Martin Kulov's Blog

Please find the updated agenda of Visual Studio 2010 Official Launch event in Sofia, Bulgaria. The event is going to be held on 23rd April, Friday, from 09:00h at Technical University – Sofia, hall 2140.

In order to attend the event you need to register here!http://events.msbgregistration.com/Default.aspx?eventID=33

http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/events/visualStudio2010.mspx

Labels: Events, Visual Studio 2010

F# is released with Visual Studio 2010. Below you can find FAQ about F# and get started at Microsoft F# Development Center.

Reposted from Don Syme's blog:

Q: What is F#?

F# is a productive functional and object-oriented programming language for .NET that enables users to write simple code to solve complex problems. Its succinct syntax and powerful type inference lets users stay closer to the domain they are working in, and the integration into .NET and Visual Studio gives rich access to the expansive .NET platform.

F# has strong support for parallelism and concurrency, through its support for immutability and asynchronous programming, and tools such as the F# Interactive enable exploring data interactively, analyzing, visualizing and testing against live data sources.  The development process then scales directly up to full .NET component development, without having to re-write code.

Q: What is F# designed for?

F# extends the .NET platform by offering a productive language for developers working in technical, algorithmic, parallel and data-rich areas.  This has included applications in domains such as financial services, data analytics, games, sciences and machine learning. But F# is also a general purpose .NET programming language, and the combination of language strengths makes F# valuable in a broad range of development applications.

Q: What were your big objectives when designing F#?

F#’s primary design goal has been to combine the simple expressivity of functional programming with the scalability of .NET and object-oriented programming.

Q: What is functional programming?

Functional programming languages express ideas at a higher level and allow users to focus on the challenge of problem solving instead of the process of writing code. A programming language like F# provides a ‘tool bag’ of functions that users can pick from to solve their problem. Functional programming includes concepts such as immutability to reduce dependencies between components, generics to express solutions that work over many different kinds of data, and functions as values to make it easy to abstract units of a solution into reusable pieces.

Q: What are the primary benefits of functional programming?

Because it abstracts functionality from coding, F# lets programmers focus more on the problem domain and less on programming itself. That’s a big benefit in some of the data exploration, algorithmic and technical computing domains and so we’ve seen a lot of interest in using F# here. By raising the level of abstraction of how problems are solved, solutions tend to be simpler, more general, easier to test and more parallelizable.

Labels: Visual Studio 2010

UPDATE: Due to air flight cancellations all over Europe, Brian Harry will not be able to make it. However the launch event is still going to be held. Same date, time and agenda applies.

http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/events/visualStudio2010.mspx

Visual Studio 2010 launch in Bulgaria will be held on 23 April, Friday. Event will be held at Technical University of Sofia, hall 2140.

We are honored to have Microsoft Technical Fellow and Team Foundation Server Product Manager, Mr. Brian Harry, who will be doing keynote about Visual Studio 2010. I am even more honored to do the demo for Brian’s presentation, so wish me good demo luck :)

I will be also doing a session about TFS for Everyone at 1pm so it is a great opportunity for all TFS fans.

Emil Stoychev and Branimir Giurov will do sessions on Silverlight 4 and Web and Windows Development in Visual Studio 2010.

Read more about the Official Visual Studio 2010 Launch and register in order to participate in the event for free using the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/events/visualStudio2010.mspx

Who is Brian Harry?

Read more here - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/techfellow/harry/default.mspx

I am lucky to know Brian Harry from the years of interaction with him in Team System MVP mailing list. I would like to assure you that talking to this man is like drinking from a pure spring of natural, clean and proven software practices. Make sure you meet and talk to him during the event.

Labels: Events, TFS, Visual Studio 2010

Today Visual Studio 2010 was released. It has been crazy long work for Microsoft product group, but also for us - Visual Studio ALM MVPs (Team System branding is gone for good).

However after all these CTPs, emails threads, Live Meetings calls and demos, one can be easily lost trying to get what’s new in VS2010. Simply because it is a huge amount of information.

Below I will try to put a list of links that can help you to find our way through Visual Studio feature set or at least you can use it for a reference later.

Feel free to place any other relevant links in the comments below and I will update the list here.

