Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the in the Visual Studio code name “Orcas” Beta 1 releases for Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.

Join the chat on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time | Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Yesterday, Microsoft's Developer Division (DevDiv) released beta 1 of Visual Studio "Orcas", which corresponds with the Connected Systems Division’s beta 1 release of the .NET Framework 3.5. Soma blogged this yesterday morning. Visual Studio "Orcas" enables developers and development teams to rapidly create Software + Services on the latest platforms, including the Web, Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and Windows Server "Longhorn".

As usualy, one of the most common questions about Orcas is, "When will it ship?". Well, here's Microsoft's official/public timeline:

Orcas Beta 1 will ship "Before TechEd Orlando in early June." - done! (see below)

Orcas Beta 2 will ship "In the North American summer."

Orcas RTM will ship "Before the end of the year."

BTW you can download the ready-to-go VPC images here (Team Suite) and here (TFS) of Orcas.

If you'd like to file bugs in TFS using a web page, perhaps for users that don't have VS2005 or the Team Explorer installed, there's a pretty clean example located here.

Now, I hear everyone crying out about Microsoft's purchase of TeamPlain and the web access available though that.  (The version one of the TeamPlain addin is now freely available for download here.)  I'm the first to admit that the TeamPlain solution is likely the best, however, there are times when you need to create your own solution.  And the primary reason for that is 'multiplexing', or supporting a large number of users who do not have TFS Client Access Licenses (CALs), by dropping everything into a single database, then having a triage individual, who does have a call, make the final decision to upload to the TFS server.  (More on that in a future post...)

Hallelujah!  You can now use WSS 3.0 with TFS 1.0 SP1!  This is great news!!!  For those of you who haven't seen WSS 3.0 as compared to WSS 2.0, you're in for a wonderful treat!  WSS 2.0 was missing that one critical tool that greatly assists the agile software development process - the wiki.  And WSS 3.0 plugs that hole!

Brian Keller, of Microsoft, has the BETA guidance for WSS 3.0 with TFS SP1 for the port on his blog.  Don't miss it!  As for right now, I'd recommending holding off on production server deployment until a few rounds of first adopters work out any possible kinks.  But if you want to be on that first round...   

Just to catch you up, Microsoft's Team Foundation Server v1.0 (released March 2006) only works with WSS 2.0. WSS 2.0 is the old version. WSS 3.0 is the new version, and launched with Microsoft Office 2007. It's full of great new features, but alas TFS won't integrate with it naturally. Even installing TFS SP1 won't get you there.

Thanks to Brian Keller, a Technical Evangelist for Team System, who has published a document on how to integrate TFS with WSS 3.0. As Brian explains, keep in mind that this is a "release candidate" of guidance that will eventually be posted to MSDN.

Now I've heard of a lot of things, but an RC of a guidance document?

One of the best things software development shops can do to improve productivity is to set Outlook to only check email once every hour (or 30 minutes at least).  This is because people tend to take quite a bit of time to get back to difficult tasks.  Email, and IMs, are difficult to ignore when that little "pellet dispenser" pops up on the lower left hand side of your screen.  And once your mind strays it's hard to get back on task.

A recent research project reported in the New York Times (link - free registration required), bears this out.  Here's the money quote:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

“If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

So, turn off that email while you're coding!  (And driving!)

Last year, at PDC, I sat down with Adam Cogan, of SSW, during an MSDN magazine party.  Feeling the guilty pleasure of totally geeking out while a decent party was going on, Adam led a group of geeks through some of his very cool software tools.  Somewhere during the discussion, he mentioned that he deploys his unit test, along with a test runner, with his shrinkwrapped application.  That got my attention, since I'd never thought of them like that.  I called him on it, and he explained.  Now, there seems to be a visceral reaction from folks against the idea.  Here's WHY it makes sense to deploy unit tests and a test runner with you application:

1. Customer - "Your stupid app lost all my contact data!"
2. Help Desk - "Maybe I can help.  Go to Help -> Analyze"
3. Customer - "OK.  I see this list of green and red dots with text."
4. Help Desk - "Can you read me the line next to the first red dot?"
5. Customer - "It says 'Can't find database at C:\myapp\contacts.mdb'"
6. Help Desk - "Hmm...  Can you browse to that directory?"
7. Customer - "No, I deleted it to have room for more mp3's"
8. Help Desk - "Oh...  That's a file required for our app to run.  Did you subscribe to our backup service?"
9. Customer - "Yes."
10. Help Desk "Good, go to Tools -> Options -> Restore Contact..."

