The Caffeinated Geek

Presenting at QAI TesTrek 09 in Toronto this week

Aaron Kowall — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:13:39 GMT

I’m presenting 2 topics this week at the QAI Toronto TesTrek Symposium.

My first session is Wednesday and is about Testing in a SOA World. I’ll cover some of the challenges with testing Service Oriented Architectures as well as some techniques and tools that assist.

My second session is Exploratory Testing with Agile in Visual Studio 2010 where I’ll delve into the techniques of Exploratory Testing and how the new test tooling in Visual Studio 2010 helps improve the productivity and maturity of Exploratory Testing.

Give me shout if you will be there.

Technorati Tags: TesTrek,SOA,Exploratory Testing,VS2010

Invited to present at MS TFS All Hands meeting

Aaron Kowall — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:04:18 GMT

While in Redmond last week I was invited to attend and present at the TFS All Hands meeting. What a lot of brain power in one place (actually 2 places; North Carolina and Redmond.) I guess they usually try to get a customer share their real world experience with the product with the development team.

I was given the opportunity to discuss some of what we see as the Hits for TFS 2010, what we still see as gaps and to do a demonstration of the Telerik Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard that Imaginet developed.

The TFS team seemed to like what we had done and agreed with the gaps we set out to fill.

Special shout out to Charles Sterling and Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson for inviting me.

Technorati Tags: TFS,WIM

New version of TFS Work Item Manager / Project Dashboard with Iteration Planning Tool

Aaron Kowall — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:04:46 GMT

Today Telerik released our Beta 2 version of our FREE and popular Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard Tooling.

There are a bunch of bug fixes (it was a Beta 1 after all) that have been made and one exciting new feature.

We now have a way to assist with Iteration Planning. You choose a query (whatever you want) of the work items you want to schedule into Iterations or Sprints. You choose which Iterations you want to do allocation for, what your effort capacity is and we provide a drag-and-drop mechanism to fill your iteration buckets. We keep finding that it’s the simple things that have immense value. There was no great interface for doing this. Now you have a very easy to use interface that gives immediate feedback on how you are filling your capacity. You can see when dropping an item into an iteration takes more capacity than you are willing to allocate to it very visually.

Check it out on the Telerik site!!

As always, keep the feedback coming. Leave a comment here for general feedback. If you are having issues, please use the Telerik Support Forums here for WIM and here for PD. That way you can track our responses and the whole community can benefit from the conversation.

Technorati Tags: TFS,WIM,Dashboard,Telerik

Microsoft Expression Encoder 3

Aaron Kowall — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:49:22 GMT

I had a requirement this week to create a video for a demo. I needed to demonstrate features that had already been recorded in other demos but I needed to grab those videos, cut and splice them together to produce a ‘new’ video.

I decided to try Expression Encoder 3 which I had heard about but hadn’t had need to use before.

(For simple team collaboration videos and screen captures I typically use Jing)

Well, Encoder rocked it out. I’m really not a Multimedia production kind of guy. I record audio and video as a mechanism to communicate, but don’t generally worry about quality. To me, ease of use is KEY.

Look forward to using Expression Encoder more often in the future. It was fairly intuitive, handled the video formats I needed and produced a pretty good result.

Technorati Tags: Expression Suite 3,Encoder,Jing

TFS 2010 Beta2 Install & Configure

Aaron Kowall — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:33:48 GMT

I was going to blog the AWESOME new install and configure for TFS 2010 Beta2 but Martin beat me to it.

If you have tried to install TFS in the past, you will definitely appreciate the simplicity and reliability of the new install and configuration processes.

Install

Configure

Technorati Tags: VS2010,Beta 2

Where is the Team System?

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:18:55 GMT

Folks with MSDN Subscriber licenses going to grab the latest version of VS2010 may wonder ‘Where is Team System? Team Suite? Team Developer? Team Architect?’

They are gone! Does that mean that MS is getting out of the ALM toolset market? Or does it mean that the ‘Team’ stuff is being released later?

The answer is NEITHER. The branding, naming and licensing of Visual Studio is changing for the 2010 version. The ‘Team System’ branding is being dropped. What ‘used’ to be the ‘Team’ client products are now being rebranded as Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate.

Team Foundation Server is still there (and is now actually available in 2 versions, a Basics version and the Full version). There is good news on this front. TFS is now INCLUDED in MSDN Subscriber licenses. And MSDN Subscribers also get a TFS CAL.

So, if your team has MSDN subscriptions, you now have everything you need to use Team Foundation Server within your team.

