Register TODAY for the "Introducing Visual Studio Webinar Series"

Some great news for folks looking to kick off the new year with a bang! Next month, we’re kicking off a free, six-part webinar series, covering Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010 and quality assurance! These webinars will run on a monthly basis (from January to June) and will bring you up-to-date on what you need to know about building software with these developer tools.

Building Quality Applications with Visual Studio 
Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing have two key goals: to validate the quality of an application and to improve overall software quality. Visual Studio 2010 helps achieve both of these with robust testing and diagnostics tools. It can also strengthen collaboration across your application lifecycle by breaking down silos within teams and delivering key integration capabilities, helping ensure teams are more productive. This session will introduce the broad spectrum of capabilities that Visual Studio 2010 technologies bring to the Test and QA space, to help you understand how you can test your systems more effectively.

Click to register: January 11 | February 8 | March 8 | April 5 | May 3 | June 7

Software Delivery using Team Foundation Server 2010 
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) is the collaboration platform at the heart of Microsoft’s application lifecycle management (ALM) solution. Team Foundation Server 2010 automates the software delivery process and gives you the tools you need to effectively manage software development projects throughout the IT life cycle. Join us for this session that provides a functional overview and demonstration of some of the key aspects of Team Foundation Server, and also speaks about migration from existing lifecycle tooling, such as Visual SourceSafe. This session will introduce the broad spectrum of capabilities that Visual Studio 2010 technologies bring to the Test and QA space, to help you understand how you can test your systems more effectively.

Click to register: January 14 | February 11 | March 11 | April 8 | May 6 | June 10

Ultimate Development with Visual Studio 
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is the comprehensive suite of application lifecycle management tools for teams to ensure quality results, from design to deployment. Whether you're creating new solutions or enhancing existing applications, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate lets you bring your vision to life targeting an increasing number of platforms and technologies—including cloud and parallel computing. Attend to learn how to eliminate 'no repro' with IntelliTrace, understand and re-use existing architectural patterns, help with architectural compliance, and validate scalability and reliability for your solutions.

Click to register: January 13 | February 10 | March 10 | April 7 | May 5 | June 9

Please note that all webinars kick off at 1:00 PM Eastern.

“But wait, what can I do before these webinars kick off?”

I’m glad you asked, dear reader. First, if you haven’t done so already, check out Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course available on Channel 9. It’s stuffed full of great videos and samples to help get you going. (Don’t worry too much about the fact that it’s dated for the Beta 2 release; most of the stuff that’s covered is still relevant.) Next, visit the Visual Studio homepage on MSDN for a huge wealth of resources on Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010 and a whole host of other great materials, including blogs and forums. Finally, take a few minutes to check out some of the awesome videos that we recorded from recent ALM Summit Redmond 2010. Many of these videos provide a great perspective on development methodologies and practices used successfully in the industry. There’s also a number of great videos on products such as Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. And if you’re looking to get your hands dirty with the bits themselves, I would highly recommend the Visual Studio 2010 ALM Virtual Machine + Labs: December 2010 Refresh. Brian Keller provides a good overview of this virtual machine on his blog.

Happy coding and I hope to see you for the “Introducing Visual Studio Webinar Series” starting in January!

Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

Great news! Earlier today, we announced Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, a process template built from the ground up specifically for Scrum teams. From MSDN:

Your team can practice Scrum more easily by using the artifacts in Visual Studio Scrum 1.0. Each artifact serves a specific function and provides opportunities to refine your processes over time. These artifacts include work items, reports, and team queries, and your team can use them to track information, analyze progress, and make decisions.

This process template was first announced at Microsoft TechEd 2010 in New Orleans earlier this summer and was recently updated to incorporate a number of new capabilities. You can read Brian Harry’s blog post to read more about its motivation. For the v1.0 release, Aaron Bjork provides a good summary of what to expect in this release on his blog. Of the questions listed, I found this one particularly interesting:

Q:  Did Microsoft work with Agile thought leaders when building this template? 
Absolutely. We worked closely with a group of Scrum experts and trainers teaching the new Professional Scrum Developer Program including Ken Schwaber fromhttp://www.scrum.org/. It was very important to us that this template be recognized by the community (you) as a great option for Scrum teams. The Professional Scrum Developer Program is taught with Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0.

