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!

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.

There are few emails that one will receive in his lifetime that will render him completely speechless. I am delighted to find out that I have been awarded with 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award.
This is the email I received:

Subject: Congratulations 2009 Microsoft MVP!

Dear Maor David,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

I am really very excited and I want to take this opportunity to thank the community that supported me over the past year. Special thanks goes to Guy Burstein who has nominated me for the MVP program. Off course I’d like to thank to my company – SRL, that encourage excellence and sharing the knowledge with the community.

My MVP Profile page: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Maor.David-Pur

Thanks!!!

Paul Hacker and Dave McKinstry have started a virtual Team System user group. The user group will use Live Meeting for demos and talks, holding the social side of the user group meeting over in Second Life.  For more information and to register visit: http://www.tsug-ve.com/

The first meeting will be held on September 18, 2008 at 6:00 PM SLT.

For the meeting time in other time zones, click here.

It was a great honor to host all of you in the meeting.

Our next meeting will be at November 10 2008 – we will talk about Team System extensibility.

You can download Eran’s presentation about Camano from yesterday’s meeting.

Maor

Next meeting will be focused on the new features that were delivered with VSTS 2008 SP1 and the new Power Tools. We will also introduce the new testing suite (Camano) that will be shipped with the next version of TFS – Rosario.

Shahar Bracha (SRL ALM Group Manager) will talk about Visual Studio Team System Power Tools  which enables us better usage and ease when working with TFS.

During his session we will go over the new Power Tools and Service pack features  (such as: Web access enhancements, notifications support,  build, folder mapping and much more…)

For our second session Eran Ruso (SRL ALM Senior Advisor and QA Expert) we will go over Rosario in general and focus on Camano, a new standalone testing suite in Rosario.  Eran will also describe his experience as part of the first group that uses Rosario and Camano in production environments.

About the lecturers:

Shahar  is the ALM Manger at SRL Group, specializes in Microsoft technologies with an emphasis on the Team System, .NET framework and Web application architecture.

Eran  is a Senior Consultant at SRL Group, specializes in QA methodologies  and testing lifecycle.

Please register here to the event:

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032384162&culture=he-IL

The Israeli ALM user group is back! I’m proud to be one of the 2 managers of this user group - my colleague is Sarit Tamir.

Next meeting (8 September 2008, 17:30) will be focused on the new features that were delivered with VSTS 2008 SP1 and the new Power Tools. We will also introduce the new testing suite (Camano) that will be shipped with the next version of TFS – Rosario.

Shahar Bracha will talk about Visual Studio Team System Power Tools which enables us better usage and ease when working with TFS.

During his session we will go over the new Power Tools and Service pack features  (such as: Web access enhancements, notifications support,  build, folder mapping and much more…)

For our second session, Eran Ruso will go over CTP 12 of Rosario in general and focus on Camano, a new standalone testing suite in Rosario.  Eran will also describe his experience as part of the first group that uses Rosario and Camano in production environments.

About the lecturers:

Shahar  is the ALM Manger at SRL Group, specializes in Microsoft technologies with an emphasis on the Team System, .NET framework and Web application architecture.

Eran  is a Senior Consultant at SRL Group, specializes in QA methodologies  and testing lifecycle.

I’ll be happy to meet you there!

Maor

Please register here to the event:

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032384162&culture=he-IL