Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tags 'ALM' and 'VSTS'

ALM Rangers sim-ship guidance with the VS11 RC

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:00:00 GMT

I am really proud to have been involved in the team of ALM Rangers who have SIMultaneous-SHIPped best practice guidance with Visual Studio 11 RC, which became available last night.

I am sure anyone working with Visual Studio and TFS will find the guidance of value, I have certainly learned a lot whilst helping produce the material. It has been a great experience working with a great crowd of people both inside and outside of Microsoft.

ALM Rangers sim-ship guidance with the VS11 RC

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:00:00 GMT

I am really proud to have been involved in the team of ALM Rangers who have SIMultaneous-SHIPped best practice guidance with Visual Studio 11 RC, which became available last night.

Speaking on the 15th Feb at the NE Bytes user group on “TFS for Everyone”

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I will be speaking at the NE Bytes user group next Wednesday (the 15th of Feb) on ‘TFS for Everyone’.

This a session based on the guest blog post on the UK Visual Studio blog I did on how TFS is not just for .NET developers. It can be used from a whole range of development platforms and operating systems. I will be including demos using Eclipse and Ubuntu.

Hope to see you there.

Speaking on the 15th Feb at the NE Bytes user group on “TFS for Everyone”

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I will be speaking at the NE Bytes user group next Wednesday (the 15th of Feb) on ‘TFS for Everyone’.

Hope to see you there.

Filtering in MDX Calculated Members

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

BI development is not something I do that often, but from time to time you need to develop a custom report in TFS. I recently had to battle a MDX problem that someone who does more BI development I am sure why have had no issue with; but as with most of these blog posts (or my long term memory as I think of it) I thought it worth a post in case it helps anyone else

What I was trying to do was produce a table, as shown below, that would allow me to report for a project on the total estimated time in the requirements work items (an estimate made in the requirements planning phase of the project), the total original estimate in the tasks work items (the estimate made by the developers during iteration planning) and compare both with the actual completed time from the task work items.

Project	Estimated Effort (from Requirements)	Estimated Effort (from Task)	Actual Effort (from Tasks)
Proj A	10	11	12
Proj B	15	14	21
Proj C	23	20	24
Proj D	9	10	10

The problem is that in the TFS warehouse both the requirement and task work item estimate in stored in the

[Measures].[Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_OriginalEstimate]

measure. In the MDX query I needed to add a pair of calculated measures that would filter for the two work item type.

This is where I stumbled, should I use IIF() or FILTER(). So I tried both. However, working in Report Builder 3 neither seemed to work. I seemed to end up with either an empty column or not filtering at all and showing the sum of all the work items estimates irrespective of the filter.

The first tip is stop work in Report Builder, this is great for making the report look good, but not the best for resolving MDX issues. Use the query tool within SQL Management Studio. As soon as I did this I saw some of my efforts were returning #Err. This explained my empty columns, Report Builder seemed to just swallow the #Err and give me an empty column.

A a bit more digging I found the form that did what I needed, and ended up with the following form for the MDX in the calculated measures

MEMBER [Measures].[EstimatedWorkForTasks] AS '([Measures].[Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_OriginalEstimate], [Work Item].[System_WorkItemType].[Task])'

By editing the MDX in SQL Management Studio it was fair quicker to develop and debug

Once I was happy with the MDX, I could cut and pasted it back into Report Builder and fix the layout of the report. And all without using either IIF() or FILTER().

Filtering in MDX Calculated Members

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Project	Estimated Effort (from Requirements)	Estimated Effort (from Task)	Actual Effort (from Tasks)
Proj A	10	11	12
Proj B	15	14	21
Proj C	23	20	24
Proj D	9	10	10

The problem is that in the TFS warehouse both the requirement and task work item estimate in stored in the

[Measures].[Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_OriginalEstimate]

measure. In the MDX query I needed to add a pair of calculated measures that would filter for the two work item type.

A a bit more digging I found the form that did what I needed, and ended up with the following form for the MDX in the calculated measures

MEMBER [Measures].[EstimatedWorkForTasks] AS '([Measures].[Microsoft_VSTS_Scheduling_OriginalEstimate], [Work Item].[System_WorkItemType].[Task])'

By editing the MDX in SQL Management Studio it was fair quicker to develop and debug

Once I was happy with the MDX, I could cut and pasted it back into Report Builder and fix the layout of the report. And all without using either IIF() or FILTER().

Another ALM/TFS focused blogger at Black Marble

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Robert Hancock, another one of Black Marble’s ALM consultants, has started blog technical tips on this blog server. You can find Robert’s new blog here or the aggregate feed of all Black marble bloggers here

Microsoft UK Techdays video’s available

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

The videos from the various Microsoft UK Techdays events can now be viewed at the UK TechDays site. This includes my session on ‘Virtualisation of the Test Environment’ and the joint one I did with James Mann on the new experience for developing SharePoint solutions in VS2010 from the Leeds event.

Speaking at Microsoft UK next week

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

I will be speaking at Microsoft UK’s ‘Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors’ event next Monday. I am one of four speakers, between us well all address a variety of subjects within ALM

Modern Software Delivery: The continuous delivery of high quality software - Colin Bird
Driving Quality Throughout the Application Lifecycle - Richard Erwin
Extending Testing into the Lab - Richard Fennell
The Secrets of Repeatable Success - Adam Gilmore

I believe there are still spaces available

ALM Ranger’s Build Customization Guidance has shipped

Anonymous — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

I am really please to say that the first ALM Rangers project I have been involved with, the Build Customization Guidance, has shipped.

The project had the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on lab guidance for the customization and deployment of Team Foundation Build 2010 activities such as versioning, code signing, and branching. You can find details at the Rangers blog or the project table of content

I have certainly learnt a good deal working on this projects, thanks to everyone who made it such a interesting experience. Hope anyone reading the materials find them as useful.