Technorati Tags: VS2010

More info on New VS 2010 SKU’s, how they relate to old VS (and VSTS) SKU’s, Pricing and the Ultimate Upgrade offer:

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:18:25 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/developer/factsheets/VS2010PackagingFS.docx

Technorati Tags: VS2010

VS 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 Release Date

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:03:30 GMT

Don’t know how I missed blogging this along with everything else, but the Release data for VS 2010 and .Net 4.0 has been announced as March 22, 2010.

Technorati Tags: VS2010,.Net 4

Oh, an a new Visual Studio Logo?

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:54:24 GMT

There is a new logo for Visual Studio.

Still an infinity symbol, but this time more flowing.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio

How do you like the new MSDN website?

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:51:30 GMT

Personally, I like it.

Seems fresh. Lots of content without looking too busy.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: MSDN

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 available for Download on MSDN Subscriber Downloads

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:18:00 GMT

Also, notice the new product versions:

Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Professional
Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Premium
Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Ultimate
Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Test Elements 2010
Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Team Foundation Server 2010

Go to Somasegar’s blog for more info on the new SKU’s and the Ultimate Offer!

Brian Harry has a screenshot of the downloads available.

Technorati Tags: VS2010,TFS,Beta 2

UPDATES: From the MicrosoftVSTS Twitter feed:

“Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium and Ultimate and Test Elements with MSDN will include one production license and one CAL to TFS 2010”

“The Ultimate Offer will transition MSDN Premium subscribers to a higher #vs2010 product at launch. http://tinyurl.com/yzko3rr ”

Why can I relate to this?

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:26:49 GMT

Technorati Tags: humor

Getting Ready for VSTS 2010 Beta 2 with “Go Live” License

Aaron Kowall — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:58:58 GMT

Brian Keller, Technical Evangelist for Visual Studio Team System just blogged about the “very soon” release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 which will have a “Go Live” license. That means you will receive product support from MS if you deploy and use it.

Brian also includes links to some resources to help prepare for VSTS 2010 beta 2

Overview presentation (.PPTX)
Detailed checklist (.DOCX)

Our ALM team at Imaginet has been working with the Beta 1 bits and have been keeping in touch with MS on what to expect with Beta 2. We are very excited at the advancements that the MS team has made to the platform. The improved manageability of TFS, better support for Agile development and some AWESOME support for improving quality via new test tools, lab management and historical debugging make this release a very worthwhile upgrade.

We would be happy to help your organization prepare for adoption whether it is a new VSTS deployment or an upgrade from 2005 or 2008. Just drop me a line!

Technorati Tags: VSTS 2010,Beta 2

Telerik Work Item Manager is LIVE (and Free)

Aaron Kowall — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:41:55 GMT

Imaginet Resources Corp. has been working with Telerik to help them optimize their Application Lifecycle Management processes. As part of this, we have built some tools to address some specific pain points they were experiencing. Well, Telerik has decided to make these tools available to all.

Check out the Telerik TFS Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard.

It contains a very rich UI based on the Telerik RadControls for WPF that makes it very easy to manage work items. It supports Enhanced Work Item Queries, Search, Iteration Scheduling and has productivity features like ‘Create workitem from Clipboard’ that lets you quickly create a new work item that contains the contents from the clipboard (very helpful when creating bugs with screenshots).

It has a Task Board view that works with any process template.

And my favorite feature is the Project Dashboard which gives visibility into what is really happening on your projects. Did you ever want to know what people are working on right now? Or how about what % completion you have on your iteration backlog? By Person? How about seeing both Code Churn and Code Coverage displayed? Isn’t it strange how code churn was high but coverage didn’t change? Maybe we should look into that.

Head over to the Telerik site and check it out! If you have any feedback, just drop me a comment or send me an email! I’d love to hear what you think.

Technorati Tags: WIM,Work Item Manager,Dashboard,Telerik,TFS

Speaking at MS TechDays Canada 2009 in Winnipeg

Aaron Kowall — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:41:23 GMT

I’ll be presenting at TechDays Canada 2009 in Winnipeg!

I’ll be presenting:

Better Software Change and Configuration Management Using TFS

A critical factor in getting the most out of Team Foundation Server is understanding the version control and build systems. In this session, learn how use Team Build and Team Foundation Server Version Control to effectively manage concurrent development branches. Learn about how set up your repository structure and how to define builds. Learn about different branching techniques like branch by feature and branch for release. Learn how builds help you find what has changed in branches and how to manage releases, service packs, and hot fixes. Attend this session to see how the API can help create better release documentation and get you out the door sooner.

December 15-16 at Winnipeg Convention Centre

Check out this picture of the cool SWAG package that John Bristowe posted on Tweetpic:

Technorati Tags: Speaking,TechDays 2009