What's New

Visual Studio Product Group Blogs

Visual Studio ALM Rangers 2010 readiness materials

10-4 video shows

Upgrading from TFS 2005/2008 to TFS 2010

Team System 2010 Overview

Team Foundation Server 2010 Key Concepts

TFS 2010 Project Management

TFS 2010 Work Item Tracking

Debugging and Profiling features in Visual Studio 2010

Write Faster Code with VS 2010 Profiler

Multi-Tier Performance Analysis

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: Parallel Performance Tools Overview

A Branching and Merging Primer

New features to understand branching/merging

Favorite VS2010 Features: Dependency Graphs and DGML

Web and Load Tests

Web and Load Test features in Visual Studio 2010

Introducing the Microsoft Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010

Using The Virtual User Activity Chart to Understand the VS Load Engine

VSTS 2010 Feature: Load test virtual user activity visualization

Lab Management

What is new for Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 RC

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 1)

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 2)

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 3)

Getting started with Lab Management (Part 4)

Enable Lab Management features for existing Team Projects in Beta2

Customization of End to End (E2E) Workflow of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 Beta2

Test Professional

What’s new in Test and Lab Management in VS 2010 Beta 2

What’s New for Testing Tools in the RC?

Elevating the Role of the Tester with Visual Studio 2010

Resources for Visual Studio 2010 Test Tools

VS2010 demos for testing tools – MTLM, CUIT and related features

Test planning using Camano

Remote Execution and Data Collection

Diagnostic Data Adapters: Changing how Developers and Testers work together (Part 1 of 2 - The Test Impact Collector)

Diagnostic Data Adapters: Changing how Developers and Testers work together (Part 2 of 2 - The Diagnostic Trace Collector)

The Microsoft Test Runner – innovation for the Generalist Tester

Platform Support for Coded UI Test (and Fast Forward feature of Test Runner)

Coded UI Test

Test Impact Walk-through

TFS API

Introducing the TfsConnection, TfsConfigurationServer and TfsTeamProjectCollection Classes

Labels: Visual Studio 2010

Have you heard of Visual Studio ALM Rangers team? This is an awesome combination of passionate people that breath and live with Team Foundation Server. Some of them are working in Visual Studio Product Group and some – in Microsoft Consulting Services. Many of the things they release is being reviewed and commented from us, Visual Studio ALM MVPs formerly known as Team System MVPs.

There are guidance documents updated for TFS 2010 released recently from this outstanding team. You wouldn’t want to miss those if you are doing any Team Foundation Server work.

Check out the list below and let me know what do you think!

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance

TFS 2010 Upgrade Guidance

Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010

TFS 2010 Requirements Management

Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Virtualization

TFS Integration Platform

Three more projects are still to be released soon:

Visual Studio 2010 Database Guidance

Visual Studio 2010 Testing Guidance

Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance

Labels: TFS, Visual Studio 2010

I am setting up Microsoft Test Manager in order to playback recorded manual tests for Propeople. I created a test case and set up my environment to collect data from web server.

However when I tried to start recording of my manual test with Microsoft Test Manager, I’ve got the error below:

Data and diagnostics cannot be collected

An error occurred while initializing diagnostic data adapters.

Timed out while initializing data and diagnostics adapters.

To increase the timeout values for all diagnostic data adapters, see the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=169311.

I started poking around in Event Viewer in my local machine, test controller and test agent machines and I found some errors log at the Test Controller machine (pasting full error details so next poor soul can find it).

(QTController.exe, PID 4660, Thread 26) ControllerExecution: Exception: System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (0x80004005): No such host is known

Server stack trace:
   at System.Net.Dns.GetAddrInfo(String name)
   at System.Net.Dns.InternalGetHostByName(String hostName, Boolean includeIPv6)
   at System.Net.Dns.GetHostAddresses(String hostNameOrAddress)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.CreateNewSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.GetSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.SocketCache.GetSocket(String machinePortAndSid, Boolean openNew)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.SendRequestWithRetry(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.ProcessMessage(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream, ITransportHeaders& responseHeaders, Stream& responseStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryClientFormatterSink.SyncProcessMessage(IMessage msg)

Exception rethrown at [0]:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.IControllerEvents.ControllerEvent(TestMessage report)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.<>c__DisplayClass1d.<CallListeners>b__19(IControllerEvents eventListener)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Execution.RemoteObjectContainer`1.InvokeAsRemoteUser(Action`1 invoke)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.CallListeners(TestMessage testMessage)

The “No such host is known” exception is too general and I didn’t find any more information on the web on how to find my recording problem.

I was running the manual test recording from my laptop which at that time was connected through VPN to the office. I decided that VPN could eventually give some networking restriction, so I tried running test recording from another machine that’s located inside the office. Not surprisingly though this machine produced the same error.

