Martin Kulov's Blog

Last week it was the MVP Summit 2008 at Seattle. I had a chance to attend it also this year. Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie were answering questions during the keynote and we had a great three days with the VSTS product group. Many things to come in Rosario so make sure that you keep in touch what is coming out in the next releases.

Here are some fresh ones. April Rosario CTP is the longest expected one (more info below). Note the significant push in the architecture tools as also the new build system based on Windows Workflow and the improved historical debugger and test tools available in the previous CTP. There are some very useful video tutorials that you must checkout after downloading the release.

TFS Power Tools March 2008 is also released (more info below). There is a very cool tool called TFSServerManager for monitoring current status of the TFS server. Also the Process Template Editor is now working with custom controls.

April Rosario CTP now available!

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/11/april-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx

Architecture Edition

• Exploring the existing code structure
• Designing process flow as activities
• Designing user interactions with systems
• Designing system functionality as components
• Visualizing and designing types in systems
• Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems

Development Edition

• Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
• Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
• Identify the test impact of code changes
• Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Database Edition

• Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
• Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
• Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
• Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.

Test Edition

• Planning a testing effort
• Executing manual test cases
• Verify the fix
• Automate a manual test and add validation.

Team Foundation Server

• Managing an Agile schedule
• Easier reporting from Excel
• Managing features with the CMMI Process
• A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
• An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
• A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
• A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
• Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
• Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements

March 2008 TFS Power Tools now available

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/21/march-2008-tfs-power-tools-now-available.aspx

Labels: Rosario, TFS

I got awarded for the third time with the MVP Award. The award is presented on an annual basis which makes it even harder to keep up in the years. Still Microsoft does not stop releasing new products and CTPs so one can easily lose many days and nights working with their products. Becoming an MVP is great and has a lot of benefits. My category is VSTS which gives me access to a number of great people that are eager to discuss and share their knowledge in VS and VSTS. If you want to become one, you have to keep one thing in mind: community work! You should be ready to spend a lot of your time helping online and local communities without getting paid for this. Believe me this could mean having weeks of few hours sleep per day. Or just leaving your daily job and concentrate on this :)

Labels: Rants

I am going to speak this Saturday at a brand new conference at Warsaw, Poland called Communities to Communities 2008 - " the first ever countrywide IT conference in Poland organized by community of Microsoft .NET and SQL Server professionals and geeks". I am going to talk about Debugging and Crash Dump Analysis of ASP.NET Web Sites where I will show real life examples how WinDbg saved my poor soul a number of times. WinDbg and related debugging techniques are something that every single production manager should know and shouldn't be scared to run and try. I will also show how you can analyze a sample stack trace and track down a specific value in stack. If you are in the area, I would love to see you there and talk to you.

Labels: Debugging, Events