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 this blog post 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 this link 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.

Here’s how this could look:

Just a quick sidenote to keep up with the development framework that made TeamExpand happen: did you know .NET has a new logo, did you know that?

The new logo was announced in October. The previous logo was created in 2000 and lasted 8 years.

The reason for this re-branding lies in the changes that took place in Microsoft products over the last years. .NET logo is now more than an addition to Microsoft’s other products, rather something bigger, associated with Visual Studio and Silverlight.

The .NET Framework is an integral Windows component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and XML Web services.

I quite enjoyed this recent episode of Visual Studio 2010 Talks. Stephanie Saad, a group program manager with Microsoft talks about how Microsoft is already using the new features of TFS.

And here’s a link to Stephanie’s Power Point presentation on from Microsoft TechEd 2008

I didn’t know (okay-okay, I might have missed on the news) that Microsoft calls the way they use their own software in-house “dogfooding”.

Stephanie explains why:

* Dogfood: n. [Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing. “To eat one’s own dogfood“… means to use the software one is developing, as part of one’s everyday development environment… Developers… using their own software will quickly learn what’s missing or broken.

The presentation also covers:
Cool Facts about Microsoft Development
Getting started on a release
Development
Tracking and Reporting
Migration and Interoperability

Really worth downloading, at least for the “One Team’s Hall Whiteboard after TFS dogfood outages summer 08)” (you’ll know what I mean, when you see it).

P.s. Come to think of it, we at TeamExpand, too, dogfood our products (TX Chrono and TX Looker), can’t say there’s any negative experience assosiated with it. hm.

Conference on Adopting an Application Lifecycle Management strategy with Visual Studio Team System

Ahh, wish I could attend. =(

Well, for those of you who will be in the area on 18th November 2008 (Microsoft’s office Tower II, KLCC), you may sign up over here.

Microsoft gives out details on the future release of VSTS and .NET framework. The official name will look as follows: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0

What they’re trying to do with VSTS 2010 is to address “the need to better integrate the functions of the project lead, architect, developers and testers throughout the application lifecycle. Key features in the 2010 Team Suite enable reuse of code assets, modeling across tools and architecture, higher quality test and better collaboration.”

The company doesn’t reveal the schedule or any other details as to the future release at this point.

Grant Holliday recently posted the latest stats on Team Foundation Server adoption across Microsoft:

“The growth of unique active users across all TFS servers in August was 582, totaling 14,684 at Microsoft.”

So they now have 27 TFS instances in production, three of which are already using the preliminary Rosario build.

Grant’s post for graphs and details on how separate divisions within Microsoft adopt TFS.

Looks like Microsoft will soon be releasing a fresh new BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server 2009 will become generally available in the first half of 2009, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, and a Community Technology Preview will be release before the end of this year.

The new server will, among other, support app platforms like .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Windows Server 2008.

What’s more exciting, it’ll offer integration with VSTS, which means more ALM functionality (automated builds, bug tracking, source controls and multi-party development).

The underlying BizTalk project system for Visual Studio will also be improved, the company says.

More on BizTalk Server over here.

TeamExpand announced the commercial version of its TX Chrono, a timesheet tracking application targeted at software development organizations standardizing on the Visual Studio .NET environment. Besides a number of bug fixes, the commercial version of TX Chrono features new workflow functionality and complete TSF compatibility to make software development activities more visible and predictable. A trial version of the product will also be available for free download.

Allowing project managers and team members to submit, approve, and analyze timesheets, the Web-based TFS timesheet application also provides a set of notification and reporting capabilities that TFS lacks. This automates time reporting and the analyzing process, and brings visibility across all project-related activities, giving team leaders the amount of control over the project necessary to ensure the team’s success.

To learn more about TX Chrono, its features and how it works you can visit the product’s homepage or check out web demo over here.

Check out the video of Sam Guckenheimer, the chief customer advocate for VSTS, responsible for its end-to-end external design, describing his book, Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, as a framework for thinking about software projects in a way that can be directly tooled by VSTS. The book presents essential theory and practical examples to describe a realistic process for IT projects.

You can also check out the Software-Development Methodologies and Visual Studio Team System page on MSDN, which explores the way VSTS provides a compelling solution for methodology management and automation.

Can you believe this?

At Microsoft’s Tech•Ed North America 2008 Developers conference keynote delivered by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates in front of more than 5,000 developers, it was announced the IBM and Microsoft are working together to allow the next major version of Visual Studio Team System Database Edition to be used to with IBM DB2.

Microsoft Corp. and IBM have announced that they are working together to increase productivity of IBM DB2 developers, to reduce risk of errors and to provide better backup and version control of DB2 database schemas. Together they are working to provide IBM DB2 database support for Visual Studio Team System. The IBM Database Schema Provider (DSP) for VSTS Database Edition will provide a DB2 Project system, versioned schema store and SQL Syntax Checking, allowing VSTS Database Edition to be used for offline development of IBM DB2 databases and SQL code, with differencing logic so developers can focus on the desired schema and allow VSTS Database Edition to generate change scripts. Together these capabilities not only improve efficiency and reduce errors that also allow greater teamwork as developers move towards VSTS Team Foundation Server to co-ordinate team activities.

What? Did I get this right? IBM DB2 compatible with VSTS? What, does IBM have too many users? Want to lose more to Microsoft? Sure =) Go Bill! =)