TFS/VSTS - Willy-Peter Schaub's Cave of Chamomile Simplicity

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Friday, January 30, 2009 11:51 PM

New technology focused blog starting in new home …

From now on I will be blogging technical journeys in this blog cave the new blog cave at http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/ . Read here for more details. This blog will remain the active cave for personal posts, including our experiences in Canada, and the home of www.SAArchitect.net community related posts. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:59 PM

Pluto … an interesting article on TIME cnn

For those who have read our book “Software Engineers on their way to Pluto” ( overview , online copies ), the demotion of Pluto and our amazement has not gone unnoticed. In fact we dedicated the following text to the poor old ex-Planet: Remembering Pluto as a planet August 24, 2006 … the solar system has shrunk?!? After much debate, the International Astronomical Union has approved a revised definition that shrinks our solar system from nine to eight planets, declassifying Pluto from a planet to...
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Tuesday, January 20, 2009 6:46 PM

TFS not a scalable and value-add solution? … really?

I know of an architect who has for some time been proclaiming that the Team Foundation Server (TFS) solution is not a scalable and enterprise ready value-add version control solution … well, I recently pondered through Brian Harry’s blog posts and stumbled across two posts which summarise the “Microsoft TFS Adoption” and “Dogfood Statistics” of TFS within Microsoft. Go here for more information: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/01/16/microsoft-tfs-adoption-update.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com...
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Tuesday, January 20, 2009 6:27 PM

VSTS Code Metrics – Cyclomatic complexity of 24359, yet no warning

I recently completed a solution review, during which I can static code analysis and code metrics to get a feel of the solution. The above screen shot was one of many and one that caused a bit of rebellion amongst the reviewers, as the one project (line 2) had a proud cyclomatic complexity of 24359, yet neither my report listed a red flag or code smell, nor he maintainability index  by Microsoft. Firstly, what is the maintainability index? The Maintainability Index gives a view of the maintainability...
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009 9:07 PM

TFS Book: Inside the Microsoft Build Engine

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi (Author), William Bartholomew (Author) have finally written and released the long-awaited book embracing the Microsoft Build Engine, containing 3 chapters and an appendix dedicated to Team Foundation Build. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735626286 for more details. " The build process when code gets assembled to see how and how well it works is a critical step in software development. Developers had few options for customizing the build process before Visual...
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Sunday, January 11, 2009 8:16 AM

Pex … a small package of dynamite

  The Pex documentation defines this product as and I quote: “ Pex is a new tool that helps in understanding the behavior of .NET code, debugging issues, ann creating a test suite that covers all corner cases – fully automatically. Through a context menu in the code editor, the user can invoke Pex to analyze an entire class or a single method. For any method, Pex computes and displays interesting input-output pairs. Pex systematically hunts for bugs – exceptions or assertion failures. As Pex...
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Friday, January 09, 2009 9:03 AM

TFS/VSTS - 101 Pocket Guide ... Value-Add or Waste? STATUS UPDATE

Thank you very much for everyone who completed the quick poll and especially those that have added precious comments to the blog post, the poll and emails to me. For details see my previous blog post at: http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2009/01/05/tfs-vsts-101-pocket-guide-value-add-or-waste.aspx I have submitted an interim report and proposal, but will continue monitoring input and revise the proposal accordingly … please continue adding input! I am, however, more convinced than ever, that this...
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Monday, January 05, 2009 8:15 PM

TFS/VSTS - 101 Pocket Guide ... Value-Add or Waste?

I have, for some time, tried to understand why … The adoption of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been slow with many of the development teams/companies who would/should benefit immensely from the technologies. Many adoptions are of short duration or end with problematic implementations adding little value to the solution stakeholders. Talking to the communities, customers and leads it has become apparent that in our environment (South-Africa)": Most teams...
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Monday, January 05, 2009 3:16 PM

PDC Video #8 – Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex (TL51)

Robert recommended that I watch this video, featuring Mike Barnett and Nikolai Tillman demonstrating two tools in one talk, as stated by the two. The video covers two main areas: Contracts (presented by Mike) A contract library will be released with .NET 4. Why contracts? To enforce: Documentation of design decisions Executable contracts to check documentation Static verification Analyses all execution paths Guides development Not only explicit contracts … does some implicit checking Contracts become...
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Monday, January 05, 2009 1:37 PM

PDC Video #7 – Improving Code Quality With Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management (TL37)

Ram Cherala discusses improving code quality with VSTS2010 Lab Management, a technology which is really exciting. The video introduces and covers the following: Lab Management addresses the following challenges we all have: Bug “ping-pong” Expensive context switches between tester and developer Double hop issues Slow turnaround Camano data gathering is mentioned … but refer to http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2008/12/19/pdc-videos-2-microsoft-visual-studio-team-system-software-diagnostics-and-quality...
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Monday, January 05, 2009 11:14 AM

PDC Video #6 – Improving .NET Scalability and Performance with Visual Studio (TL24)

Steve Carroll and Ed Glas, cover .NET scalability and performance testing, in a tools oriented session covering topics such as: Performance Lifecycle Load testing … drilling into the test result graphs. The visualisation of the load test, the collection of performance data during load test and the drilling into the data is a great feature. Performance data collection (sampling) walks complete stack, non-intrusively, collecting both managed and native environment data during load test … new 2010 feature...
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008 9:43 AM

Goodbye ATC … thank you everyone and “Auf Wiedersehen”

Dear Colleagues, This is my last official day with BB&D, which is both a sad and an exciting day. It is a sad day, because I am leaving behind a great company and the best team and team colleagues with ATC. Thanks to Ralf , I had the opportunity, challenge and especially his trust to create the Microsoft Technology Unit (MTU), which evolved into the ATC unit of today. The unit has been focusing on technology awareness, readiness training and research, both within BB&D and extending to communities...
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008 8:20 AM

Branching Guidance II - “Rocking” Along

After a festive season break, I had a chat with the infamous Bijan who is running/driving the Branching Guidance II project for the VSTS Rangers. Not only has Bijan managed to unify the VSTS Rangers, the product stakeholders and the MVPs, not only has he ensured that a top quality product was shipped to CodePlex, but within a few days he has probably broken a few records: Branching Guidance II project has moved to the upper 25 most popular downloads on CodePlex, with 3985 downloads, within only a...
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Sunday, December 28, 2008 4:39 PM

TFS|VSTS 2008 Images – Imminent expiry and new images

As everyone knows … we hope … the TFS|VSTS 2008 Virtual machine images are expiring shortly on 31st December 2008. Read Brian’s blog http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/brian/archive/2008/12/24/happy-holidays-and-look-what-santa-s-brought.aspx for details on the new images (four choices), which are ready for download and are only expiring at the end of 2009. Upgrade your images as soon as possible, or end up in no-man’s land: Thanks Brian! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it...
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008 3:10 PM

TFS/VSTS 2008 Nuggets … references to answers to questions raised recently

This blog just summarises some of the issues I picked up … some of which ‘again’ … during discussions, some great information I got from colleagues and consolidates some of the hyperlinks, the teleport details for the wealth of information out there. TFS Workgroup Edition … what is it and can I upgrade? During discussions, trying to convince projects teams that Team Foundation Server (TFS) is not a version control system, but an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, which coincidentally...
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