Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010 Released

In my experience, there's a lot of animosity and poor communication between Development and QA. It's not that they don't appreciate one another so much as they never seem to stay on the same page.

QA: "What's the status on defect #4874?"
Dev: "Done."
QA: "Done?"
Dev: "Yeah, I fixed that Tuesday."
QA: "Err, ok. Well where is it? I mean where can I verify it?"
Dev: "No clue. I committed it Tuesday. It passed unit tests and built successfully."
QA: "Alright. I'll track it down."

Invariably, QA speaks with the build manager (if there is one) to find the build in which that defect was repaired. After discovering the correct build, now QA needs an environment stood up to house that build. But wait, the UAT environment is currently testing the next release. It can't be disturbed for another week.

At this point, the QA person's blood pressure heads for unsafe levels and the Dice.com browsing begins. But it doesn't have to be this way...

Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010 along with TFS solves many of these pains. Here's what the above scenario might look like with Lab Management:

QA doesn't inquire to the Dev about #4874 because it's already marked Resolved and back in QA's list of Defect Work Items. It's associated with a Continuous Integration Team Build instance which is marked with a Build Quality of Ready for UAT (meaning all unit tests passed and the build compiled successfully). Behind the scenes, as part of the build, Lab Management spun up a virtual web server, application server and database server. Team Build deployed the solution to this virtual environment and even sent an email to the build manager and the QA person (they chose to be alerted) saying this environment was ready for testing. This shop is currently testing four pending releases along with a production hotfix that's going out later today--all at the same time in completely separate environments.

Best of all, it's an amazing value. If you made/make the investment in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, you get Lab Management for free. Yes, that's right: free. That said, you will need some not insignificant hardware to serve as a host for these virtual servers...but you have that already, right?

How I Cloned my Laptop Hard Drive or Skirting the Dreaded Hard Drive Kerklunk

Recently, my laptop hard drive started emitting the dreaded, "kerklunk, rriiipppphphhhh" noise. Oh yes, you've awoken in a sweat with this nightmare, haven't you? It's a sure sign of a failed drive coming down the pike. Incoming!

Rather than suffering the life-shattering disruption of an unrecoverable drive, I called a Code Blue...and here's what I did:

Background: I have Win7 64-bit running on a Dell Latitude D830 with a bay-mounted SATA external 500GB drive and an external USB 500GB drive.

1. Download Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition; install
2. Use Paragon B&R to create a full backup of my existing hard drive (including MBR/Master Boot Record) onto my external USB drive (about 1/2 the size of my total hard drive)
3. Use Paradon B&R to restore from the external USB drive to the external bay drive
4. Shut down Windows7
5. Swap primary hard drive with external bay drive
6. Start up Windows7
7. Order new hard drive to replace old, busted, Kerklunk drive...

Unbelievably, that's it. Everything (including Windows Activation) just worked. I will shout to the hills about the awesome-ness of Paragon's tools. Yea Paragon. Seriously. Booyah.

Scrum for TFS Template v1.0 (Beta)

In case you missed it, Brian Harry announced Microsoft's Scrum process template this week at TechEd in New Orleans. Very exciting. Great work, Aaron and team!

Scrum for TFS 2010 at Path to Agility

Thanks to all who attended Alexei's and my Scrum for TFS 2010 Thursday at the Path to Agility conference. Please contact us if you have follow-up questions. We posted the deck here.

Path to Agility Conference: Speaking

I'll be leading a panel and presenting at the Path to Agility conference Thursday May 27th. The panel at 1:15PM is entitled "Attracting and Leading Agile Developers". The presentation at 3:00PM is entitled "Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010". Hope to see you there!

TFS 2010: Check-in Policies and Power Tools

Recently, I had an inquiry about where the "Changeset Comments Policy" went for Check-in Policies...check the Power Tools.

