This week Microsoft released the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – Project Server 2007 connector as a CodePlex project. The project has been up for a few weeks, but is now being broadly advertised.

The TFS-PS2007 connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities of TFS with Project Server 2007. It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution. Future versions of Team System will have native integration with Project Server, in the meantime this Connector solution is the best way to integrate the two Microsoft products. This solution builds on the previous PS2003 VSTS Connector, published on GotDotNet.

I apologize for the delay, but if you attended our PRCN05 pre-conference last week at Tech-Ed, you might be interested in downloading our demo files.

I just learned about this neat editor for creating and editing Windows Installer packages (.msi files) and merge modules (.msm files). Orca is just one of many cool installer tools by Microsoft. It provides a graphical interface for validation, highlighting the particular entries where validation errors or warnings occur. This KB255905 article explains more.

Orca is part of the platform SDK and locating the correct download was difficult - a lot of redirected pages and dead ends, but I found it as part of the Vista SDK download as well as the Windows Server 2003 SDK download. Once you install the SDK, look for Orca.msi and install it separately.

Here is a screenshot of running Orca on the Orca.msi file ...

In the process improvement goal setting post a few days back, I stressed the importance of making your goals specific (and thus measurable).  Randy Eppinger made a good comment, and I felt to make it a bit more public, I'd copy that comment to a new post.

That's good advice. I find it helpful to do both. We create high-level objectives of the sort you listed like, "Reduce the number of bugs being released", "Assimilate new team members more easily". Then we create a list of milestones related to one or more high-level objectives. One or more team members takes ownership of achieving milestones which are more specific like, "Research and purchase a good book on unit testing techniques", "Create a Continuous Integration build for all code branches", "Create the Visual Studio 2005 section of the coding conventions document".

His comment reveals something that I missed.  It's definitely possible to have both types of goal statements!  In fact, setting concise, specific milestones is an excellent approach.  As long as there is a visible, specific, MOTIVATING goal to move toward, you'll have more success in your process improvement.  Thanks, Randy!

If you're building web applications using Team Build, you'll often get an error saying that the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file is unavailable.  In theory, upgrading to Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1 on the build server should install it for you.  But I've now had two cases where it just didn't seem to work.  finding it online is pain in the rump, and I'm always forced to find a machine that has it to copy it from.  Thus, as a service to the community (and my future sanity), here's a copy for you to download.  Enjoy!

Microsoft.WebApplication.targets (4.28 KB)

"Reduce rework", "Hit scheduled release dates", "Improve developer productivity"...

We see these all the time as we work with companies on their process improvement initiatives.  Unfortunately, they all lack specificity and measurability.  Thus, they're both difficult to measure, and make lousy motivators.

Instead, make your goals specific.  TFS can help make the measurement of those goals easier or possible.  For instance, replace "Reduce rework" to "Reduce time spent on bug fixes to 25% of total effort.".  You could also use something such as "Reduce bug count to 15 per Scenario".  Now, even though some scenarios are larger than others, you have an average target you can hit.

Specific values are also motivating.  When you are trying to limit the number of bugs to 15 per scenario, as the number of bugs increases, there is psychological pressure (and motivation) to ensure that further scenario development is conducted more carefully (possibly with the introduction of unit testing).

Microsoft (and others) had announed that its Fall Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) would be October 2-5, in Los Angeles. Yesterday, they canceled the event and are in the process of rescheduling it.

From their site:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies.

The browser support out-of-the-box for Team Edition for Testers is pretty minimal. But, you can extend this support by adding your own browsers (common ones you'll probably want to add are IE7, Firefox and Opera and there are others you can probably think of). The files which provide the configuration for the browser types are stored in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Templates\LoadTest\Browsers. You will several files which end in the extension ".browser". These files simply contain the header information a browser sends with a request. The IE6.browser file looks like the following:

<Browser Name="Internet Explorer 6.0">
  <Headers>
    <Header Name="User-Agent" Value="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" />
    <Header Name="Accept" Value="*/*" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Language" Value="{{$IEAcceptLanguage}}" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Encoding" Value="GZIP" />
  </Headers>
</Browser>

If you aren't sure of what information to enter in this file, simply open up your favorite browser that isn't in the list and go to http://www.ranks.nl/tools/envtest.html and grab the appropriate values! Use the IE6.browser file as a template. For example, if you wanted to add support to test Opera you might add the following and save it as Opera.browser:

<Browser Name="Opera 8.0">
  <Headers>
    <Header Name="User-Agent" Value="Opera/8.00+(Windows+NT+5.1;+U;+en)" />
    <Header Name="Accept" Value="text/html, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-bitmap, */*" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Language" Value="en" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Encoding" Value="GZIP" />
  </Headers>
</Browser>

There are obviously other values you can place here and some of this will be dependent on your locale, plug-ins you have loaded and other environmental factors. Once you save this file, you should be able to go in and create a new load test and Opera 8.0 will now show up as an option in your browser mix list.

Learning a new language isn't always fun, especially Javascript.  Plus, when you're working in one language, it takes context switching to flip to another, even for a trivial task.  Nikhil Kothari, an architect on the Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft, has created something called Script#, which allows you to program in C# while compiling to Javascript/Ajax.

ZDnet has a good blog post on the importance of this technology, and a brief comparison with the Google version which compiles Java to Javascript.

John Paul Cook, a Microsoft MVP for Virtual Machines has an excellent article on VM Central on how to use Acronis to effectively compact your VPCs.  (The article also covers other areas of interest to VPC users.)

John is one of the few people in the MS community with a really firm grasp of virtualization technologies.  Keep an eye out for future articles!