – the OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010. This is a new way to get to the data in TFS using the Open Data Protocol (OData, http://www.odata.org/) instead of the web services and .NET object model. This means it will be much easier to consume TFS information from any device on any platform which supports HTTP requests.
If you have a project hosted on Codeplexhttp://www.codeplex.com/ there’s already a cloud-hosted service up for using OData to get to your TFS project there. Go to https://codeplexodata.cloudapp.net for documentation on how to use that.
See Brian Keller’s announcement of the OData Service plus a link to a video demonstration of what you can do with the service.
I’m installing the bits now, let’s see what we can do with it. To be continued…
VS/TFS 2010 SP1 has just been released! SP1 rolls up most of the post RTM hotfixes and updates but it does not include Feature Packs and some other updates.
Here’s a list of the current stack of tools and patches that should be applied to a new Visual Studio/TFS 2010 environment:
See Brian Harry’s detailed post on what should be installed where.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive list of what’s in SP1 look at Brian’s Visual Studio SP1 announcement post.
The TFS team just released an updated version of the essential TFS power tools. In this version I think the following are the most important additions:
- Improved feature-set in the Windows Shell Extension. Workspace management, history search and the option to do Shelving from the shell are all welcome features.
- TFS Build Power Tools. Stating with this release Microsoft will start sharing parts of their internal tools around build management. I had the opportunity to see some demos of the coming features at the MVP summit last week and I can’t wait to get more of those in the package! For now we have to settle with a command-line version of the Clone Build definition feature introduced in an earlier TFPT release (see this post on how that feature works: http://msmvps.com/blogs/molausson/archive/2010/10/21/clone-a-build-definition.aspx)
This update also resolves a number of issues with the TFS Backup/Restore tool that came with the previous release. Based on what I’ve heard the tool is ready for use now!
Brian Harrys has written more about this release here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/03/03/mar-11-team-foundation-server-power-tools-are-available.aspx
You can get the latest TFS Power Tools from the Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager or directly from this link: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f
The evaluation VPCs Microsoft kindly provides us will soon expire (on December 15). To our rescue Brian Keller has updated the virtual machines for Hyper-V, Windows 7 and Virtual PC 2007 so that it will run for another six month (next date to be aware of is June 1 2011).
You can download the images from the following locations:
If you want to know more about what's available in the VPC, check out Brian's post Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs.
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