The CTP of Visual Studio 2010 was announced at PDC. One of the coolest features in Visual Studio 2010 is the Lab Management.

Lab Management leverages virtualization to enable software development and test teams to build higher quality apps. Lab management accelerates setup/tear down time and eliminates no-repro bugs by creating better integration across dev and test teams throughout the application lifecycle.

Did you know that:

• 30% of testing time is spent in setting up machines and labs
• Under 30% utilization of test and dev assets
• “No Repro” bugs often slip into production impacting project success

Lab Management leverages virtualization and allows multiple checkpoints to be created across lab environments (consisting of multiple VMs). Since the checkpoints are part of the same image as opposed to having to clone at every state snapshot, that reduces the proliferation. In addition, lab management ties the environments to the notion of a project which allows the lab administrator to clean up the images as projects are completed.

Lab Management is built on top of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and thanks to SCVMM managing VMs on multiple hypervisors, Lab Management supports both Hyper-V and VMware ESX out of the box.

Want to see how it works?  get more details?

We have a special guest in the next ALM user group: Shay Mandel, Principal Manager from Microsoft India. Shay will introduce the lab management and will talk about it, historycal debugger and aftershock.

The meeting will take place at Microsoft Ra’anana, Dec 24, 17:30.

Please register to the session here.

See you there!

The team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management

The December meeting of the Israeli ALM user group in Microsoft focused with the fascinating subject of Agile Development and the steps that a software organization should implement to achieve the transition.

You can download the slides here:

Yes.. It was only two and a half months ago when I wrote about receiving my Microsoft MVP award. I was quite honored to receive this award.

The reason that I have to give up my MVP award is that today I joined Microsoft Israel to the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group.

My official job title will be Developer Evangelist which means that I will help customers to choose the best technologies that Microsoft offer.

Many who know me, know that I pretty much talk tech to anyone who’ll listen and that I’m very passionate about it. My professional career has been focused around Microsoft technologies for the past 10 years so, needless to say, I feel like this is the perfect role for me.

Finally, What about this blog? don’t worry. Currently, I’ll continue write here about Team System anymore

-Maor

This is a special treat!  The next ALM user group has a special guest: Shay Mandel, Principal Program Manager from Microsoft India.

Attention – the meeting will be at Dec 24, 2008

Shay will be visiting Israel at the end of December and very happy to talk in the user group. Shay will talk about the new Microsoft Lab Management and Visual Studio 2010.

So much was said about using Virtualization in production and Data Centers, but Virtualization is even more amazing when it is used in the development lifecycle. In this session you will learn how to leverage virtualization and the new tools that are available in VSTS 2010 to speed up the development process, enhance collaboration and improve software quality.
You will see how you can easily save a lot of time by using the new Lab Management tool to use virtual machines for easily deploying isolated environments for each developer and tester. Deploy the application automatically. Run tests and file actionable bugs that enable easy debugging, even weeks after the bug was filed, as if they occurred just now. Automate the build process and the continuous integration.

The meeting agenda

Speaker: Shay Mandel, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft India

17:30 – 18:00 Assembly

18:00 – 19:00 Lab Management for smoother ALM process

19:00 – 19:15 Break

19:15 – 19:45 New tools in VSTS 2010 – Proteus (historical debugger) and Aftershock (change impact testing).

About the speaker:

Shay Mandel is part of the VSTS Lab Management product, based out of India. The team have exposed the product only very recently, and it will be part of VSTS 2010 

The team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management

Please register to the session here.

See you there!

New tool was released on CodePlex called TFS Check-in Validation Tool.

This tool provides the ability to have a checkin validating by a build prior to being checked in.  This is similar to a feature in TFS 2010 called Gated Checkin, which is integrated into VS and TFS (more info in this video). With both of these the goal is to prevent build breaks from being checked in by validating them beforehand.

If you really like it and are interested in doing something similar with TFS 2008 (before TFS 2010) comes out, you can check out this new project on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/BuddyBuild.

It is not a part of TFS and the implementation is unrelated to the TFS 2010 Gated checkin feature.

Buck Hodges has created a great post on this commonly issue here.

Version 2.2 for TFS 2008 is out:

• Task Board for Team system has hit Gold Master and is coming out of Beta
• Task Board for Team System now supports SfTS 1.2 on TFS 2005

Version 2.2 of the free process template is now available for download:

http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/en/download.aspx?key=A23E296BA97DA7410F496F650C41AC26&site=UK&version=v2.2

Version 2.2 supports:

• TFS 2008 / TFS 2008 SP1
• SQL Server 2005 / SQL Server 2008
• WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007

It features a new "Report Flicker Mode", a velocity report, ten new engineering focussed report along with numerous bug fixes, performance tweaks and other enhancements.

Task Board for Team System hits Gold Master:

http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/en/TaskBoardBeta/Default.aspx

RadioTFS is going to be doing a series of shows on the new Features in Visual Studio Team System 2010 – In this edition they catch up with Habib and the developer features!

Habib is a Lead Program manager on the VSTS Development group.  His main responsibilities include the Visual Studio debugger, profiler, code coverage and pretty much anything related to troubleshooting and diagnosing applications.  He joined Microsoft in 2000 and has been in Developer Division ever since.  Before joining Microsoft, Habib studied computer science at the Australian National University in Canberra.  While not at work, Habib spends his time playing with robots, shooting hoops or chasing that elusive Yellowfin.  One of his favorite possessions is a Washington state license plate with the label "RUNTIME".

When MSBuild was first released, it was seen as a stopgap measure. Prior to its introduction, building a non-trivial .NET project from the command line was a daunting challenge. Either command line options have to be carefully laid out or third-party libraries like NAnt have to be brought in.

Recently MSBuild Extension Pack was released on CodePlex. Run by Mike Fourie and a team of 5 developers, this successor to FreeToDev MSBuild Extensions has over 170 different tasks for MSBuild. Many of these tasks support a MachineName argument allowing the actions to be performed on a remote machine.

The team summarizes the tasks into these categories:

• System Items: Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound
• Code: Assemblies, CAB Files, Code Signing, File Detokenisation, GUID’s, Mathematics, Strings, Threads, Zip
• Applications: BizTalk 2006, Email, IIS7, MSBuild, SourceSafe, StyleCop, Team Foundation Server, Visual Basic 6, WMI

The next meeting of the Israeli ALM UG will be focused on VSTS/TFS extensibility.

Save as Outlook Appointment:

VSTS is a great ALM platform. One of the main advantages of VSTS is it’s API which gives us the ability to write tools to make our daily work more productive.

We will talk about what parts and how we can customize and extensible VSTS.

The agenda:

17:30 - 18:00 : Assembly

18:00 - 18:45 : Part 1 - TFS API fundamentals

18:45 - 19:00 : Break

19:00 - 19:45 : Part 2 - Hands-On & code samples

Please register here.

The lecturer:

Shmulik Segal works as ALM group manager in Sela Group. Shmulik is a software engineer with rich and varied technical experience. In the past 3 years Shmulik assimilate many TFS projects and has proved experience in writing tools to VSTS.