The Holiday season is in full bloom, huh?

Oh well, before disappearing for the long weekend, I thought I’d share the latest TFS Radio episode with you. Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff talks about the history of Team System, how the teams in Microsoft ship the Team System product and reveals some of the plans for the future. As usual, all can be found on RadioTFS.

Happy New Year and have a wonderful one!

Haven’t stolen a tip from Sara Ford for a while, so there, another tip for VSTS 2008.

So, this one shows how to go directly to the code samples from within Visual Studio.

To get to the samples installed for VS, you only need to go to Help-Samples and click on the local Samples folder link in the browser.

Note, the samples are in a .zip file and need to be extracted first.

More on Sarah’s tips: she has a book, called Visual Studio Tips, 251 Way to Improve Your Productivity, full of useful tips on Visual Studio.

It turns out that renting instead of buying is possible with Microsoft software too.

You can rent Team Foundation Server on the Phase 2 International website. They offer hosted TFS, and allow companies to use the software while saving up on time and money. Oh and the bonus - it’s hosted, so you can pretty much access it from anywhere in the world as long as you’re connected to the internet. TFS on your mobile device? Yep.

Oh and free support…free sounds good, doesn’t it?

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:

“Team”…presupposes a sort of unity around the same cause or idea among its members. Microsoft tries to reinforce that idea in their Team Foundation Server as much as possible. Nothing wrong with that. =)

Next month Larry Guger will be holding a free seminar on the collaboration features and capabilities provided by TFS.

During the seminar, Larry will discuss the collaborative side of Team Foundation Server and how it fits into the developer side of TFS. He will also share the vision that Microsoft has for TFS as a tool for every stakeholder in a project.

Among other, the topics to be covered include requirements tracking and integration, relating code and check-ins to requirements, making the most of work items and Project Templates, using TFS from Linux and Eclipse with Teamprise etc.

Register here.

Join Larry on December 10 at 9:00 am at:
Microsoft Corporation
10260 SW Greenburg Rd
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
USA

In a recent PDC2008 contest developers showed off their projects supposed to make Visual Studio better and more convenient to work with.

A few links to PDC2008 ShowOff Entries:

Multi-channel Virtual Earth - a multi-channel version of the Virtual Earth control.

Clipboard History for Visual Studio - Also demonstrates a 12-part blog series with complete step-by-step instructions showing how to build this feature for Visual Studio 2008.

Of course, Brian the Build Bunny won. I wouldn’t expect any less.

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.

Quite a few companies are thinking of implementing a single development lifecycle management system that would facilitate planning, development, and project management all together. Looks like MSIT is already on their way of getting there. Recent TechNet Radio episode describes the company’s three-year vision to adopt Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation across the organization.

Quite a few companies are thinking of implementing a signle development lifecycle management system that would facilitate planning, development and project managememnt all together. Looks like MSIT is already on their way of getting there. Recent TechNet Radio episode descibes the company’s three-year vision to adopt Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation across the organization.

Another VSLive conference took place last week in Las Vegas. One of the new speakers, Jeff Bramwell, led an interesting session on “Using Team Foundation Build in the “Real” World”. You can download the presentation from this session over here. I thought it was quite comprehensie, embracing a large scope of topics from TFS debugging, performance, and test automation to deployment and 3-rd party tools.