Today Microsoft revealed that "Rosario" will be VSTS 2010. Not to amazing but it's great to see more of the official words getting out there. The 2010 release will be a huge step forward for the tools in the ALM space. The new architect tools look great, the build system will be improved, the tools for project management will (finally) get support for hierarchical structures, test management... The list just goes on and on...

The complete announcement can be found here.

And Brian Harry of course has some more to add about this in this post.

An updated CTP for VS 2010 will be released sometime soon. I'm really looking forward to PDC in a few weeks :-)

I just read this piece of good news: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc948977.aspx and in all the goodness one part especially caught my eyes:

As of October 1, users of 2008 Development Edition or Database Edition will have access to both products.

This I hope will finally boost the use of VSTS-DB, a great product that has been hard to use since not all developers have had the Database Edition as well. Now we can all create database projects in Visual Studio!

Microsoft released the first service pack for Visual Studio 2008 today. Download from the links below:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)
Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1

Read the details on what's new in SP1 here. Some of the Team System goodies include drag-and-drop support for adding files, version control of unbound files (not in the current solution) and noice and performance improvements in the team build reports.

And as usual, Brian Harry has a post with lots of detail about the service pack. I recommend you read the notes on TFS in particular.

Conchango, the creators of the Scrum process template, recently released a new tool for visualizing and managing work items in Team Foundation Server. With the Task Board for Team System it is possible to manage work items outside of the Team System tools using a stand-alone Windows application. The tool is currently in beta (beta 2 is due to be released on august 15) and requires TFS 2008 and v2 of the Conchange process template. The setup was a no-brainer and the tool is intuitive to use. Here's a taste of what it looks like:

Another option if you want this kind of tool but rather have it as a web application is to use the Scrum Dashboard, which is community tool you can get from Codeplex. Great add-on which is also based on the Conchango Scrum template.

The latest release of the TFS powertools has been released and can be downloaded here.

There are two things this time that got my attention;

• A UI for setting up alerts to TFS using an editor similar to the work item query editor. This is a really useful enhancement since most people want to automate tasks based on the event model in TFS.
• Support for TFS in Microsoft System Center. With a dedicated TFS pack it will now be possible to monitor TFS the same way as other application servers. This add-on will be released as a separate download following the existing release mechanism for SCOM management packs.

Brian Harry has written a good post on what else is included in this release.

Here's another question that I often get: How can I control which Team Projects a specific user can see in TFS?

A: In TFS 2008 this is the default behaviour! New projects will only be visible to the members of the project groups.

In TFS 2005 there's a different story. Here the behaviour is that all valid TFS users can see all projects. That of course won't give them rights to do things in the projects, but having a long list of projects can be confusing. The solution in this case is to create a role (i.e. "Denied users") with "View project-level information" set to "Deny".

One question I get quite often is how you can control access to the Team System Web Access client.

TSWA will use the permissions setup for a user in TFS. So if you're allowed to view reports or manage documents in Sharepoint then these features will be available to you in TSWA as well.

Now, in TSWA 2008 there is also a way to control which tabs a user is allowed to use. To setup access permissions, chose "Settings, Team Project, Access Restrictions" in the web client. A dialog like the one below is shown where you can configure permissions in TSWA similar to the rest of TFS.

When Nicole in the case above logs in to TSWA the UI will not allow her to work with the reports, source control or build tabs. Not bad but in my opinion it would have been even better if the tabs wasn't shown at all.

Conchango recently released v.2.1 of the popular Scrum process template. Mainly bugfixes in this release and it's possible to upgrade existing projects using an included utility. The process is straightforward for the latest releases, but when upgrading from 2.0 Beta 1 I've had to handle it manually (which is the way to do it). Below is some short notes of the installation procedure.

Upgrade 2.0 Beta 2 & RTM => 2.1

• Uninstall Scrum for Team System 2.0.
• Install Scrum for Team System 2.1.
• Upgrade existing projects to 2.1 using the ProjectUpgrade.exe as described here.

Upgrade 2.0 Beta 1 => 2.1

• Uninstall 2.0 and install 2.1.
• Upgrading projects using ProjectUpgrade.exe will not work, instead
  • Extract the work item type definitions from the process template.
  • Import the work items types (existing will be updated, bug will be added).
  • The "Sprint Retrospective" work item type has been renamed so the old one called "Sprint Retrospective Item" should be removed.
    • Use the Team Foundation Power tool tfpt.exe /DeleteWIT to remove the unwanted work item type.
  • Remove all template work item queries and add the ones from the new process template.
  • Remove all template reports and add the ones from the new process template.

Otherwise a great release of a great process template. Probably the best mapping of Scrum to Team System around.

Microsoft just released an update to the Team Foundation Server Power Tools.

My favorites this time:

• Support for custom work item controls in the Process Template Editor.
  
  I suggested this a while back at MS Connect and it's great to see that this has added to the tool.
  
  There's also a CodePlex project working on WI custom controls, WitCustomControls, that I've been involved in. The controls can be used as they are and the code is there too so it's easy to customize and create your own.
  
• TFSServerManager. A utility that will give you nice statistics of TFS usage.

Brian Harry has a complete post on feature in the march release here.

Download TFPT here.

Per at EPiServer has built a very nice project dashboard based on TFS and Conchango's Scrum project template. And it just the thing I would like to have/do but nerver got the time to... Great work!

The Dashboard features:

• Ajax-based web interface with support for Internet Explorer and Firefox
• All features are sprint-centric for daily work in a sprint
• Create, add and update product backlogs
• Create and update sprint backlog items (task, impediment, bug)
• Colorized sprint backlog items to visually see progress and unplanned work
• Import bugs from another project for maintenance tasks
• Statistics and sprint burndown chart easily visible for the whole team
• RSS feed for syndication of changes in product backlog

The dashboard is available as a shared project on CodePlex.