Into ALM with TFS

Last week was extremely busy with TechDays Belgium where I presented two sessions on Application Lifecycle Management.

My company Sparkles was also present with a conference booth and it has proven to be very valuable to listen to your feedback. Sparkles will continue to invest in offering the best advanced IT Training classes (Dev + IT Pro) with local and international experts.

Thank you all for attending one of the sessions and/or for showing up at the booth. Don’t forget to register for the Sparkles newsletter as you might still win free IT Training Vouchers.

Link to slides:

• Visual Studio Lab Management 2012
• Build & Test a Windows 8 App with Team Foundation Service [duo-session with Kevin DeRudder]

There are still a few seats left for the 3 day hands-on ALM training class in Ghent.

Lately I have been discussing with other people (IT and non-IT) how important training is in the IT business. We also talked about the importance of self-study and about the new kid on the block: on-line training. There are just no excuses anymore to miss the boat.

Anyway, it should be obvious for all people working in the IT business: if you don’t catch up from time to time on the new technology evolutions => soon or later it’s game over because your market value will decrease exponentially! And this doesn’t necessarily mean you are obliged to look for external (classroom) training or you need to attend specific software conferences. It only means you need to find the best way to update/upgrade/improve/broaden your skills. Some people are perfectly self-managing: they read books, articles, blogs, forums … and/or they simply experiment (hands-on) with new stuff in their spare time. But for the majority of people this isn’t a valid approach and learning everything by yourself may give you a very biased opinion.

Attending software conferences give you the advantage to easily grasp the bigger perspective of what’s going on in our industry and offer you the possibility to follow some side-tracks (consider it as off-road) which might be very interesting as well. And don’t forget the different networking opportunities which may lead to the best geek talk you ever experienced. Still, IMHO dedicated classroom training is the best choice to improve specific skills in a short period of time. This is only true if the (interactive) classroom training is led by an absolute expert in the field who has dealt with many different challenges in real-life projects. To learn something brand new or to switch to another (similar) technology, there are many courses/classes which might do initially, but to get you to the expert level of a specific topic, there are not that many options. Once you get past the junior/medior level, it’s a different game and you won’t benefit anymore from the default training classes!

It’s exactly that gap that I want to tackle in Belgium with the training offer (Master Classes) at Sparkles. In the past I partnered already with IDesign which has a unique position of software industry leadership and reputation. The team of Juval Löwy will continue in 2013 to deliver their famous and intensive Master Classes in Belgium. Next to that, I’m also looking to setup other training classes on various topics (dev & IT Pro) with local and international experts. The purpose is absolutely not to offer a typical 9-to-5 basic classroom training (which might be good for some people), but the goal is to create a unique intensive learning experience by selecting the best people – who are working in the trenches – to get you to that precious next level! Learn IT by the experts! Keep an eye on the upcoming training offering and I hope to add some extra confirmed classes before TechDays where Sparkles will be present with a partner booth.

A last note for companies freezing the training budget for their employees. I’m aware of the trade-offs which must be made, but in the end: not investing in the most appropriate training for your people is a double risk. One, you might lose your best talent who will take a job at the competition and your global knowledge level will stall which will lead to less attraction on the market to engage new talent. Mostly, the more well-spoken and brave employees are able to put some extra pressure on management to finally get registered for a software conference or a particular training class … but I do catalogue this outcome as a quick win and it will backfire soon or later. Treating your people as a cost will completely demoralize and demotivate your staff. I can already imagine some reactions: “but what if we train them and they leave the company”? OK, be sure to read this and let it sink. It depends of course greatly on the personal attitude of all individuals: basically they are in control of their continuous learning & career path. So, it’s your call to invest in training or not!

Update (October 20, 2012): download slides

On October 19, I’m booked for a full day session on Application Lifecycle Management for Microsoft Partners in Belgium and apparently the registration is now also open for other people who would be interested in learning how to use the latest release of Microsoft’s application lifecycle management suite to improve the software development process.

Recently I was informed that Jeff Beehler would also be in Belgium that day and quickly it was confirmed that Jeff would team up to deliver the keynote of the day. Jeff (Chief of Staff for Visual Studio at Microsoft) has already a long history in the Visual Studio product team and is the perfect speaker for setting the scene and to give the audience extra insight in the evolution of the product and where the product family is heading to. I’m very excited to have Jeff as a keynote speaker for this event in Belgium.

Here’s the final agenda for October 19:

• 09h00 – 10h15: Continuous Value Delivery with VS ALM 2012 (Jeff Beehler)
• 10h15 – 10h30: break
• 10h30 – 12h00: Agile Project Management with Team Web Access and TFS Preview
• 12h00 – 13h00: lunch
• 13h00 – 14h30: TFS 2012 Version Control improvements + the new Team Explorer experience
• 14h30 – 14h45: break
• 14h45 – 16h15: Exploratory Testing with Microsoft Test Manager 2012 + IntelliTrace in Production
• 16h15 – 16h30: break
• 16h30 – 17h00: Continuous Deployment to Windows Azure with TFS Preview

Note that this day is not scheduled as a hands-on workshop. I will only introduce and demo some new and powerful features inside the new release of Team Foundation Server.

Register at Microsoft World Wide Events.

Are you more looking for a deep-dive technical hands-on training on ALM with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server? I’m organizing for the second time a public 3 day ALM training class on November 12, 13 & 14. Register your spot right now for the full track or choose your preferred training day à-la-carte.

Hope to see you on one of the upcoming events!

Doing parallel development across multiple branches is quite easy by creating a number of branches in TFS, but the difficult part is to setup a valid branching strategy and to enforce best practices like always pushing forward integration actions before the reverse integration operation, …

In some scenarios it will be required to avoid that individual changesets can be merged into another branch (for example configuration changes). Enter discarding candidate merges!

Using the Merge Wizard in TFS, you have the option to select the cherry-pick option to only see the changesets which haven’t been merged from Source to Target.

But, from the UI it’s unfortunately still not possible (TFS 2012) to discard a candidate merge changeset. I would just love to right-click on a changeset and discard it from there.

Up till now I always switched to the command-line to discard the changeset from there (tf merge /discard).

Recently I got a question at a customer to make this possible through the API. First of all I was a bit worried why on earth it would be necessary to automate this through the API because in the end this action should be quite exceptional. So, after going into more details it seemed that a background process was running which made a number of configuration changes to the branches, but those changesets were branch-specific and weren’t allowed to be merged into some other branch. These changesets were in fact seriously blocking the merge process due to the fact that only consecutive changesets can be merged from Source to Target and a number of these “configuration” changesets were sitting between other valid candidate merge changesets. Not good!

The solution for discarding changesets through the API is making use of the Merge method on the Workspace object. To discard, you must use the enumeration AlwaysAcceptMine as parameter for the MergeOptions. This will push the merge (without actual changes in the files) into the workspace after which the check-in can be executed. The check-in will make sure that the changeset won’t show up anymore in the candidate merge changesets.