Into Visual Studio Team System

The BUILD conference held last week in California was not only the start for getting the details about Windows 8, but was also the time where Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure was announced with a public preview.

Read all about the preview on this blogpost from Brian Harry. I have been part of a private preview in the past months and I’m really thrilled with the hosted TFS Service coming our way. This will surely decrease the infrastructure and maintenance obstacle for many small and medium enterprises. Note that the service is far from ready and many features (reporting for instance) are still missing. The interesting part with a hosted and reliable TFS service is the ability to (automatically) push new features more frequently to the public. Quite a big difference with hosting a private Team Foundation Server on-premise.

You may also configure a local build server against a hosted TFS account which was made possible with Windows Azure Access Control Services (ACS).

If you were not able yet to pick up an invitation code for registering your TFS 11 account, you may use my invitation code [5 users left – first come, first served]: a0d8ad92-c44b-4ce7-82ed-b63b8fd91979. Visit tfspreview.com and use this code.

Next to this, you may also download a preview/CTP of Team Foundation Server 11 which is designed to showcase updates and improvements made since TFS 2010 and provides an opportunity for developers to use and provide feedback before the final release. See this blog post at ALM Rocks for detailed installation steps. A preview of Visual Studio 11 can be downloaded here.

Instead of doing a full install of TFS 11 (including Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS, SQL Server, SharePoint, Visual Studio 11 …), I decided to wait for the Visual Studio 11 ALM Virtual Machine which is a fully prepared and configured Hyper-V virtual machine. Thanks to Brian Keller for making this available once again!

TFS 2010 was already a BIG release with a strong focus on Testing and Architecture, but the upcoming release won’t disappoint neither. Exciting times!

[For the people in Belgium: note that an interesting user group event (AZUG) is coming up with Clemens Reijnen, a colleague VS ALM MVP, who will give a session on ALM for Windows Azure.]

After upgrading TFS2008 to TFS2010 it happened a few times that builds were failing on the build server(s) due to error TF42006.

TF42006: The build service could not get the project file for build definition X. Ensure the project file exists and the build service account Y is a member of the Build Services group for the team project.

TFS 2008 build definitions that are upgraded to TFS 2010 will use the Upgrade Build Process Template and do still need a path to the TFSBuild.proj file (folder level) in Version Control. If a new service account is used to execute the builds on the TFS 2010 Build Servers, you will need to make sure that the Project Collection Build Service Accounts group has at least Read permissions on the folder (TeamBuildTypes) where the TFS 2008 build definition is stored.

This might not be set correctly if security settings were modified (no inheritance of security settings) in TFS 2008.

Just try to avoid unchecking the inherit security settings on the Version Control folders, unless you know what you’re doing. Unchecking this may bring some unwanted side effects!

Build definitions in TFS 2010 that use the Default Build Process Template are entirely stored in the TFS database and can’t be tracked anymore via individual build project and response files. I only wish that there were some more auditing possibilities on changes done to the build definitions. An issue that I already raised during the beta phase of VS2010.

Only one month to go for my second appearance at Techdays Belgium. Last year I did a presentation on Branching & Merging strategies with Team Foundation Server 2010, but this year I will speak about the automated Build-Deploy-Test cycle with Visual Studio Lab Management 2010.

Most companies don’t have dedicated test environments that are clean, easy to reset and similar to the production environment. This makes it very hard to test software applications. Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 allows you to define, configure and create complete test environments as needed. It can coordinate both physical and virtual environments, and comes with an incredibly powerful suite of effective tools that make managing environments simple and cost effective. In this session, you will be able to see the Lab Management workflow in action: we will define a test environment, identify a suite of (automated) tests for an application, set up a new automated build, deploy the application automatically in the test environment and run the (automated) tests. In the end we will take a look at the collected information through the different data collectors (Intellitrace, System Information, …). This session is geared towards developers, testers, architects, IT personnel and managers who want to see an in-depth, scenario-based demo of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010.