Before installing Power Tools…

After installing Power Tools…

Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010 – Starting Point

Congratulations to the Microsoft team for recently releasing the much anticipated Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010. My firm is embarking on several roll-outs right off the bat so I wanted to capture some of our efforts. To start, lets just provide the basics:

TFS 2010 Installation Guide

TFS 2010 Administration Guide

Visual Studio Rangers Guidance

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Training Kit

Application Lifecycle Management Online Assessment

MSF for Agile Software Development 5.0 Process Guidance

Team Foundation Server Power Tools April 2010

TFS 2010 Setup | TF255437: Access is denied.

If you experience TF255437: Access is denied while installing TFS 2010 on a remote/separate data tier, likely, the setup account is not a member of the local Administrators group on that data tier machine.

The Path to a-gil-i-ty

I'm excited to deliver a break-out session at The Path to a-gil-i-ty conference coming up May 27th. The presenter line-up looks fantastic...I'm eager to sit in on the other talks!

I'll be speaking along with Alexei Govorine on managing Scrum projects leveraging the recently released Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010.

Click here for COAAH write up and registration. My firm, Cardinal Solutions is a sponsor.

End User Improvements in SharePoint 2010

Thanks to everyone who attended the Cardinal Solutions event last week when I delivered our "End User Improvements in SharePoint 2010" presentation. It was well-received and certainly fueled the excitement around empowering business users with a viable platform beyond just Office or relying on custom development.

OT: Safelite Triathlon | Results

Following up on my participation in the Safelite Triathlon to benefit MaAfrika Tikkun, I indeed finished and more importantly, raised $1000. Thank you again for your generous contributions!

Regards to the Safelite folks who organized a safe, fun and entertaining event. Held in Las Vegas, I typically think of one (or two) things: gambling. However, out by Lake Mead is gorgeous. The event utilized the lake, trails and some serious up-and-down hills through rocky terrain to deliver a challenging run, swim and bike.

OT: Triathlon for Charity: MaAfrika Tikkun | Safelite

In April, I'll be competing in the Safelite Charity Triathlon benefiting MaAfrika Tikkun, a charity charged with reducing hunger and improving health care for children in South Africa. If you care to donate, please click on the Donate button in the right pane or visit my page at http://www.firstgiving.com/JeffHunsaker. Thank you!

Next Generation Testing with Visual Studio 2010

Monday the 15th, Randy Pagels delivers "Next Generation Testing with Visual Studio 2010" in Columbus at the Polaris Microsoft offices. I'll be delivering a short segment on my firm's capabilities. Hope to see you there!

Agile with TFS 2010 Talk

Last Thursday, I spoke on Agile (Scrum) with TFS 2010. A lot of great conversation and questions came out. A few I wanted to follow up with:

Q. Has security administration improved with 2010?
A. Yes, fellow MVP Paul Hacker points out the new TFSAdmin 2.0 tool on CodePlex.

Q. Is anyone doing hosted TFS?
A. Yes, again see Paul Hacker's firm SaaS Made Easy.

TFS 2010 Upgrade from Beta2 to RC…

…went great. I followed the PDF posted here and only encountered a single issue (which I wanted to record here).

[ Reporting ] TF255275: The following Web service for SQL Server Reporting Services could not be accessed: http://win-4h5rozlea69/ReportServer/ReportService2005.asmx.

Embarrassingly, this is simply due to SSRS not started on the server. Props to my friend Jason Barile called this solution on MSDN Forums (scroll to the bottom).

DogFoodII: VSTS 2010 | Follow-ups

Had a fantastic audience Friday for my VSTS 2010 Overview presentation at DogFoodII. Thanks for coming. I wanted to follow up on some of the questions with more complete responses.

Q. Will 2008/5 custom SSRS reports fail following the upgrade?

A. One key aspect here is “custom”. 2010 significantly changes the data warehouse schema (…which drives most reports). So, existing reports will need some work to function properly under 2010. That said, the VSTS team upgraded/updated the process templates and reports for Agile and CMMI to work properly against the 2010 schema. If you have custom reports, you’ll need to update them manually. Excellent information from Aaron Bjork here.

