"I really like the way you can access your work items from within Outlook. I like the way you can bring up the full work item forms, make edits, and save immediately to TFS. It was great to create new meeting requests or mail messages from the work items."
Lori Lamkin Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server at Microsoft
"These types of products are important to the industry."
Joel Semeniuk CEO and co-founder of ImagiNET Resources Corp.
"I know of a good number of companies that will love having something like this - getting their timesheet management into TFS (so it can be reported on, especially) will make life a lot easier for them."
James Manning Software Design Engineer for Visual Studio project at Microsoft
"I like the idea of being able to link work items to e-mails and meetings. I also like that it provides non-technical information workers the option of working with TFS in a more familiar environment. Congratulations to TeamExpand on the release!"
Jason Barile Principal Test Manager for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server at Microsoft
"TX Chrono, by TeamExpand, allows users to easily track how they are spending their time, store that information in TFS, and make it available for reporting in the warehouse."
Brian Harry Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server at Microsoft
Haven’t been here for quite a time, and missed some interesting events, including the availability of Silverlight 3 and announcement of Expression Blend 3. Haven’t you forgotten, that last year it was promised (Brian Harry did it in his blog) to create more seamless integration between TFS and Expression Blend?
That was done. TFS integration is in the top ten of new features in Expression Blend 3. The team workflow is now available for designers, TFS now ensures safe, up-to-date designers work available to the whole team. Everyone’s happy (after they get the patch to Team Foundation 2008 to ensure the integration to work).
Besides, there are lots of nice useful things there, such as improved UI to increase productivity, the possibility for designers and developers to work simultaneously on both the design and code aspects of the application, possibility to edit code directly in Expression Blend 3 through A full code editor with XAML, C# and VB Intellisense, and many more.
P.S. By the way, our TeamExpand guys have not been resting upon their oars as well. So watch the news .
Not so long ago the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle team announced the release of Microsoft SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System. This new template is designed to work with TFS 2008 and makes writing secure code much easier. The new SDL template has a solution that reduces the barrier to entry for SDL adoption, provides auditing for satisfying the security requirements, and helps demonstrate security return on investment.
There is a short overview of its options:
The Process Guidance page provides a security owner with five steps for Getting Started on an SDL project, and details on customizing the template and extending it for third party security tools.
For developers, who care about security, but want it to be intuitive, the SDL Process Template includes check-in policies. These policies ensure every check-in of code is taking advantage of the SDL required compiler/linker flags and Code Analysis features already in Visual Studio. This will eliminate entire classes of security weaknesses from the code!
Testers want to be able to emphasize the importance of a security bug and properly communicate the impact to their product. The default “bug” work item now has customized security fields so one can identify security severity, and security cause/effect (using STRIDE), and mark a bug as “Blocking” or “Not Blocking.” This feature allows tracking and searching for security-specific bugs.
For the management team there are the Final Security Review Report and Security Bugs Report, which provide an auditable set of artifacts that details security work completed as well as deferred tasks.
Actually, the new SDL template addresses the challenge of making the code more secure. More deailed overview may be found .
In his Friday’s blog post, Jihad Dannawi, Microsoft developer tools solution specialist, announced the release of the beta 1 of the long-awaited Visual Studio 2010. The release is planned for Monday, May 18, i.e. for today.
“Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN [Microsoft Developer Network] Subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on Wednesday, May 20th through Microsoft Downloads,” he wrote.
When VS 2010 was first announced last autumn, it was said that there would be a try to democratize the application lifecycle, by allowing all contributors on a software project to participate throughout the lifecycle.
About a week ago, Jason Zander, manager for Visual Studio’s developer division, shared some of the changes they made responding to the users’ unpopular feedbacks. One was to abandon triangles from the outline mode, which most users found a bad idea. Zander also provided some updates done to the performance area – the subject that worried the users greatly, according to their feedbacks.
Well, everything indicates that the coming VSTS 2010 will be a really great release. Brian Harry in his latest blog post announces new awesome features of Team System 2010 stressing that VSTS 2010 marks a significant departure from 2008.
According to Brian there will be 3 really “new” areas. Investments in the testers’ tools, that help make them amazingly productive, a new area of investment called “Lab Management” - a set of features that makes it very easy for one to deploy and test software in many different configurations and then to debug and fix issues that the testing finds and a new area in architecture tools.
