Etienne's VSTS World

Read all about it here.  Since Microsoft acquired TeamPlain this spring they have worked hard to incorporate all new features in the product and best feature of all; It's FREE for TFS owners.

Cheers,

ET

PS I swear I'll get to Team Build I'm just sooooo busy ;-).

So I'm still working hard on the build series, I'm up to a 26 page document right now just showing how to create a build ;-).  But there are just so much new stuff happening that I'm going to skip to that and go back to document after.

The whole Team System stack has been renamed check out Rob Caron's blog entry here for all the names.  Essentially Visual Studio Team System 2008 - product name.

Next I'm featured here on the Canadian Developer Blog there is a short questionnaire I answered about myself ... go check it out ;-).

Beta 2 of VSTS 2008 is ready and downloadable here it's fresh out of the press so go and grab it.

I'm leaving in a week an a half for the finals of the ImageCup.  I can't wait that'll be very cool to see all those project and the hard work that those student have poured into them.

A CTP of the next version of Visual Studio (the one after 2008 ;-)) has been signed off and will be available to download as a Virtual Machine very soon also.

Silverlight 1.0 is also about to be shipped on the web.  If you are into web animation and JavaScript stay tuned for the release if you prefer to stick with the .net framework then version 1.1 is still in Alpha but we can do much more stuff under the cover.

I'm sure with the release of Beta 2 of Visual Studio a lot more technology will be 'refreshed' to work with that build.  According to all account it's a near feature complete build.  I will be testing both TFS and VS B2 in the next few months and will post back on the highs and lows of beta testing also.

Cheers,

ET

So I haven't blogged in while, I've been so busy I can't tell when it's night or when it's daytime... Well not really but you get the idea.  I have been toying about the idea of actually coming up with some content (instead of just reporting other people's content ;-)) and I've decide it was time to do so.

In the next few months (weeks if I can kick myself hard enough to do it) I'll write a series of post on Team Build.  I've been playing quite a bit with it and I think there is a lot to talk about.  We'll cover the basics (setup and configure) to the driving forces (MSBuild and Build Types) to customization (Custom Tasks and Target overrides), so stay tuned it should be interesting.

I was in Redmond last week for a VS2008 and .Net 3.5 lab.  This was very interesting, LINQ look better and better, WPF looks harder and harder so does WCF btw, Mobile Development is easier and VSTO still is well... VSTO.  As I was listening in on the various presentation, I was thinking how Moore's law didn't usually apply that much on software technologies but mostly on Hardware, with the new wave of offerings coming out of Microsoft in the last 4 years it seems like Moore's law now is catching up to the software world as well.   There are so many new technologies, versions of old one made better and well old ones still around that it make supporting and creating new solutions rather... well difficult.  After have a few discussions with Microsoft Technology Evangelist their mandate is obviously to show the new stuff, and large crowds at event around the world line to hear about them, but in the real world, I'm not sure those people use much of them due to ITO constraints or customer requirements.  How do you guys deal with the technology churn? How to you manage it?  I know at a lot of event that I talk at people still want to hear about ASP.NET 2.0 let alone AJAX or Silverlight.  They want to hear about TFS v1 but also want to know what's coming up so they don't reinvent the wheel but also that TFS is going in the right direction for their business.

So starting with my next post I'll focus on TB for a while, first up: Setup and Configuration

Cheers,

ET