Q. Will 2008/5 customizations to team builds fail following the upgrade?

A. After doing some internal reading, I think this will actually work ok and upgrade successfully. The process template upgrade solution will wrap custom builds in a “legacy” MSBuild file and simply call Team Build against it. That said, you may want to leave behind some customizations and embrace the more optimal WF-style of automated builds. You may find you don’t even need that customization any longer. Finally, C# MSBuild Tasks you built custom and want to leverage in 2010 should continue to function as they did with 2008.

Q. Will 2008/5 customizations to process templates fail following the upgrade?

A. There is a process template upgrade “engine” (for lack of a better term). I think this will depend upon the extent of customization.

Aside: Internally, there was an exhaustive Beta1 to Beta2 TFS Upgrade Guide published to assist early-adopters and MVPs with the upgrade. The Rangers are taking on a similar project for the RTM. Keep an eye on the “TFS Upgrade Guide” on the Rangers page. Pramodv is heading up the team.

Q. Will Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer work with TFS 2010?

A. Yes, as will most clients…with an upgrade/install called the General Distribution Release (GDR) Forward Compatibility Update. Great details here from the WIT team. KB article is here.

Q. Is it possible to expose my TFS repository over the Internet?

A. Yes, with 2008, this is possible via SSL. However, I would err on the side of requiring remote users to use a VPN to first connect to your internal network. At the least, if you must expose TFS on the public Internet, deploy certificates to would-be clients using AD/PKI. Older but good article here.

Q. Is there anything that would accelerate my remote development teams? Interacting with the source repository consumes lot of time for my overseas / geographically disperse teams.

A. Yes. Check out TFS Proxy Server. It synchronizes source changes across slow or remote connections. Grant Holiday provides a nice launch point here.

Q. I would like to pull quantitative developer metrics (lines of code committed, number of unit tests, reactivations, code churn, number of builds broken, average code coverage, etc.) from TFS. Is this possible?

A. I haven’t done it but yes, most of this is possible. However, I don’t recommend it. IMO, it’s too easy to misinterpret this data at an individual level (vs. a team level). Just because I have a lower number of lines of code committed or number of unit tests, doesn’t necessarily mean I’m a sub-standard developer. That said, you could easily pop open Excel 2007, point to the TFS data warehouse and/or SSAS cubes and crawl through the schema. Good starting points here and here.

DogFoodII: VSTS 2010

Thanks for coming to my VSTS 2010 (Beta2) presentation at DogFoodII in Columbus. I've posted the deck here and will publish a follow-up post with Q&A from the session.

Special thanks and appreciation to Randy Pagels, Microsoft Developer Solution Specialist for the Heartland District for supplying a lot of the material. Randy maintains an excellent resource on VSTS/TFS at http://www.teamsystemcafe.net/.

Also, special thanks for the VSTS MVPs for helping us learn and understand what's coming in 2010.

TFS/VSTS 2010: A Preview @ DogFood II

I'll be speaking at DogFood II on TFS/VSTS 2010. It's a preview but will help you get your hands around the breath of 2010. Here's the skinny:

Please join us for the 2nd Annual Dog Food Conference; sponsored by the partner community. We will have MS speakers, MS partners, ISVs, MS MVPs and community leads presenting over 40 topics. Around half of the speakers are community leads; and half are MS specialists. As seating is limited, we encourage you to knowledge share with your peers, see overviews and chat one on one at the “Ask the Expert” area.

Website has the full agenda and register links.

SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 Presentation

Recently, I delivered a client presentation on SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. There were some follow-ups I thought I’d share:

Q. After creating and deploying an .RDL file to Report Manager, later, when I want to modify it, can I bring it back into BIDS?

A. Yes. Simply create a new, empty Reporting Services project within BIDS and then Add >> Existing, browse out and open the existing .RDL file. You may need to make some minor edits if you were using a shared data source.