Here’s a list of what Brian calls “just new features in VSTS 2010”:
Architecture
Architecture Explorer
Layer diagram
Use case designer
Activity designer
Component diagram
Logical class designer
Sequence diagram
Modeling project system
UML Model explorer
Architecture validation during build
Test planning
Test case management
Test prioritization
Run management & reporting
Project quality reports
Manual test execution
Diagnostic recording (environment, video, etc)
UI Automation recording
Coded UI tests
TFS
Work item hierarchy & linking
Improved Agile template
MOSS & WSS Dashboards
Simplified reporting
Improved support for parallel development
Rollback
Build queuing and pooling
Gated checkin
Simplified setup
Scale out of web and data tiers
Admin console
Project move/archive/restore
As you may have already known, Jason Zander, the General Manager for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft, uncovered the new look for Visual Studio 2010 in his latest blog post. He announced several improvements and new features for the new Visual Studio UI:
Reduced clutter and visual complexity by removing excessive lines and gradients in the UX and modernized the interface by removing outdated 3D bevels
Introduced multiple monitors support
Placed focus on content areas by opening negative space between windows and drawing attention to the current focus with a dominant accent color and a distinctive background
Added an inviting new palette to make VS 2010 more distinctive
Triangle glyphs in the margin are used to collapse or expand your code blocks
Collapsed sections of code are marked with an empty triangle (pointing straight) as well as a set of ellipses
Colors on the margin indicate edits that have been made
New Project dialog has updated to include online template viewing, a search box, and easier navigation
New Extensions Manager to improve searching and installing VS extensions
Amazing, but as it comes from the comments to his blog post, the most appreciated feature is the possibility of using multiple monitors.
As you probably have heard, Microsoft Team System Development Center is working on the new Visual Studio version, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. According to the VSTS team, “Rosario” (code name of the VSTS 2010) will feature the following functionality:
· the new Architecture Explorer
· extended use of multiple diagrams
· improved tools for better documentation
· the new Test Impact View
· enhanced version control capabilities
To add more, Microsoft Team System developers emphasize that user experience is the key factor in any VSTS project, that is why they put so much effort into the so-called “democratized ALM” (Application Life cycle Management). But what exactly do they mean by “democratized ALM?” Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 is going to provide some new functions and capabilities, which embrace the needs of users in the life cycle. To be more exact, it will provide better cooperation between architects, developers, project managers, testers, and other project members.
Another good news is that next year Visual Studio is also expected to support an interactive designer for Silverlight (fully editable) and a tool support for data-binding.
After continuous discussions, customers’ claims, and useful feedbacks, the Microsoft Team System Development Center the fair verdict: “The VSTS website must be changed.” And it was.
In fact, the website of Team System was “put on a diet,” as the number of pages was massively shortened from 418 to 92. This, the VSTS webmasters believe, will enhance usability and improve search engines’ results.
Secondly, VSTS customers will enjoy the new site framework and layouts. There have been numerous complaints on behalf of broken paths, and webmasters admitted, people simply couldn’t find the information they had been looking for. The improved navigation framework (which is fixed by rebuilding the primary and secondary navigation framework, and addressing information architecture issues throughout) is likely to change things for better.
The Microsoft Visual Studio Team System website is going to morph throughout several months and everyone is welcome to leave their feedback.
Great news for those of you, who watch closely MSBuild and Team Foundation Server updates: a new book on MSBuild and TFS was just published by William Bartholomew, developer productivity specialist in South Brisbane Area, Australia, and Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi, a developer and architect in Jacksonville, Florida.
According to the author, if you have never worked with MSBuild, this book is perfect for you, as it can tell about the basics of MSBuild (and if you use Visual Studio 2005 or greater, you use MSBuild anyway), and teach you how to optimize and personalize MSBuild. If you are not new to it or you use TFS Build on top of MSBuild, you’ll definitely learn more. Besides, the edition provides a whole range of examples on Web deployment, automated releases, and other essential topics.
The full name of the book is “Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (PRO-Developer)”, and it is already available at amazon.com, even with a gift-wrap
Maybe soon we’ll have Windows-based smart fridges and microwaves?
In October last year (ow, last year means 2008, it’s starting to sink in now) Microsoft launched the contest asking participants to come up with a novel concept for Windows CE devices they’d like to see in the home of the future.
Round one is long over, and round two started a few days ago. At this point the 50 finalists from the first round receive a free SPARK Your Imagination kit, based on the VIA Artigo Pico-ITX board. The task is to build a working prototype of the idea they developed for round one, submit a 4-8-page paper describing the solution and a 2-minute video summarizing the project.
The deadline for this is March 11, 2009 at 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8)
There’s even the Competition Clock on the official website, ticking the time left till the second round ends.
When your work circles around TFS, it’s nice to know whenever a new Work Item is assigned or the status of an old one gets changed. E-mail alerts are perfect in that sense. I just came across on setting up E-mail alerts from TFS through Gmail. Getting TFS alerts in your gmail account can be handy you use a lot of Goodle apps for work. Lev Blavias, the author of the post, recommends to help set up the alerts. He notes, that for the connection to work the following components need to be installed first: Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2008 Power Tool, Stunnel, and an SMTP virtual server needs to be set up on the machine.
But google apps and gmail are still far from being THE all-enterprise system for itnernal use, so for a lot of companies linking Microsoft Office with TFS is much more relevant.
Speaking of e-mail, some tools already offer connectors linking MS Outlook and TFS. The nice thing about such tools is that you don’t have to go through a lengthy set-up process yourself, as it’s already been configured for you. All it takes is to install the add-on and alas! Not only do you get your TFS alerts in Outlook, you can also create new TFS work items and meetings without ever opening TFS.
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In his Friday’s blog post, Jihad Dannawi, Microsoft developer tools solution specialist, announced the release of the beta 1 of the long-awaited Visual Studio 2010. The release is planned for Monday, May 18, i.e. for today. 
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