Back from an intensive week at Microsoft PDC08. It's been a great week with lots of interesting keynotes and sessions and bit different PDC than the others I've been at.

I was mainly coming to the PDC to get all the latest news about Visual Studio Team System and the Software + Services platform. I'm got more than I was asking for... I'm really impressed of the breadth of products we were shown! I mean, all the new stuff in VSTS 2010 would easily fill a week of content. But that was just a part of the puzzle... The big topic this time - Windows Azure, or the "cloud" OS, shows what powerful solutions a big player like Microsoft can come up with. Not just is it a new OS for the cloud space, it IS the cloud as well. With Microsoft backing up a platform with a hosting environment, the S+S vision may now be closer than I'd expected. As a PDC attendee we can now all go and create services in Azure and start getting familiar with the idea of having our software running outside of our own datacenters. A both compelling and somewhat scaring possibility.

As for VSTS 2010; much of the new stuff had already been revealed by Brian Harry and others a few weeks back. It's great to have some time to listen to the product team present their solutions. The 2010 is an impressive release. There are so many new features it almost feels like a new product. But the bulk of the new stuff goes into areas where the product has suffered from the "v1" syndrome and it feels good to have those areas covered as well. I'm talking about improvements in project management (yes, now we'll get those hierarchical work items), simplified reporting, vastly improved tools for test management including a new stand-alone tool called "camano" and finally a much improved architecture edition with both architectural visualization tools as well as full UML 2.1.2 support.

Apart from all good content it was really nice to have time to catch up with old friends, discuss the impressions with other colleagues and the opportunity to talk to the people writing the software we use every day.

Finally, and a bit surprising, the next PDC (2009) was also announced at the last day of PDC08.  

Below are references to some of the new stuff presented at the PDC:

Visual Studio Team System 2010

• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel 9
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Overview
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP)

Windows Azure

• Windows Azure, Microsoft.com
• Azure Services Platform, MSDN
• Introducing The Azure Services Platform, David Chappell

Dublin

• Windows Server Application Server Roadmap
• Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation 4.0, Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 and Windows Server “Dublin”
• Oslo, WCF, WF & Dublin PDC Bits Review, Alan Smith

I'm (still) getting the question about how to use TFS from VS 2003 and other Visual Source Safe compatible environments so I thought I'd summarize what's required in this post. In short we use a provider for TFS that implements the old Visual Source Safe API (MSSCCI). When used, the environment that uses the MSSCCI provider can use TFS instead. The integration is quite seamless but when you need to switch between environments (TFS to VSS) then the Windows Registry is used and there's no integrated support for changing between the different providers. To do so you'll use one of the tools at the bottom of the post.

The MSSCCI provider for TFS can be downloaded from here.

Ed Hintz (MSFT) has a good post on how to the integration works here.

Finally Vertigo has written a good post on how to use the TFS integration in VS 2003.

Tools
Here are some handy utilities to swith between the different source control providers installed:

http://www.sitedev.com/sccswitcher/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/sccswitcher.aspx
http://weblog.kilic.net/tools/SCPSelector/

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".

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!