FTP Online has started a new Team System column written by me! I'll be writing about virtually anything that comes to mind or that you want me to write about! It's a twice monthly column and I'll be looking for some good article ideas from process and methodology to the technical nuts and bolts. I only have 800 words or less so they will only be point issues and not overly in-depth (unless I do a continuing series type of thing). You can view the first column on Test Driven Development in Team System today.

Today's chats were well attended, with many experts and well over a hundred guests. The quests came fast and furious, with some great answers given by the experts. It seems people are really anticipating Orcas (and Rosario) for those features that didn't make it into v1.

I have captured the entire transcripts (both expert and guest chats) in this PDF document (for the 10am PST chat) and this PDF document (for the 4pm PST chat).

Note: this is the raw content, copied and pasted from each chat, so you are getting it "as is".

When you're trying to edit an automated Team Build, you can really get stuck waiting long times for the builds to complete.  This can be very frustrating while you're going through a series of running a build, fixing an error, running a built, fixing an error...

You can really speed these steps up by following this guidance by Dave McKinstry.

Accentient is pleased to announce the hiring of Jeff Levinson, a fellow Team System MVP!

Jeff joins our team as a senior consultant, having just left The Boeing Company where he worked as a solution design & integration architect. Jeff is an experienced software developer and SDLC practitioner. Jeff holds the following certifications: MCSD, MCSD.NET, MCDBA, SCJP and Security+ and is the author of two books on .NET development. His latest book (co-author) is Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Apress 2006). He has presented at various conferences and user groups, and writes articles on all areas of .NET development.

We look forward to working with Jeff and benefiting from his vast knowledge.

Read more about Jeff on our Mentors page.

I've posted about this before, however, it's so important I'll repost.  If you're trying to create a listener web service for TFS events, don't start from scratch!  Use Howard van Rooijen's VS2005 template.  It will create the web services, along with the appropriate signatures, as well as convert the events to an object, so that you can effectively use it. 

Pack up your compilers and IDES, because it's camping time in Portland!

Portland Code Camp 3.0 is back May 19th and 20th!

Location: Washington State University - Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave, Vancouver, WA 98686

Visit the site for more information.

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...