Q. Compare Report Builder 2.0 with BIDS.

A. Reference this page: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/report-builder.aspx

Q. Compare SSRS 2008 for Standard and Enterprise SQL Server editions.

A. Reference this document: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/D/F/2DF66C0C-FFF2-4F2E-B739-BF4581CEE533/SQLServer2008EnterpriseandStandardFeature%20Compare.pdf

Additional, informative article: http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/SQL_Server_Standard_and_Enterprise

Q. Is there a freely available version of SSRS?

A. Yes. SQL Express optionally includes a scaled-back version of SSRS. Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/download/

Q. Book recommendations?

A. I really like “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services”, by Brian Larson. http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Server-2008-Reporting-Services/dp/0071548084/

COALMG November: TFS 2010 from Microsoft's Doug Neumann

Very excited to announce we've (well, Alexei deserves all the credit) landed Doug Neumann for COALMG's November meeting!

Date/Time:
Thursday November 5th, 6PM, Polaris Microsoft Office (4th Floor)

Abstract:
Visual Studio 2010 is almost here, and with it comes a host of new capabilities for application lifecycle management in Team Foundation Server. In this talk, we'll survey the new features in TFS 2010, starting with enhancements to the core features of version control, work item tracking, and build automation and then venturing into new capabilities for executing agile projects, managing quality assurance activities, and simplifying the provisioning of virtualized testing environments. There's a lot to learn with Team Foundation Server 2010, but this talk will cover the foundations and get you on your way to becoming an expert.

Biography:
Doug Neumann has been working on Team Foundation Server since its inception in early 2003 when he was responsible for designing a new version control tool to succeed Visual SourceSafe. Currently he is a Principal Group Program Manager for the product and manages the teams responsible for the version control, build automation, web access, and administrative features of the product.

VSTS Tester Demo Follow-ups

Last week, I delivered a VSTS 2008 Tester Edition demo to a prospective client. Following up on a few questions to which I didn’t know the answer:

Q. Can I use Subversion with TFS?

A. I get this question all the time from developers. It’s a perfectly valid question. The answer is no…but yes…sort of. The version control repository (and all data) must remain SQL Server. Yes, it’s proprietary. Further, if you plan to use TFS in your software development environment, but choose not to leverage it for version control, it severely limits the usefulness of the information elicited from TFS (because you’re not feeding in the crucial VC data). If you’re not leveraging VC in TFS, you’re probably not leveraging Team Build either.

That said, while a fully-integrated TFS for ALM and SCM is the ideal, there’s a compelling argument to leverage TFS as a repository for requirements, scenarios, test cases, functional and load testing as well as defect tracking. TFS is an excellent repository to store “stuff”: risks, requirements, issues, defects, etc and relating all these items. So, while your shop won’t get 100% of the horsepower of TFS without leveraging VC, there are still benefits.

Q. In a Web Test (and Load Test), one can indicate the browser type and even break this out into a distribution (e.g. 50% of users are FF3; 50% IE7). What is this really testing? (Test menu >> Edit Test Run Configuration…Web Test…Browser Type)

A. Contrary to what we would drool over, this is not actually rendering the test in a given/different browser. This is just sending a browser-specific header to the web server and hence the testing engine. The web server will note the browser type (user agent) but it’s not like these settings will reveal (for example) HTML table tags mis-rendering in IE when they look fine under FireFox 3.x (you are using CSS, right?). Here’s a write-up describing how to install additional/new browser types.

Q. If we deploy our web site into a test environment, the base URI for the web tests will differ from that when administered on the local machine. How can we make the base URI dynamic/configurable?

A. Yes, one can make the base URI dynamic / data driven from (for example) configuration.

1. Record the test with a local instance

2. Right-mouse on the test selecting “Parameterize Web Servers”

3. Configure with meaningful names (TestEnvironment, UATEnvironment, etc.). I have to imagine this could be configured at build / deployment time but I haven’t done that.

