Yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of the RTM version of Hyper-V, the new virtualization component of Windows Server 2008.

I'm a huge fan of Virtual PC. I use it more or less every day for development tasks and training because it's so easy to use. Having a way to deal with different environments without messing up your main configuration is priceless.

I've tried to use Virtual Server much the same way on a server scale but compared to VM-Ware it's quite limiting when it comes to guest OS management, such as resource sharing, support for physical hardware (where's the USB support?) and image handling. Hyper-V will likely change this so that we now can use the same infrastructure for virtual images both on desktops and servers.

And as for Team Foundation Server? It's supported as well! TFS 2008 still requires 32-bit OS on the application tier but a 32-bit OS can of course be hosted in Hyper-V on a 64-bit system. Brian Harry wrote about the implications of using TFS with Hyper-V technology in this post.

I've concidered using Windows Server as the OS for my laptop for a while. With Hyper-V now out the door my next laptop will run Windows Server 2008!

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.

Now the week of the event has passed. We had a busy three-day tour of Göteborg, Malmö and Stockholm.

The presentation can be downloaded here.

I got a number of interesting questions and I thought I'd share some of them here.

Q: Can I use TFS from Visual Studio Professional?
A: Yes, Visual Studio Standard Edition and up will work fine with Team Explorer. The Team Editions include a TFS CAL, the other will require a separate license.

Q: How can I exclude certain files from source control in TFS?
A: When you add files to projects under source control you can undo the newly added files from the pending changes list and it will not be under source control. Should you later change your mind then exclude and include the file and it will be added to TFS.

Q: Will my check-in policies for TFS 2005 work in TFS 2008?
A: Short story: check-in policies are compiled against a particular version of the TFC objects and will therefore only work with that version. More info here and on the forums here.

Q: Is there any good articles on moving from Visual Source Safe to TFS?
A: Steve St. Jean has written a good piece on this and it can be downloaded here.

Q: Is it possible to merge two changesets?
A: No, each changeset is unique and its content cannot be modified.

Ehh, well, since the presentation was non-exising I thought I'd just post some notes and references to the stuff we looked at in the SweNug talk this week.

VSTS 2008 - News for the architect
Conform to WSDL: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsarch/archive/2007/06/20/conform-to-wsdl-new-feature-in-team-architect-orcas.aspx
Top-down system design: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsarch/archive/2007/08/30/top-down-system-design-by-delegating-behavior.aspx
Web application projects
Team Architect Power Tools: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsarch/archive/2007/08/15/team-architect-power-tools.aspx

VSTS 2008 - News for the developer
Code metrics: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb385910.aspx
Performance run comparison: http://blogs.msdn.com/ianhu/archive/2007/04/03/comparing-performance-reports-with-the-visual-studio-team-system-profiler.aspx
Hot path: http://blogs.msdn.com/ianhu/archive/2007/09/14/pinpoint-a-performance-issue-using-hotpath-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx
Code analysis Policy improvements
Unit test in professional edition
Improved unit test data binding: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182528.aspx
Test list management in professional edition

VSTS 2008 - News for the tester
Auto cleanup of results: http://blogs.msdn.com/nnaderi/archive/2007/05/14/new-unit-testing-features-in-orcas-part-2.aspx
Load modeling
New load test views
Performance improvements: http://blogs.msdn.com/nnaderi/archive/2007/05/11/new-unit-testing-features-in-orcas-part-1.aspx
Unit test in professional edition
Improved test data binding
Test list management in professional edition
Web test recorder support for Ajax: http://blogs.msdn.com/billbar/archive/2007/06/14/new-load-test-and-web-test-features-in-the-orcas-release.aspx
Auto extract dynamic parameters

New in TFS 2008
http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/08/08/final-tfs-2008-feature-list.aspx

Support for SharePoint 3.0 / 2007

Team Build
• Build definitions
• Continuous integration builds
• Scheduled builds: http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2007/02/07/you-can-schedule-builds-in-orcas.aspx
• Build Queuing
• Drop management

Source Control
• Destroy
• Get latest on checkout
• Annotate
• Folder diff
• Offline support

Performance, scalability, licensing
Improved Web Access

The Swedish ALM Live events will continue this year as well and I've got the opportunity to give the first set of talks. My last ALM Live presentation was about using the new source control system in TFS. This talk will pick up on that subject and go more in-depth on how to actually migrate to TFS. We'll look at some strategies, compare features in other popular SCC systems and perform a migration from Visual Source Safe to TFS.

We'll visit Göteborg, Malmö and Stockholm this time and the dates are February 5-7.

The complete agenda and registration for the event is here.

Welcome!

It's time for a new SweNug event. This time Joachim Rossberg and I will go through what's new in Team System 2008:

Starta det nya året med ett seminarium om Visual Studio Team System 2008. Kom och lyssna på Mathias Olausson och Joachim Rossberg när de berättar (nästan) allt som ni behöver veta om Visual Studio Team System 2008.

Datum:   15/1 2008

Tid:           17.00 --->

Plats:       Informator Göteborg