Effective Thoughts

I'm honored to be presenting at the DogFood Conference again this year. I'll be delivering a session entitled "Engaging nondevelopers in Visual Studio 2010/TFS/ALM" on Friday. Hope to see you there! Update (11/03/2010): I posted my deck on SkyDrive...but you still need to attend in person! (Lots of demos...)

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 .

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!

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.

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.

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!

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 .

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 s...

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.

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.

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 av...

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 qua...

Thanks for everyone attending my " Implementing an Agile Software Development Process with Team Foundation Server (TFS) " presentation today. We enjoyed some good discussion. I had a few TFS-related questions pop up which I thought I'd address in a post: Q. Is it possible to fail the build but only if a specific test fails? So, let's say we have 3 tests. If Test01 or Test02 fail, fail the build. If Test03 fails, don't fail the build. A. Not that I'm aware of. If any test fails in a build but compilation succeeded, that build lists a state of Partially Succeeded. With TFS 2008 SP1, we received a property to modify or control this behavior: TreatTestFailureAsBuildFailure. If true (false is the default), any test failure will set the build state to Failed (vs. Partially Succeeded). Nice write-up here . You might take the approach of creating two separate builds: one that contains all your tests and one containing just mission critical tests. Set TreatTestFailureA...

Thanks to everyone attending my firm's monthly Microsoft BizValue Series. In case you missed it, I've presented recently on the Microsoft Business Intelligence ( MSBI ) stack, Microsoft Online Services / BPOS and Team Foundation Server ( TFS ). We meet in our offices downtown (Columbus, OH) on the 2nd Wednesday of the month. Next week (June 10th), I'll be delivering a talk on leveraging TFS for agile software development efforts. I'll deliver a similar presentation in our Charlotte, NC offices the following day (June 11th). You can learn more and register here and here .

Update: 3/28: Thanks for joining us in Mason, OH. Slide deck is here and on Slide Share here . Thanks for joining us at ArcReady in Columbus, OH "Architecting for the Cloud". I hope everyone got some good information out of my "Cloud Services" session. I'll also be delivering this same session in Mason, OH this Friday. Thanks for coming and thanks to Brian Prince for offering the opportunity to present. Architecting for the cloud For our next ArcReady, we will explore a topic on everyone’s mind: Cloud computing. Several industry companies have announced cloud computing services . In October 2008 at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the next phase of our Software + Services vision: the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Services Platforms provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on premises environments or the internet. Session 1: Cloud Services In our first session we will explore the current state o...

I haven't installed a development tool (production or beta/CTP) on my core OS for years. I do all my development, presentation preparation and learning / experimentation on Virtual PC (VPC) instances. (Ok, my clients pony up development machines for client work but...and no developing / architect jokes) Also, these are not VPCs I created. Certainly, one needs to license these instances properly when used in a production environment (vs. testing/evaluation) but leveraging a VPC will save you loads of time and effort (and headaches). To be clear, I don't recommend this approach if you need to actually learn how to install and configure a product and/or operating system. If you're studying for your MCSE, it likely behooves you to actually install it a few times rather than leveraging an existing virtual instance. But, if you want to learn how to leverage or use the product rather than how to install and configure it , go out to your favorite search engine or search.microsoft....

I'll be presenting VSTS/TFS 2008 at this two day event Feb. 4-5th. Speakers: Alexei Govorine , Quick Solutions Jeff Hunsaker , Cardinal Solutions They are the co-founders of the Central Ohio ALM Group The SDLC in a Box session will be led by two Central Ohio community leads. This 2 day briefing will discuss an application lifecycle project, from initial conception through requirements gathering, design, development, testing, build & review processes. We also cover process concepts, integration with non-Microsoft development and best-of-breed partner solutions & offerings for Visual Studio 2008 Team System. This two day sesions is targeted for Developers, Architects, Project Managers, DBAs and Business Analysts looking for ALM and researching Team Foundation Server. Register for this Event! Enter code: 857100 This event will be held at: Microsoft 8800 Lyra Drive Suite 400 Columbus, OH 43240 Map IT!

Update (2/7/2009): VsDoc for jQuery v1.3.1 released! Update (1/23/2009): Thanks to all who attended! The packed house made for some great energy...and I hope some solid learning. I added the link to the samples/demos below (all the way at the bottom). My colleague Jason Karns and I have the honor of presenting " Introducing jQuery in ASP.Net " at the Detroit MSDN Developer Conference on January 22nd. Come see this exciting inclusion of an open source library with Microsoft Visual Studio! I've included several links below we'll discuss in our talk: jQuery: v1.3 Released 1/14! (...but no official Visual Studio annotated Intellisense file yet ;-( jQuery Project jQuery Visual Studio annotated library Scott Guthrie “ jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 ” - Enabling Intellisense for jQuery in Visual Studio2008 Hotfix to support -vsdoc.js annotated files within Visual Studio ASP.Net: ASP.Net MVC (Beta) ASP.Net AJAX (built in to ASP.Net 3.5 SP1) ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit...

If you work for a State or Local Government operation in central Ohio, bug your boss to attend TFS Day December 9th and 10th. Along with Brian Prince and Alexei Govorine , I'll be delivering a full day and a half on VSTS and TFS. Look forward to seeing you there!

[Google ranking skyrockets... ;-)] I'm a big fan of TFS/VSTS. However, there are a good pocket of folks who take issue with the way TFS handles or implements a certain feature. Well this is your chance to vent! I'm planning a presentation around the "Top 10 TFS/VSTS Hates and How to Alleviate Them"...or something along those lines. But I need your help. Post a comment below detailing your dislike. If it's legitimate, I'll highlight it in the presentation and [hopefully] provide an alternative, resolution, or work-around. Thanks in advance! Update 7/19/2008: Version Control and Microsoft