What come to surprise to me is that this time the error in Event Log on Test Controller machine was slightly different:

(QTController.exe, PID 1368, Thread 34) ControllerExecution: Exception: System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (0x80004005): A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 192.168.xx.xx:50086

Server stack trace:
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.DoConnect(EndPoint endPointSnapshot, SocketAddress socketAddress)
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Connect(EndPoint remoteEP)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.CreateNewSocket(EndPoint ipEndPoint)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.CreateNewSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.RemoteConnection.GetSocket()
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.SocketCache.GetSocket(String machinePortAndSid, Boolean openNew)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.SendRequestWithRetry(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpClientTransportSink.ProcessMessage(IMessage msg, ITransportHeaders requestHeaders, Stream requestStream, ITransportHeaders& responseHeaders, Stream& responseStream)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.BinaryClientFormatterSink.SyncProcessMessage(IMessage msg)

Exception rethrown at [0]:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.IControllerEvents.ControllerEvent(TestMessage report)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.<>c__DisplayClass1d.<CallListeners>b__19(IControllerEvents eventListener)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Execution.RemoteObjectContainer`1.InvokeAsRemoteUser(Action`1 invoke)
   at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.Controller.ControllerExecution.CallListeners(TestMessage testMessage)

The IP 192.168.xx.xx is the address of where I run MTM client and after reading the cause of this error in Troubleshooting errors in lab management, everything suddenly got crystal clear to me.

The way MTM works is contacting Test Controller machine and initialize it. Then Test Controller is trying to open a socket back to the MTM recorder. You can see that by running “netstat -nab” on the MTM machine and look for something like this:

TCP    0.0.0.0:50086          0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
[mtm.exe]

So in order to fix all errors of this kind you must make sure that your Test Controller can connect to the machine running MTM. In my case – the second error was produced because MTM machine was blocking the port because of the firewall. The first error was produced because MTM machine is a VPN client and it doesn’t get registered and resolved in DNS. In order to workaround this, I created a record to my VPN client in hosts file at Test Controller machine.

I’ve got it all running except IntelliTrace data collection which I will blog in separate post.

Labels: Propeople, Tools and Tips, Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft announced retail prices for some of the VS2010 SKUs:

Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010

			With 1-Year MSDN Subscription*
Product	Buy	Upgrade	Buy	Renew
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate	-	-	$11,899	$3,799
Visual Studio 2010 Premium	-	-	$5,469	$2,299
Visual Studio 2010 Professional	$799	$549	$1,199	$799
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010	-	-	$2,169	$899
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010	$499	$399	-	-
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL	$499	-	-	-
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 (1000 Virtual Users)	$4,499	-	-	-

* Subscription contents vary by purchased product.

Pay attention that MTLM is renamed to Visual Studio Test Professional.

Price for Lab Management is still to be announced.

Labels: Visual Studio 2010

New dates for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 RTM are announced today. The official RTM date is 12th April 2010. As I wrote before, in February there will be released also Release Candidate version.

Microsoft will be supporting upgrade from Beta 2 to RC, Beta 2 to RTM and RC to RTM so there is no reason why you should not upgrade today or at least start planning it. A full TFS upgrade can take a lot of time so you better plan it. I will write a follow up post on common pitfalls during TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 upgrade process.

If you have any problems upgrading TFS 2008/2005 to TFS 2010, please feel free to contact me.

(through Microsoft Bulgaria - Developer and Platform Evangelism Blog)

Labels: TFS, Visual Studio 2010

The so long anticipated date of 22nd of March will be “moved back a few weeks”.

Visual Studio 2010, TFS 2010 and .NET 4.0 release will be postponed due to outstanding performance issues.

While I am happy that MS is taking VS perf issues so close to announce this huge change, it still messes up a lot of planning around that date. Let’s hope that VS2010 gets much better at the end.

In addition a VS2010 Release Candidate with Go Live license will be available in the middle of February.

You can read more at Soma’s, ScottGu’s and Brian Harry’s blogs.

Labels: Visual Studio 2010

This time we are going to discuss what are the advantages in Team Foundation Server 2010 versus SourceSafe. We will see how easy is to install TFS 2010 and what functionalities we get compared to SourceSafe. Again we will go quickly through pricing and licensing issues. Topics and dates for next meetings will be proposed.

Please see Facebook event or Outlook calendar file for information on how to connect.

This meeting is part of the VS2010 Beta 2 Focus Group events and is also part of the SofiaDev.NET User Group activities.

Labels: INETA, TFS, Visual Studio 2010

The second of the series of meetings targeting Visual Studio 2010 launch is announced. You can find the details in the Visual Studio 2010 Planning and Deployment Facebook event. It will be held tomorrow, 19^th of November, at 10am (CET+1/GMT+2). The event will be held in Bulgarian and will look at different scenarios for upgrade to TFS 2010, deployment and performance problems in TFS 2008 and how they are solved in TFS 2010. Also compatibility issues between different versions of Visual Studio will be discussed.

