It's time again for me to get on the ALM Live tour. This time the topic is around how we can use TFS to improve the quality of our development project. In particular we'll look how a continuous integration process can help us build software with higher quality by integrating often and by providing transparency in the development process.

Key topics this time:

• Build automation including continuous integration.
• Integration of tests and code analysis in the builds.
• Automated generation of release notes.
• Generation of key metrics from TFS

We'll also look at how status and metrics can be communicated in the project using reports and dashboards.

The event will be in Stockholm, Malmö and Göteborg as usual and the dates are November 25-27.

More info about the event, including registration, here. See you!

The Team System team has released a new version of the power tools for TFS. This is a pretty big release with lots of good stuff (again).

My personal favorites this time are:

• Source Control Shell Extension. The source control folders can be mapped directly to Windows directories, which gives you an efficient way to perform version control tasks without starting Visual Studio. Users of Tortoise for SVN should now feel confortable with TFS. Here's a snapshot of the shell integration:

• Team Members. A new folder in the Team Explorer that lets you view and interact with people on the team.
• Improved search in source control. It's now possible to search of files based on dates, comments, check-in notes and more. A sample screen:

Download the power tools here.

Read more about the release in Brian Harry's post.

As of TFS 2008 SP1 the Team System Web Access (TSWA) SP1 supports multiple languages. And as expected that support covers the larger languages, to which unfortunatly Swedish didn't qualify as one.

I've had a couple of customers asking if it's possible to get TSWA in Swedish and so I looked around and found a project on Codeplex that aims to add additional localization support for TSWA, the Team System Web Access Translation Project managed by Marcel de Vries (Team System MVP). Apparently I've got too much free time so I decided to join in and contribute to the project with the Swedish translations. The project is getting closer to a v1 release and I'll get back with more details when it does.

Languages Currently in Development in this project:

Dutch
Portuguese (pt-pt)
Portuguese (pt-br)
Norwegian
Turkish
Danish
Swedish

Base Language already available from Microsoft for TSWA

English (US)
Chinese Simplified
Chinese Traditional
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Japanese
Korean

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.