Effective Thoughts

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...

Very excited to announce we've (well, Alexei deserves all the credit) landed Doug Neumann for COALMG 's November meeting! Date/Time: Thursday November 5th, 6PM, Polaris Microsoft Office (4th Floor) Abstract: Visual Studio 2010 is almost here, and with it comes a host of new capabilities for application lifecycle management in Team Foundation Server. In this talk, we'll survey the new features in TFS 2010, starting with enhancements to the core features of version control, work item tracking, and build automation and then venturing into new capabilities for executing agile projects, managing quality assurance activities, and simplifying the provisioning of virtualized testing environments. There's a lot to learn with Team Foundation Server 2010, but this talk will cover the foundations and get you on your way to becoming an expert. Biography: Doug Neumann has been working on Team Foundation Server since its inception in early 2003 when he was responsible for designing...

Last week, I delivered a VSTS 2008 Tester Edition demo to a prospective client. Following up on a few questions to which I didn’t know the answer: Q. Can I use Subversion with TFS? A. I get this question all the time from developers. It’s a perfectly valid question. The answer is no…but yes…sort of. The version control repository (and all data) must remain SQL Server. Yes, it’s proprietary. Further, if you plan to use TFS in your software development environment, but choose not to leverage it for version control, it severely limits the usefulness of the information elicited from TFS (because you’re not feeding in the crucial VC data). If you’re not leveraging VC in TFS, you’re probably not leveraging Team Build either. That said, while a fully-integrated TFS for ALM and SCM is the ideal, there’s a compelling argument to leverage TFS as a repository for requirements, scenarios, test cases, functional and load testing as well as defect tracking. TFS is an excellent repository to s...

A little more than a month ago, I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Team System. I haven't said much about it because I try to remain a humble guy and frankly, I've been swamped with work/life. And, unlike a lot of awards, it's not really one you "go after"...it comes to you without a formula. What I really want to say about this is thank you. Thank you to the community for creating opportunities to present. Thank you to Microsoft for supporting technology professionals and creating jobs and careers around your products (and staying out of the way when I comes to implementation :). Thank you to the community leaders and professionals who dedicate their time and seemingly endless energy to making all of us stronger by creating environments of intense learning and camaraderie. Thank you to my employer for believing in my endeavors and investing in me the time to develop my TFS/VSTS skill set and share what I learn with the commun...