10:35 AM (Los Angeles)

A fictitious developer, from the fictitious company "Fourth Coffee" is demonstrating the new, agile development features in Visual Studio 2008. She's showing off how to manage team development projects (a.k.a. team projects and work items), giving her tasks to make some changes to her code. Mostly she is showing off the split-screen editor, synchronization of code and designer, integrated design tools, and the new JavaScript debugger.

Oops, she just called it "Team Services" as she closed out her work item. Well, we get the idea.

I know. I know. This doesn't sound like a very interesting post, but it saved me time, and hopefully it can save you some too.

When you install Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft creates a "Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt" shortcut, under that program group.

I like to take this shortcut and drop it on my Quick Launch toolbar:

The problem is that when you install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools (or other new command line utilities) you need to put them in the path.

Well, if you look at the file the shortcut calls, it's vcvarsall.bat, but don't bother editing that file because it calls vcvars32.bat, but don't bother editing that file, because it calls vsvars32.bat. If you go ahead and edit that file, you can find where the PATH is getting set, and add the Power Tools path to it:

@set PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\VCPackages;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools;%PATH%

Last week I had a chance to meet some of the brains behind gridGISTICS - a .NET development company in Atlanta that gets it. Not only are they up to speed on the latest .NET 3.x technologies, but they have some killer products as well.

The one that struck me as the coolest was their Aware Server product, which is a grid-computing based deployment and management environment. In other words, the missing pieces to Team Foundation Server's build and (ahem) deploy automation. Packaging up applications by system and version into manifests, these binaries can be automatically deployed, registered, launched, and monitored by various Aware Agents installed around a company's environment. From the development side, they provide many Visual Studio 2008 templates and add-ins to help generate Aware-compatible applications very quickly.

Follow their story here.

Now the Team Foundation Server 2008 supports WSS 3.0 as well as MOSS, I'm even more interested in what the differences are - more than just "one is free, and one is not".

I found a couple of good resources. The first one is a page that discusses "which SharePoint technology is right for you?" and the second one, is a condensed Excel download of the comparisons.

So, pop quiz time ...

Q. Which SharePoint supports Mobile Devices (simplified text-only format)? (choose all that apply)

A. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
B. SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
C. Forms Server 2007
D. SharePoint Server 2007 (Standard)
E. SharePoint Server 2007 (Enterprise)

Man, I need to keep a closer eye on the work product over at .NET Rocks. I had meant to link up this transcript last Summer, but I dropped the ball. Apologies.

So, what this was was a VSTS panel discussion at Tech-Ed in Orlando last June, with Mike Azocar, Steven Borg, Doug Seven, Joel Semeniuk, and the hosts Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin.

Here's the panel (with Barry Gervin running the microphone)

And some of the audience (you can see Rob Caron and Mickey Gousset in the back).

There's some pretty good questions in there, especially those asked by yours truly!

Microsoft announced today that PDC 2008 is on!

October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conferences October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your calendars and save the date. More information coming soon.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008

Come chat with the Visual Studio Team System group on Wednesday, December 5th.

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

There will be two sessions that day:

• 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time (Add to Calendar)
• 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time (Add to Calendar)

Hmmm ... it still has that fresh .ISO smell.

Seems that we'll have something extra to be thankful for this week. VSTS 2008 Team Suite is available for download today!

I hope you are an MSDN subscriber, so you can access the subscriber downloads.

I just came across this download at Microsoft. It provides an introduction to the concepts and step by step instructions for creating and customizing TFS reports.

The zip file contains instructional PDF documents as well as several sample reports.