Agile SCM Talk

April 12 is the New Release Date for Visual Studio 2010. At least that the latest from Microsoft's Rob Caron. He's the Marketing Communications Manager for Developer and User Experience Runtimes and Tools at Microsoft — which includes of course Visual Studio. He recently presented a quick update on the new release date for Visual Studio 2010.

I assume this includes TFS (i.e. VS 2010 ALM)?

The VS ALM Rangers have just published a Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guide. The guide is designed to quickly review the capabilities and features of the 2010 version.

When using TFS work items you may find that when you transition from one state to another that you selected the wrong reason code, or you found out shortly afterwards that the reason code you selected is incorrect.

Well, you may be surprised to find that reason codes (System.Reason) cannot be updated within the same state.

Those of us that started working with TFS 2005 know what a "terror" installation and upgrading can be. TFS 2010 holds out the promise to be different.

This recent post by Brian Harry provides a good example of the manageability that I hope 2010 will realize for us.

We don’t use the term “Bug,” rather we use “Software Action Request” or “SAR.” I renamed the Bug WI definition from Bug to SAR. I added a few custom fields to our SAR WI definition, but all the Microsoft fields are used and unchanged.

What I want is for the MTLM client to be configured to open a SAR rather than a Bug. In other words, out-of-the-box when a user is manually executing a test case with the MTLM Test Runner client and one of the steps fail, the user clicks a button to create a Bug or link to an existing Bug.

My goal was to have the burndown chart on the team project portal main page display the current iteration.

The default report displays the tasks for the entire team project starting 5 days before the current date and ending 25 days after the current date. FRUSTRATING, to say the least! I mean, what a useless report! Who's Agile book did they get that one from?

Here in sunny LA the annoucements at PDC 2009 are significant. Though many new features are catching up to what Apple can already do, the integration and breadth of the 2010 releases is big!

Software Releases Announced

• Public release of beta versions of:
  • Office 2010
  • SharePoint Server 2010

There is some helpful information from Ewald Hofman on passing in parameters to the TFS SQL Server Analysis Services OLAP reports.

But, the 2010 schema has changed. You can use the SQL Server Mgmgt Studio to access the metadata and query the tables to seee the new schema and record values.

As an example of the Task Burndown report on the TFS 2010 Project Portal, here's the URL that worked in a browser:

The VS 2010 Training Kit looks really great! I'm just starting it and Brian K. and the team did a great job. It was a bit of a surprise to see the roadmap RTM date in the "What's New in Visual Studio 2010" PowerPoint presentation.

The training kit is posted on channel 9 and can be downloaded from there. Once installed it provides a complete set of material for VS2010 training that includes presentations, videos and labs.

I plan to work through all of it over the next week.

I have reached the point where I can say that I have installed beta 2. There are many features that I have yet to perform. But, I'm moving on and will create separate posts for that. Overall, Beta 2 was a great install experience. Lab Management still has a whole lot of room for improving the install/setup experience, but beta 2 was a big improvement over beta 1. Bob :)
- Last updated: 12/3