Also make sure that you join the VS2010 Beta 2 Focus Group on Facebook and you will receive future notifications about similar events in this focus group.

All participants in the meeting will receive one Visual Studio Planning Poker Cards Deck kindly provided by Visual Studio Product Group.

UPDATE: Link to Outlook calendar can be found here - http://www.kulov.net/blogs/martin/VS2010%20Planning%20and%20Deployment.ics

Labels: Events, INETA, Visual Studio 2010

The recording from the Visual Studio 2010 Focus Group is available for download.

    Subject: VSTS 2010 Focus Group - Visual Studio 2010 Pricing and Licensing
    Recording URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?id=4737R8

Next meeting will be on 19 Nov 2009 and we will be covering “Visual Studio 2010 Planning and Deployment”.

Thanks to everyone for participating and will see you at the next meeting.

Labels: Events, INETA, TFS, Visual Studio 2010

At DevReach 2009 (www.devreach.com) was announced the launch of a new focus group targeting the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010. This focus group will deliver series of discussions until Visual Studio 2010 RTM in 22^nd March, 2010.

On 19^th October Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This version is of significant importance as it comes with Go Live license for production systems. Go Live license allows you to deploy and run .NET 4.0, VS 2010 Beta 2 and TFS 2010 Beta 2 for commercial use and have full support from Microsoft. Upgrade from Beta 2 to RTM version is also supported.

It is also worth mentioning that this is one of the biggest releases of Visual Studio so far.

Here are the first scheduled sessions so far:

• 05 Nov 2009 – Visual Studio 2010 Pricing and Licensing
• 19 Nov 2009 – Visual Studio 2010 Planning and Deployment
• 26 Nov 2009 – SourceSafe is dead, Long live TFS Basic!

The most active participants will be included in a raffle provided by Microsoft Bulgaria.

The meetings will be delivered using Live Meeting discussions in Bulgarian and will be held at 10am (CET) for an hour. Attending the first meeting is easy – just click on this link. Our idea is to allow more people to join from their working places and avoid time usually spent in traffic.

These meetings of the focus group are part of SofiaDev.NET User Group.

For additional announcements, please watch out Martin Kulov’s blog at www.kulov.net/blogs/martin and Face Book group VS2010 Beta 2 Focus Group.

Labels: Events, INETA, TFS, Visual Studio 2010

The new licensing schema is actually hotter topic than the new Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. So – good bye Visual Studio Team System – welcome Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Visual Studio 2010 RTM will be released on 22^nd of March.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 will also include Go Live license for all customers.

In addition – clients using VS 2008 can connect to TFS 2010 using the newly released VS2008 GDR Pack.

Here is the new Visual Studio 2010 SKU list:

• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Professional
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Professional with MSDN
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Premium with MSDN
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Test Elements 2010 with MSDN
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Team Foundation Server 2010
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Team Lab Management 2010
• Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010

Need to learn more about the licensing and pricing? Check out my blog as I will post information when and where you can learn more in our User Groups.

PS: Did I tell you that TFS is now available in all versions with MSDN? And for small teams you can use TFS Basic that is installed from the same installer as the full blown Team Foundation Server!

Labels: Visual Studio 2010

If try to connect to TFS 2010 instance from Visual Studio 2008 you will probably experience the following error message:

Possible reasons for failure include:

• The Team Foundation Server name, port number or protocol is incorrect.
  
• The Team Foundation Server is offline.
  
• Password is expired or incorrect.

The trick is that due to changes in TFS 2010 architecture, you now have to enter a full URL to connect to the server. This URL have to include a TFS virtual directory in it. So at the end the URL will something like this:

http://tfs2010:8080/tfs

This will connect you to the default collection of the TFS 2010 server.

Labels: Tools and Tips, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010

Do you want to try the new branching features in the upcoming VS Team Foundation Server and .NET 4.0? Do you want to see the new WPF based editor in VS 2010? Do you want to try out the new historical debugger?

These features and also many more are available for free trial download from Microsoft.

Please note that these images expire on 1 Jan 2009 so you need to run off the time synchronization in VPC or Hyper-V.

There is also Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit.

You will also need the following passwords to login to the VPC:

• Administrator: TFSSETUP, password: 1Setuptfs (use this account to explore the CTP)
• Administrator: Administrator,password: P2ssw0rd
• User: TFSREPORTS, password: 1Reports
• User: TFSSERVICE, password: 1Service

Labels: Tools and Tips, Visual Studio 2010