It’s released, but not yet available for MSDN subscribers. That said, you can download the Trial Edition and get your hands on it. My understanding is that you can product key activate it later, when it shows up on MSDN.

Click here For more information on Express Studio 3, including a top 10 list of features. I’m most excited about #7 …

Team Foundation Server Integration – share your Expression Studio project files with those of your colleagues by using check in and check out functionality with Microsoft Team Foundation Server integration.

When setting up new virtual machines for Team Foundation Server 2010, I find myself having to manually create the four amigos: TFSSERVICE, TFSREPORTS, TFSBUILD, and WSSSERVICE (per the installation guide). Needless to say, this gets quite old, so I set out to automate this process.

First, I checked out Grant Holliday’s post from 2007 on Hands Free TFS Installation. I was only interested in the part where he creates the accounts and sets the permissions. His approach uses a (.bat) batch file, so he’s limited to using “NET USER” commands such as “net user TFSSERVICE * /DOMAIN /ADD /EXPIRES:NEVER”. I wanted to specify account description and have more control, so I decided to integrate his ideas with mine into a (.vbs) VBScript file. I also added code to create groups, such as the TFS Administrators group, which I always suggest having.

1. Download my script

It’s at the bottom of this post.

2. Obtain Microsoft’s ntrights.exe utility

It’s part of the free download of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. Download the tools and then install. Since you only need the ntrights.exe tool, it seems silly to install everything else, especially when I try to keep my VMs as small as possible. I used a snapshot VM so I could revert back, then installed the tools, copied out the one file, and reverted. If you trust me, then you can just download the ntrights.zip at the bottom (just don’t tell Microsoft).

3. Customize the script

You may want to change the computer name, password, and account names. These are easy search/replace operations.

4. Keep the files together

I opted to put the tfsaccounts.vbs and ntrights.exe in the root of C:\Program Files for simplicity and to not clutter up my C:\ root folder.

Attachments: tfsaccounts.zip, ntrights.zip

Windows Update dropped the SP2 update at my doorstep yesterday.

Since I’m always nervous about patching a server running Team Foundation Server, I checked with the VSTS product group.

Brian Harry indicated that installing SP2 on a TFS box will be just fine.

Happiness.

Join us tomorrow (Tuesday, June 23rd) at 2pm MST for the following webcast:

First Look: Visual Studio Team System 2010

Microsoft has been working hard on their next generation of Visual Studio Team System. The 2010 version will deliver new capabilities for everyone on a project, including architects, developers, project managers and testers.

Since beta 1 released, the experts at Accentient have been hard at work, putting it to the test, and demonstrating it to our clients. We would like to share some of this insight with you.

Join us for a tour of the marquee features and improvements found in Visual Studio Team System 2010:

• Separate and improved install and configuration process
• Team project collections
• Architecture explorer
• UML support
• Hierarchical work items
• Improved test case management
• Source control branch visualization
• Workflow-based build
• Test and Lab Manager
• UI testing

Whether you’ve already adopted Team System, or have been waiting for the critical “third version” to be released before you commit to trying it, you should attend this webinar, see it firsthand, and get your questions answered.

There are a few seats left. Please be sure to register to attend.

Last week I gave a presentation on integration and migration options for IBM ClearCase and ClearQuest. Here are some bookmarks to some various tools and articles that came up:

• Blog post: Migrating ClearCase Branches to TFS
• ClearQuest Hooks and Scripts
• Forum post: ClearCase versions supported
• Forum post: How to manually sync TFS with CQ
• Forum post: Should CQ and TFS be integrated
• IBM Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest Sales Discussion Guide
• TFS 2005 vs. Clear Case
• Walkthrough: Migrating CQ Work Items to TFS

I hope this helps anyone who is looking into to this.

Finally, there’s something to do in Southern California besides surfing, celeb-watching, and working on your tan. Mike Vincent, a VSTS MVP, has taken the lead on setting up this new user group.

The kickoff meeting is this month, June 23rd and I’ll be presenting a grab-bag of topics on best practices. Time permitting, I’ll show a bit of VSTS 2010 beta 1.

So, if you are in the SoCal area, be sure to come to support this user group, and attend the first meeting.

http://www.socalteamsystem.org

I’ve been getting asked more and more about IBM’s CC and CQ products, and not just how to migrate away from them to TFS. Some clients are wanting to know why Team Foundation Server is better. I think it’s obvious, but sometimes have difficulty putting it into an executive summary with all of the details.

I happened upon this document today, which gives an overview of IBM Rational, ClearCase, ClearQuest, pricing, licensing, competitive messaging, and other resources.

Not quite as gritty as a true “Battle Card” used internally by Microsoft’s sales team, but this discussion guide does provide some good information.

I ran across this document today, which details out Microsoft’s virtualization strategy on implementing 64-bit (Hyper-V) virtualization in the classrooms. As virtual machines do more, and require more resources, so must the hardware/software requirements of the training centers be updated.

In a nutshell, here are the requirements for HL6:

Hardware

· 64-bit Intel Virtualization Technology or AMD Virtualization processor (2.8 GHz dual core or better recommended)

· Dual 120 GB hard disks 7200 RPM SATA or better (striped)

· 4 GB RAM expandable to 8 GB or higher

· DVD (dual layer recommended)

· Network adapter

· Sound card

· Video adapter aero-capable recommended

· Super VGA monitor (17 inch/ 43 cm)

Software

· 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition

· Hyper-V role configured

· Microsoft Learning Lab Launcher – Hyper-V version

Ok, I’m on a Microsoft Research kick today. I admit it. Some of you know what I’m talking about – you find one cool project and that leads to another one, and another one and before you know it you’re finding and reading a paper titled “Mining Software Effort Data: Preliminary Analysis of Visual Studio Team System Data”.

It seems that some really smart people on the VSTS product team got together to analyze actual VSTS data and prove that (in software development) smaller features can be estimated more accurately than larger ones. In other words, there is a positive correlation between actual estimation error with feature size.

Hmm. Now I could insert a wise crack here, but I won’t. Think about it. This is empirical evidence based on actual data. This rocks! I see this as the beginning of many successful data mining adventures of the TFS warehouse.

Basically the research focused on the actual development of VSTS 2008 and the product group’s predicted effort estimates for 55 specific features. They then updated the actual and remaining effort tallies throughout the development process and then collected the data directly from TFS, performing statistical analyses to identify estimation error and relationships between error and effort metrics.

I was talking TDD with Doug Seven at Tech-Ed last week. He gave a great presentation on Agile Development with Team System 2010. Afterward we were brainstorming on ways to get people to write unit tests. We both agreed that it has to be understood and driven by management. While we may never get management to understand the intricacies of unit testing or the discipline of TDD, but we may be able to appeal to their desire for software quality. On that point, Doug guided me towards this document on Microsoft Research from January 2008.

The authors (Nachiappan Nagappan, E. Michael Maximilien, Thirumalesh Bhat, and Laurie Williams) conducted case studies with three development teams at Microsoft and one at IBM that have adopted TDD. The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not use the TDD practice. Subjectively, the teams experienced a 15–35% increase in initial development time after adopting TDD.

Finally, some empirical evidence supporting the practice of TDD.

I met up with the Altova folks last week at Tech-Ed and asked about any cool improvements or features in their 2009 version of DiffDog It turns out there are two new, albeit surprising, features in there: compare and merge (the contents of) database tables.

It looks pretty good, and very similar to Microsoft and Red Gate’s products – just surprising to see it in an XML compare/diff tool.