Visual Studio Lab Management lets you manage a collection of virtual machines, templates, and virtual environments for your Team Foundation team project. You can use these environments to develop, test, or run your application. A virtual environment is a collection of virtual machines (VMs). Each VM in a virtual environment represents a role required for the application that you intend to develop, test, or run. For example, you might be developing a multi-tiered application that requires three roles: a desktop client, a Web server, and a database server.

Watch my recorded screencast on Lab Management at Channel 9.

Hope to meet you in Antwerp on April 28!

Update (April 28, 2011): slides attached

Download slides

In less than a month I will be attending TechEd Europe in Berlin (November 8-12, 2010). I guess this must be my 6th TechEd (two times Amsterdam, two times Barcelona and now my 2nd time Berlin) and I must say that I always look forward to this conference.

In my early years I always wanted to get all the information on as many technologies as possible, but last years I really tried to focus on the ALM/TFS sessions. I don’t want to overload my agenda because I do find it interesting to also spend some time to work on things I picked up in some session instead of rushing from session to session. On the other side, this year I might have a look at some Windows Phone 7 sessions to get some phone development insights.

Of course, I also look forward to meet some people from the “Team System” product team to have some discussions on the future of ALM and Team Foundation Server. And did I mention already the usual (community) parties? If you are a Belgian TechEd attendee: don’t forget to register for the TechEd Belgian country drink.

Scheduled ALM sessions for this year:

• Successfully Administering and Running Team Foundation Server 2010 (Neno Loje)
• Best Practices Using Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 (Neno Loje)
• Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010: Part 1 of 2 (Brian Keller)
• Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010: Part 1 of 2 (Brian Keller)
• Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010: Making it real for YOU (Brian Keller)
• Applied Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010 (Brian Keller)
• The Busy Developer’s Guide to Team Foundation Server 2010 Version Control (Brian Randell)
• TFS 2010: Install and Configure in 30 Minutes or Less (Brian Randell)
• Understanding Branching and Merging in Team Foundation Server 2010 (Brian Randell)
• Agile Development with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 (Aaron Bjork & Peter Provost)
• Visual Studio ALM: Lessons Learned through Dogfooding (Aaron Bjork)
• Application Lifecycle Management – Microsoft Project 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, Better Together (Aaron Bjork & Christophe Fiessinger)
• Architecture Discovery with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (Peter Provost)
• Visualization and Modeling in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (Peter Provost)

See you at TechEd Berlin in a few weeks!

My video session (1 hour and 10 minutes) from Techdays 2010 in Belgium was pushed online at Channel 9!

This session will provide some insightful and practical guidance around branching and merging with Team Foundation Server. Setting up a specific version control structure for a new Team Project and defining the appropriate Branching strategy go hand-in-hand and need to be addressed before development starts. We will look into different scenarios how to support parallel development and how the new branching visualization features in TFS 2010 will help you to understand the big picture. In addition this session will cover guidelines on how to include a versioning strategy in your Team Builds to synchronize build numbers and assembly version numbers.

Slides were already dropped at the download section. Let me know if you would have comments/feedback on the session!

Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 enables teams to accelerate setup/tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for test execution and build automation. It extends build automation by automating virtual machine provisioning, build deployment and build verification in an integrated manner. It also allows testers to file rich bugs with links to environment checkpoints that developers can use to recreate complex environments, effectively reducing wasted time and resources in your development and test lifecycle.

A week ago at my main customer SD Worx in Antwerp, I managed to install a full-blown Team Foundation Server 2010 (RC), including Visual Studio Lab Management (RC) in an isolated environment.

I really got spoilt and got two physical servers at my disposal with each 20GB of RAM. This is the current configuration:

• Physical Server 1 (Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V):
  • TFS2010AT_A: Application Tier TFS2010 (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 4GB RAM)
  • TFS2010AT_B: Application Tier TFS2010 (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 4GB RAM)
  • TFS2010DT: Data Tier TFS2010 (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 4GB RAM)
• Physical Server 2 (Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V):
  • VS2010: Client with VS2010 Ultimate (Windows XP Pro with SP3 – 3GB RAM)
  • TFSBUILD2010_A: Build Server (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2GB RAM)
  • TFSBUILD2010_B: Build Server (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2GB RAM)
  • TESTVM: Virtual Environment for testing Lab Management (Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2GB RAM)

Note that the Team Foundation Server 2010 is setup with Network Load Balancing (NLB) for TFS services. I also should setup NLB for Reporting Services and WSS on both AT servers. SQL Reporting Services is installed on the application tier while SQL Analysis Services is installed on the data tier. One Team Project Collection is created with one MSF Agile Team Project. A Build Controller for the Team Project Collection is setup on Build Server A that manages a Build Agent on Build Server A and another Build Agent on Build Server B.

