It looks like I'll be speaking at BASTA! in a few weeks.

I'll be delivering two regular sessions:

• Team System Best Practices (Mar 1, 8:30AM - 9:30AM)

• Customizing and Extending Team Edition for Database Professionals (Mar 1, 3:15PM - 4:15PM)

And one full-day workshop:

• From Zero to Team System (In 5 Days) (Mar 2, all day)

Thanks to Brian Harry and team for releasing the latest version of the provider.

The enhancements in this latest release include:

• Enable handling branched solutions in Visual Studio 2003
• Fixed issues to enable provider to support TOAD for SQL Server 2.0
• Enhanced the "Choose Folder in Team Foundation Server" dialog
• Fixed bug which prevented Properties Dialog from displaying local path
• Work Items Query list in the Checkin Dialog is loaded and saved on the disk
• "Get" operation performance improvements
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

Download the new provider here, and remember it is for use by anyone who owns a Team Foundation Server Client Access License (CAL).

If you're upgrading your TFS with SP1 (which you should) and you're using the Workgroup edition, there's a gotcha if you already are using all 5 allowed people.  Basically, you'll have to remove on of the users, do the upgrade, then add the user back in.  Dave Glover has a good post you'll want to read before you do the upgrade.  You can find his post here.  Happy upgrading!

Some of you have been beta testing it and, thanks in part to your hard work, it's ready for prime-time ... before the holidays!

Click here to learn more, and download SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, Team Foundation Server, and/or the Express editions. In addition, you can download Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta.

Spread the word!

We got spammed on our comments, and so we've disabled comments on the blog.  Soon, we may put up an authorization scheme so that we aren't hammered by bogus comments.  But, for now, comments are disabled.  In lieu of comments, please send emails to myself.  My address, which you'll have to normalize from the awkward way I'm writing it here, is steve_nospam at accentient dot com.  (Simply delete the _nospam from my name, and send the emails to steve@..., thanks)

We're about to redo the Team System Widgets page, and are looking for any suggestions on improvements.  Some things we'd like to add are comments on each widget, and an icon designating which ones are still 'works in progress'.  Any other ideas?  Tags?  Let us know!

Microsoft will be holding the next Professional Developers Conference (PDC) October 2-5, 2007 in Los Angeles, with two days of pre-conference on September 30 and October 1.  Save the date!

The PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. PDC 2007 attendees will have the opportunity to access new code, learn about the latest Microsoft product offerings and hear from Microsoft executives about the various platform developments.

Click here for more information.

Or that's what they say, anyway!  Martin Woodward ran across this site, and shot us an email.  Interesting!    It's a direct copy/paste of the html from our widgets page (prior to a recent update).  I don't see any attribution, but it's in a language that doesn't display on my computer, so I wouldn't know for sure.  It's actually good to see that people are using the site.

By the way, if you haven't seen Martin's VSTS blog, it's time you do!  His post on measurement is one of my favorites!  You can find it here.  He's a must have on your blog roll!

Bookmark this page. It contains the starting point for the V1 (RTM) version of the DB Professional documentation.

This edition became available last Thursday on MSDN. Hazzah!

I've noticed when installing the edition, as well as the CTPs, that it also installs the "ProjectAggregator" ...

A quick search of the forums, finds a post by Robert Merriman (MS) explaining what the ProjectAggregator is ...

"We use the Visual Studio ProjectAggregator to integrate our package into Visual Studio. The ProjectAggregator is from the VSIP SDK and here is some information from the April 2006 readme file for the VSIP SDK:

There is a new ProjectAggregator2 MSI for project systems to leverage. A new aggregator (ProjectAggregator2) was added to the Visual Studio SDK to replace the following two aggregators:

• ProjectAggregator: included with Visual Studio 2005, used for project flavors (also known as project subtypes)
• NativeHierarchyWrapper: included in previous SDK CTPs, used by the MPF project samples

In addition to solving the problems the NativeHierarchyWrapper solved (source code control support for projects implemented in managed code), this new aggregator solve a limitation of the original ProjectAggregator (which did not allow for multiple levels of flavoring)."

 

Bill Essary, software architect at Microsoft just posted this MSDN article on new team project limit and monitoring recommendations for Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.

The article includes a downloadable Excel spreadsheet (TeamProjectLimits.xls) containing experimental data which you can use to estimate the maximum number of team projects per server when you use customize work item types.