Inaugural COALMG Meeting: Tuesday April 29th

Announcing the first meeting of the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Managment Group (COALMG). First, check this post to discover more about Application Lifecycle Managment (ALM).

To accommodate the schedule of our speaker, we've moved our meeting this month to Tuesday April 29th from 5:30-7:30pm at the Polaris Microsoft office. (Normally, we meet every other month on the 1st Thursday, opposite the MOCSDUG.org user group.) Our web site is www.COALMG.org. Look forward to seeing you there!

Writing Maintainable and Robust Applications with Visual Studio Team System

Meeting Date & Time: 4/29/2008 5:30PM

Session Description:
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is an extensible, life-cycle tools platform that helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern, service-oriented solutions. Visual Studio Team System is designed so every role in the development team has an integrated, seamless experience with the tools they are most comfortable with. Code Analysis, Code Metrics, Code Profiling, and Unit Testing are tools that are part of Team System and can be used through the software development lifecycle to improve quality. The impact of software defects is one of the reasons it is difficult to control the costs of the development and deployment activities on software projects. It is commonly accepted that defects that get resolved later in the development cycle cost more to fix. Learn how you can reduce defects by using the tools provided in Visual Studio Team System Developer Edition 2008.

Speaker Bio:
Randy Pagels - ALM Technology Specialist, Microsoft Corporation
Randy is an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Technology specialist for the Heartland District providing expertise on the Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server products. He helps customers get the most out of their ALM tools by explaining best practices, installation, and configuration through presentations, workshops, or quick starts. Prior to Microsoft Randy worked as a developer for 16 years in the IT area of DTE Energy. He has architectured and development many .Net web applications using agile methodologies.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Just verifying the time... Is it 5:30-7:30 or 6:00-8:00? I see it posted each way above.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 9:55:00 AM

Jeff Hunsaker said…

Thanks, Jason. It is 5:30pm. Good catch.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 10:10:00 AM

TFS Reports Out of Date

You may have noticed it takes a while for Team Foundation Server (TFS) reports to reflect changes you've made to work items or builds. Let me guess...about an hour, right? Out of the box, TFS is set to refresh the data warehouse from its transactional store every 60 minutes. How do I change the frequency of the data warehouse refresh? Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service on your TFS application tier server within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the ChangeSetting option Enter RunIntervalSeconds for the settingId and the desired number of seconds for newValue (300 for 5 minutes...5*60) Select Invoke How do I force a data warehouse refresh? Two methods here: either via the above web service or using SQL Server Management Studio. Via the web service: Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the Run option Click Invo...

Rollback a Ooops in TFS with TFPT Rollback

Rhut roe, Raggie. You just checked in a merge operation affecting 100's of files in TFS against the wrong branch. Ooops. Well, you can simply roll it back, right? Select the folder in Source Control Explorer and...hey, where's the Rollback? Rollback isn't supported in TFS natively. However, it is supported within the Power Tools leveraging the command-line TFPT.exe utility. It's fairly straightforward to revert back to a previous version--with one caveot. First, download and install the Team Foundation Power Tools 2008 on your workstation. Before proceeding, let's create a workspace dedicated to the rollback. To "true up" the workspace, the rollback operation will peform a Get Latest for every file in your current workspace. This can consume hours (and many GB) with a broad workspace mapping. To work around this, I create a temporary workspace targeted at just the area of source I need to roll back. So let's drill down on our scenario... I'm worki...

VSTS 2008 Data-Driven Web Test

During a client demo this afternoon, I mind-blanked on creating a data-driven web test. Sure enough, I stepped out of the client offices and figured it out. Super. But, I think it's counterintuitive enough to outline in a blog post (...trying to make myself feel better ;-). Somewhat in my defense, I was thinking about data-driven unit tests. These, IMO, are easy to implement. Data-driven web tests are a bit more effort and challenging. Create a web test: Right-mouse on your test project selecting Add >> Web Test. Use the browser recorder to capture your web test scenario. Let's assume you're submitting an age and credit rating to an insurance rate calculator...similar to the screen capture below: Create a table or CSV file (comma-delimited...just use Excel and save as CSV) with relevant headings for your inputs and expected values: From Solution Explorer, double-click on your web test. In the main window, right-mouse on your web test selecting Add Data Sou...

Effective Thoughts

Search This Blog