The second physical server will also serve as the HyperVHost machine, the VmmMachine and LibraryMachine for Visual Studio Lab Management.

This setup should give the opportunity for a small workgroup to further test the benefits of the entire Team Foundation Server 2010 environment. In total I must have spent about 4 days in installing and configuring this setup. I did follow the guidelines on the Visual Studio Lab Management Blog where the team posted a series on Getting Started with Lab Management.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

I was really happy with the fact that the installation/configuration of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the other more IT Pro related stuff was pretty straightforward. More information on Lab Management can also be found at MSDN.

Next step is to schedule some internal workshops with the team to kick-off all the testing on the platform. Pretty excited to see this evolve!

I also want to thank the Lab Management Product Team for their support and follow-up of this installation at my client. To be continued!

Today I got renewed as a Team System MVP. Sweet!

Dear Pieter Gheysens,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Team System technical communities during the past year.

Looking forward to another very interesting “Team System” year with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 just around the corner! The release of Visual Studio 2010 will probably also be the time that the “Team System” moniker will disappear in the MVP title. I’m still not sure what the new title will be like: Team Foundation Server MVP? ALM MVP? Visual Studio MVP? Visual Studio ALM MVP?

Upgrading from Beta 2 to RC has really become a nice experience. I just upgraded also my Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 on my home computer (Windows 7) to RC. Just a screenshot to show you the wizard page that upgrades the available Team Project Collections.

Be sure to download the Upgrade Guide on the blog of Bryan Krieger to proceed with your upgrade to RC!

After the uprgrade process, the version seems to be already RTM?!

Also the TFS Build configuration wizard seems to be smart enough to keep/upgrade existing resources from Beta 2.

While upgrading my full-blown Team Foundation Server 2010 to RC on Windows Server 2008 R2, I must admit that I got an issue while upgrading the Team Project Collections. The wizard apparently got stuck due to some issue with the TFS application pool that wasn’t able to startup correctly. Force a rerun of the job in the Team Foundation Administration Console if you would be confronted with this issue!

Last week I delivered for Microsoft Belgium a full day technical seminar on testing with Visual Studio 2010. More than 20 people showed up and the attendees were an interesting mix of dedicated testers with none or little knowledge of the Team Foundation Server platform and some developer oriented profiles with little knowledge in the testing area.

While preparing and delivering this course I became even more convinced that the testing offering with Visual Studio 2010 really rocks. Some specific testing features (manual testing with action recording, IntelliTrace, Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Test, …) will be hard to miss once you get to use them in practice. Testers and developers will certainly be able to work more closely together to reduce the time it takes to find and fix software defects … and that’s what it’s all about in writing quality software!

All my demos did also work fine on the RC release of Visual Studio 2010, so I was pretty happy that I decided to prepare a RC image to use for the course.

I definitely need to blog about some of the cool collaboration stuff between development and testing teams. Note to self: free up some time!

Slidedeck is available at the download section.

Today I delivered an evening session on Application Lifecycle Management with VS2010 for the Visual Studio User Group in Belgium.

35 people showed up at SD Worx in Antwerp.

During one hour and 30 minutes I managed to give a brief introduction to the product features of the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010. In the first part I covered some slides and did a live basic installation of TFS2010 on Windows 7. In the second part I demoed some of the cool features of Visual Studio 2010:

• Team Foundation Administration Console
• Attaching Team Project Collections
• Branch Visualization features in Version Control
• Team Builds 2010 (Gated Check-In)
• Running manual test cases in Test & Lab Manager
• Creating a coded UI test from action recordings
• Architecture Explorer

The slides are available for download!