You get the idea.  It rocks for troubleshooting those pesky support calls from customers.  For a lot more information, and a very nice screenshot, see Adam Cogan's original posting on this topic!  You can find the specific recommendation in his menu unit tests best practice. (While you're there, check out the rest of his best practices, he has a huge number of great ideas.)

Unfortunately, you cannot ship your Team System unit tests with your application.  I know there's an NUnit to VSTS Unit Test converter.  Does anyone know if VSTS Unit Tests can be converted to NUnit or MbUnit unit tests, so that all of us using VSTS Unit Tests can implement this best practice?

UPDATE:  Adam Cogan claims he got the idea from James Newkirk (of NUnit fame).  That may be the case, but I'll have to credit Adam.  He's got so many best practices on his site (see this rule that covers shipping unit tests for an example) that if he didn't get the idea from Newkirk, he likely would have thought of it himself!

UPDATE TWO:  This IS Adam's idea!  James simply wanted a distributable test harness for developers to use!  I misunderstood his first comment to me!  (By the way, if you have comments on this post, or any other, please send email to steve+comments[at]accentient.com.  We've had to disable comments until we find a way to more effectively eliminate comment spam.)

More fun with Vista.  I love the OS, and there's so much to recommend it, but I keep running into WEIRD problems!  Here's another one...  I like to listen to DotNetRocks, Hanselminutes, and other podcasts during my commute to and from client sites.  They offer downloads in both WMA and MP3 formats.  I've generally used MP3, but thought, "Hey, I should switch to WMA, since that's native to Windows Media.  Unfortunately, when I tried to drag any WMA files onto Windows Media 11 in Vista, it won't allow me to drop them onto the 'To Burn List', or add them any other way I was able to see.  However, MP3 files can be dragged onto the burn list easily.  Weird.  So, I guess it's back to MP3s. 

NOTE:  For those of you writing to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it so that it works, I appreciate it.  However, my main complaint isn't that I can't spend 30 minutes (or even 10) trying to figure it out and making it work, it's taht Vista/WM11 seems to choke on native files, but easily support MP3s.

PEX = Program EXploration (a Microsoft Research project). I'm not really sure what this is, but a fellow RD, Barry Gervin, pointed it out to some of us MVPs recently after he visited a Microsoft Research "science fair".

Apparently, PEX automatically generates unit tests, allowing developers to find bugs early. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs. Sounds too good to be true, but since it will enable "a new development experience" in Visual Studio Team System, I should probably keep an eye on it.

Maybe this will keep the TDD purists off of VSTS' back.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to recognize a couple of cool 2007 Jolt Award winners ...

• Microsoft and the VSTS/Database Professionals product group for "Database Engines and Data Tools" (read more here and here)
• Scott Ambler for his awesome book, Refactoring Databases.
• stpBA Storyboarding for VSTS 

In fact, here are all the winners.

I've been in Orlando this week, speaking at SQL Connections and have been derelict in my blogging duties, especially with regard to VSTS.

• Microsoft announced on Monday that they had acquired DevBiz (the company that produces TeamPlain), which has been the leader in browser-based access to Team Foundation Server, further boosting cross-platform access (and adoption). TeamPlain Web Access also enables a peripheral team member to browse project information and manipulate work items, source code, etc. I believe the new, official name will become "Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access" (another mouthful). This acquisition also means that we will get to use TeamPlain for FREE (assuming we have a proper client access license for TFS). Read more about the acquisition on Brian Harry's blog and Microsoft PressPass.
  
  
• Microsoft published their Visual Studio Team System "Future Releases" roadmap, even beyond Orcas. So now, we can all speak the words "Rosario" in public. Rosario is the codename for the version of VSTS beyond Orcas. The roadmap is very thorough, even listing service packs and power tools, so you know exactly what delivery vehicle your feature or fix will be arriving in.
  
  
• Gert Drapers (the data dude) announced Service Release (SR) 1 for VSTS Edition for Database Professionals. He says that it's "in the works" and will be published sometime in Q2 of 2007 (let's hope April). He lists a few of the fixes and features that will be in the SR in a recent blog posting.
  
  
• Yesterday, Microsoft announced that unit testing will become a feature of the Professional edition of Visual Studio Orcas. This has been a passionately-requested feature by everyone in the world not running Dev, Test, or Team Suite editions. Finally, everyone who has Professional edition and up will be able to write and run unit tests. What about code coverage, that's still a question.
  
  
• The Patterns and Practices team has released updated prescriptive guidance on VSTS. JD Meiers lists many of the improvements on a blog post and you can find the guidance itself on CodePlex.
  
  
• Speaking of guidance, Microsoft recently published a 40-page branching guidance document which does a very good job of explaing branching and merging strategies for various size teams.