A Quick Installation Walkthrough

First, download and install Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 from the Visual Studio Gallery. It’s a (small) 483KB MSI package that will provide you with the files required for both the Process Template Manager (to install the Scrum process template) and your project portal (for the Scrum reports). As an alternative, you can download Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 via the Extension Manager of Visual Studio 2010 (listed under Online Gallery → Tools → Process Templates):

Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 in the Extension Manager of Visual Studio 2010

Next, launch the Process Template Explorer in Visual Studio 2010 (Team → Team Project Collection Settings → Process Template Manager...):

Process Template Manager

Click the Upload button and select the folder where the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template is installed (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0\Process Template). Once installed, the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 should be listed in the Process Template Manager as follows:

 
Process Template Manager with Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Installed

For projects based on this template, you should see the following structure listed in Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2010:

Team Explorer Structure with Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Process Template Installed

As you can see in the image of the Team Explorer window (listed above), artifacts (like work items) are defined in accordance to the Scrum literature. You can create bugs, an impediment, sprints, and many other artifacts, all from within the Team Explorer window. It’s pretty awesome; almost as awesome as ahot dog vending machine.

By the way, if you’re looking for move the data of an existing project into a new project built from Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, you should check out the TFS Integration Platform project on CodePlex.

New Reports with Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

Here are a few screenshots of some of the new reports available in Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0:

Velocity Report in Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

If your team has completed multiple sprints, you can forecast release and product completion dates and plan future projects more accurately by reviewing the velocity report.

Sprint Burndown Report in Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

By reviewing a sprint burndown report, you can track how much work remains in a sprint backlog, understand how quickly your team has completed tasks, and predict when your team will achieve the goal or goals of the sprint.

Release Burndown Report in Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

By reviewing a release burndown report, you can understand how quickly your team has delivered backlog items and track how much work the team must still perform to complete a product release.

In addition to these three reports (above), we’ve also included four new reports to the template that focus on engineering metrics:

• Build Summary
• Builds Success Over Time
• Test Case Readiness
• Test Plan Progress

These reports are included in the MSI package and take about five minutes to install. There’s a Scrum SharePoint solution package that’s included (Microsoft.TeamFoundation.SharePoint.Scrum.wsp) and requires deployment to your SharePoint server.

Looking for more information? Check out a detailed overview of Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 on MSDN. Also, if you're looking to learn more about Scrum, I'd recommend checking out thehttp://scrum.org/. From the site: Scrum.org's purpose is to improve the profession of software development so that developers love their work and our customers love working with developers.

Related Links

• Announcing Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 by Aaron Bjork
• Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
• TFS Integration Platform
• Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 (MSDN)
• Process Templates and Tools (MSDN)
• Scrum.org

Note: This post also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection.

Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

In this episode of Developer Night in Canada (DNIC), Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) and I chat with Joel Semeniuk (@joel_semeniuk) about a number of topics including Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Download MP3 Audio - Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (24.59 MB - 53 minutes, 58 seconds)

Show Links

• Imaginet Resources Corp.
• Imaginet's Healthcare Software
• TFS Work Item Manager & TFS Project Dashboard
• Lean Software Development
• Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009
• Visual Studio Lab Management Team Blog
• TFS Integration Platform

About Joel Semeniuk

Joel Semeniuk is a founder of Imaginet Resources Corp; a Canadian based Microsoft Gold Partner. He is also a Microsoft Regional Director and has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba. Joel has spent the last twelve years providing educational, development, and infrastructure consulting services to customers throughout North America. Joel specializes in helping organizations realize their potential through maturing their software development and information technology practices. He employs a customized and incremental approach, promoting the ability to quickly adopt and tailor processes and technologies that best suit the needs of the organization. Backed by industry best practices and his experience, Joel works with organizations to ensure that their technology supports the vision of their business and is adaptable to the ever-changing marketplace, to accomplish this responsiveness without sacrificing quality, and to realize earlier and greater returns on their technology investment. For Joel and his customers, the ultimate goal is to achieve superior business agility.

About Developer Night in Canada (DNIC)

Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is a podcast produced by John Bristowe (@jbristowe) and Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy)of Microsoft Canada. Its focus is to provide insight and analysis from some of the developers and experts in Canada. The RSS feed for Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is available here. Alternatively, you can subscribe through Apple's iTunes here.

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.

Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server