Q. What Instant Messenger (IM) clients does the “Team Members” functionality support?

A. Right-mouse on Team Members (need SP1 for this functionality), Personal Settings, Collaboration, Change button. Live and Communicator are included. Beyond that, the interfaces are exposed and an MVP team created a Skype provider. Good write-up here.

Awarded Team System MVP

A little more than a month ago, I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Team System. I haven't said much about it because I try to remain a humble guy and frankly, I've been swamped with work/life. And, unlike a lot of awards, it's not really one you "go after"...it comes to you without a formula.

What I really want to say about this is thank you. Thank you to the community for creating opportunities to present. Thank you to Microsoft for supporting technology professionals and creating jobs and careers around your products (and staying out of the way when I comes to implementation :). Thank you to the community leaders and professionals who dedicate their time and seemingly endless energy to making all of us stronger by creating environments of intense learning and camaraderie. Thank you to my employer for believing in my endeavors and investing in me the time to develop my TFS/VSTS skill set and share what I learn with the community and clients. And finally, I want to thank you--the readers/community/professional folks. Thanks for showing up to presentations, seminars, user groups and conferences. It’s a blast!

I'm humbled even to be mentioned in the same sentence as some of the past and current MVPs. While the MVP is quite an honor, it's not a means to an end. I'm still the same guy. I plan to keep doing the same sort of things I was doing before. To that end, please let me know how I can help you with learning or adopting TFS/VSTS in your environment. If you know me, I'm not completely bias toward TFS...there are other great tools for the job out there. We'll help get you up and running and producing high quality software--regardless of toolset.

Technorati Tags: Team System,MVP,VSTS,TFS,Microsoft

VSTS 2010: Architecture Edition Presentation

Recently, I had the pleasure of co-presenting (probably generous...I more just rode shotgun :) on VSTS 2010: Architecture Edition with Randy Pagels, Developer Platform Technical Specialist with Microsoft. We spoke to an impressively-attended internal user group at Cincinnati Financial. Thank you Randy for the invitation to co-present and Cincinnati Financial for having us in.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the current 2008 Architecture Edition. Too rigid. Doesn't roll with the punches very well. It's more of a lay-down-the-law boundaries at the beginning of the project without the flexibility of absorbing feedback and instituting ongoing, evolutionary change.

The new version seems much more flexible and functional. It imposes a model / architecture but can be (and expects to be) adjusted easily over the life of the project. One can also institute a confirmation check of the code against the model during the automated build. It's less overbearing and more of a quality gate and feedback mechanism: "Uh, excuse me, you're directly accessing the data layer from the presentation layer...? Nope, sorry. You need to go through the interface / business layer to ensure...Thank you."

From the presentation, we fielded a lot of great questions. Here are the responses Randy and I compiled that we needed to take away. Thanks to Randy and the product group for their responses:


Q. Can we modify the TSWA project home page to include 2 WI query results: Individual, Team?
A. There’s not much you can do with TSWA 2008 but there’s a new feature in TSWA 2010 (which is now a part of TFS 2010) that might accommodate this request. In TSWA 2010, you will be able to customize the “Work Items Summary” section on the home page(talk about nice!) to select a stored query. Even though the Limitation here is that you can’t have more than one query showing, you can select a query that might have a filter that looks like “AssignedTo = @me OR AreaPath=Team”.

Q. Can a Coded UI test, test multiple browsers during a build? e.g. Mozilla, IE6, 7, 8
A. We support IE7 and IE8. The support for FireFox 3.0 will be at CTP level by RTM time. There are no plans for other browser support from product team at this point but there is extensibility support here for other 3rd parties/partners to add the support.

Q. Does code need to compile in order to produce the sequence diagram?
A. Generally speaking, the code must compile for sequence generation to work. Since we use the language services which use a sort of background / delay compile system – you will get a generated diagram for the parts of your code that does compile. For the parts that don’t compile, all bets are off since the language services do not guarantee behavior at that point.

Q. Can you update the underlying DGML XML and have that change reflect in all instances? Sort of a search/replace?
A. Not totally clear on this, but in general, if you update the raw XML behind a DGML graph, it will be immediately reflected in the graph.

