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.

In today’s press release titled: “Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview” MS also announced the merge of the Developer Edition and Database Edition SKU’s.

From Gert’s post:

What does this mean?

In the next release of Visual Studio Team System we will be merging the feature sets of the Development Edition and the Database Edition into a single product. The new product – part of Visual Studio Team System codename “Rosario” – will include all of the features in the Development Edition and the Database Edition as well as new capabilities delivering even more value in a single product. This will provide a more complete set of capabilities for building software in today’s data-driven environments. Bringing these two feature sets together enables you to take advantage of the core tools for application development as well as the necessary tools for database development, including performance profiling, code analysis, code metrics, code coverage, database refactoring, Schema Compare, Data Compare, and more.

As an MSDN subscriber we want you to realize the benefit of this merged feature set now, which is why we are extending this exclusive offer. If you have either the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition with MSDN Premium subscription or the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition with MSDN Premium subscription, on October 1, 2008 you will have access to both the Development Edition and Database Edition through MSDN Subscriber Downloads. This change also applies to customers who purchased Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers with MSDN Premium Subscription and Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals with MSDN Premium Subscription.

A lot of users confused and don’t understand why the database does not appear on the target server when they do deploy.

The reason is that in CTP 16, the default deploy mechanism is to deploy to script. If you want to deploy to database you have to change the ‘Deploy action’ on the project properties, deploy tab to ‘Create a deployment script (.sql) and deploy to the database.’

I spent hours to solve this problem…

My customer has VB6 SP5, we installed Team Explorer 2008, MSSCCI provider…and nothing! I started the VB6 IDE, but I cannot find any source control or Team Foundation menu’s.

Then I found this thread.

The Solution:

Add the line:

vbscc=1

To c:\windows\vbaddin.ini

Then restart VB6, and you get a new menu item: Tools, Team Foundation.

Many customers ask me the same question: does Expression Blend can talk with Team System / Source Control?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. Blend does not have the ability to use a source control repository and actually strips out any source control binding it finds in a project file.

Just published over on Radio TFS a special episode on the Database Edition of Team System with the Data Dude man - Gert Drapers.  In the show Gert talks how the product got started, where it is now, where it is going in the future, the latest CTP of the Database Edition GDR and more.

The new <TestContainer> item in Team Build 2008 in a great way to run tests without test metadata file (*.vsmdi).

You can specify the following to run all unit tests found in assemblies matching the pattern *.Tests.dll and even specify .LoadTest and .WebTest files as well:

<ItemGroup>
  <TestContainer Include="$(Outdir)*.Tests.dll" />
  <TestContainer Include="$(Outdir)WebTest1.webtest" />
  <TestContainer Include="$(Outdir)LoadTest1.loadtest" />
</ItemGroup>

But if you try to run it in Team Build 2008, you will get an error like: Could not load file or assembly.

That’s because the task tries to do an Assembly.LoadFrom() on whatever files you include in the <TestContainer> item. This obviously fails because .LoadTest and .WebTest are XML files, not assemblies.

This problem has been solved in TFS 2008 SP1. All you need to do is to apply the TFS SP1 patch to the build machine (If you don’t want, it’s not necessary to install TFS SP1 on TF Server to get the fix).

The other day I got a question: How can I deploy an app via ClickOnce using Team Build?

There is not out of box way to do that, but we can do it with a simple workaround:

we should overload the target AfterCompile in TFSBuild.Proj to call MSBuild Task Publish and can pass the PublishDir property:

<Target Name="AfterCompile">
  <MSBuild
  Condition=" '@(SolutionToBuild)'!='' "
  Projects="@(SolutionToBuild)"
  Properties="Configuration=%(ConfigurationToBuild.FlavorToBuild);
    Platform=%(ConfigurationToBuild.PlatformToBuild);
    SkipInvalidConfigurations=true;
    VCBuildOverride=$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\TFSBuild.vsprops;
    FxCopDir=$(FxCopDir);OutDir=$(OutDir);
    PublishDir=$(OutDir);
    ReferencePath=$(ReferencePath);
    TeamBuildConstants=$(TeamBuildConstants);
    $(CodeAnalysisOption);PublishDir=\\qa1Srv\drops\publishedVers\ "
  Targets="Publish" />
</Target>

Gert just posted about the release of CTP16 of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR release.

From Gert’s post:

This release adds the following features:

• VSDBCMD.EXE
  • We added independent commandline deployment and reverse engineer, which can be used on machines that do not have Visual Studio installed, in order to deploy the results of a database project build (.dbschema file), or if you need to generate a .dbschema file so you can for example compare it, this commandline tool will let you do that as well.
• Database Project (.dbproj) Upgrades
  • CTP15 enabled upgrade of project files, but did not included updating Data Generation Plans (.DGEN files), which now be upgraded when they are opened the first time inside the DGEN designer.
• Schema Compare
  • You can now choose the SQL Command Variables (SQLCMD) to use during a Schema Compare session by clicking the “Specify SQLCMD variables” button on the Schema Compare toolbar. This will allow you to compare projects that are using SQLCMD variables and provide the contextual information via the variable values.
  • You can now set the Schema Compare options at the session level, in addition to Tools->Options, by clicking the Settings button on the Schema Compare toolbar.
  • And you can now save your Schema Compare session and reopen it again. We also added an item template for this, name “Schema Comparison”
• Extensibility
  • We finished the namespace and assembly naming cleanup. As a result all assembly names and namespaces have been changed. This means if you have code leveraging our extensibility mechanisms you need to update the assembly references and namespaces in your code.
  • We added the ability to add your own refactoring types! So now you can create your own refactoring command and have it change all the required references inside the schema. This is above and beyond the ability to create your own refactoring targets (the sources your want to change by an refactoring type), static code analysis rules, data generators, data distributions and test conditions.
  • We now also offer public access to our TSQL parsers for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, including the script generator functionality.
• And then there are many more enhancements in the parser, interpreter, validation, build and deploy.

Pre-requisites:

CTP16 requires the following components to be installed:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM
• Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 SP1

Download location:

You can download CTP16 from the following location:

• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/setup.exe
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/Readme.mht
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR Documentation.zip

NOTE: If you have a previous version of the GDR installed, you will have to first uninstall this and then install the latest CTP16 bits.