Q. Is there any Visio import UML?
A. Yes, this will be provided as a PowerTool at RTM.

Q. Is there any XMI import UML?
A. Yes, same story as the Visio Import.

Q. Is there state management / authentication persistence support within SuperPreview?
A. Since this runs in an actual browser session and will run anything in the “OnLoad javascript” call so if there is anything going on in there it will execute and then take a snapshot of the page. An image is produced after you specify the URL – it is a snapshot. You have to change the URL to change the side by side layout. Unfortunately, there’s no way currently for SuperPreview to work with web pages that are behind a log-in (if I’m interpreting your question, correctly). The page must be publicly accessible. This is a pretty high priority item for the PG with the next version of SuperPreview.

Q. Does Test Essentials require agent/service/install onto QA boxes?
A. Yes, through small services called “Data Collectors”

Q. What's new in unit tests for VSTS 2010?
A. There are some minor enhancements, such as support for categories instead of test lists, performance improvements like using more than one core. Simplifying deployment that will result in improved performance as well. Unit Tests can now be extended with custom attributes (like privilege escalation attribute). The unit test type can be extended to provide custom coded tests (this is how coded UI is implemented)

Some good discussion: on Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at http://www.codeplex.com/MEF

Off Topic: Chicago Must-Eat Foods

This is a frequent topic of conversation with friends visiting Chicago. I lived there for 8 years and loved Chicago...well, except for the October to May winters. Chicago has great sports, culture, festivals, events, shopping and...of course food. So I can avoid regurgitating this list every time I'm asked, here we go:

Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinders (Pizza in a bowl...owner remembers wait list by your face)
Cafe Babareeba (Spanish tapas)
Giordano's (deep dish pizza; pass on Gino's...no where near as good)
Portillo's (Loaded dogs)
Joe's (get the Stone Crab if it's in season)
Mon Ami Gabi (French)
Tizi Melloul (Mediterranean)
Mia Francesca's (Italian)
Star of Siam (Tai)
Mitchell's (breakfast)

I'm sure I'm forgetting something but that's a good start. Enjoy!

TFS 2010 Setup: Gotchas

I'm sure I missed a step somewhere during setup but...so the search engines catch 'em, I'm going to post my TFS/VSTS 2010 setup missteps below:

Issue: "TF255147: The following server that is running SQL Server is not listening on the expected TCP port: SERVER"
Resolution: Open SQL Server Configuration Manager. Under SQL Server Network Configuration, Protocols for MSSQLSERVER, right-mouse Enable TCP/IP. Restart SQL Server. Re-run TFS configuration wizard.

Issue: "TF255282: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 cannot be installed. The program is already installed on this server"
Resolution: Open up Add/Remove Programs (or "Programs and Features" under Win2k8 Server) and remove Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Re-run TFS configuration wizard.

Issue: Couldn't get Full-Text search within SQL 2008 to install.
MSI (s) (14:AC) [00:03:21:091]: Source is incorrect. Unable to open or validate MSI package D:\Setup\sql_engine_core_shared.msi.MSI (s) (14:AC) [00:03:21:093]: Note: 1: 2203 2: D:\Setup\sql_engine_core_shared.msi 3: -2147287037 MSI (s) (14:AC) [00:03:21:093]: Source is incorrect. Unable to open or validate MSI package D:\Setup\sql_engine_core_shared.msi.Please insert the disk: Please insert next disk
Resolution: I'm installing on a VPC so I simiply download ISO installs, "Capture ISO image..." from the CD menu of the VPC and install. Works great...usually. In this case, for some reason, the installation would get 2/3rds to completion and die with very innocuous errors. I kept coming up empty searching for "error" within the 500k MSI log file. Finally stumbled onto something referring to "Unable to open..." having something to do with subst.exe and network or simulated mapped drives. I expanded the ISO with MagicISO, copied it to the VPC hard drive and wala, no more issue. That was a good 6 hours of struggle.