Scott Hanselman has a very cool blog post series on building a developer machine that (almost) has a 7.9 Windows Experience Index, the highest value currently available. If you are planning to build a new dev pc, this is definitely worth a look. Normally I get my input from tweakers best buy guide and related comments, but this feels like a serious showcase that I would love to rebuild.

The post also contains videos of building the machine and links to other interesting tweaks.

Very nice!

Available at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/59ac03e3-df99-4776-be39-1917cbfc5d8e

“Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is a new process template from Microsoft.  Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development.  This template includes work items and reports to help your Scrum team be successful.   Click here more information about this release. 

Note:  During the beta this template was named Team Foundation Server Scrum v1.0 - Beta.  It has been renamed and is now Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0.

This template includes:

• Work Item Types
  • Sprint
  • Product Backlog Item
  • Bug
  • Task
  • Impediment
  • Test Case
• Reports
  • Release Burndown
  • Velocity
  • Sprint Burndown
  • Build Success Over Time
  • Build Summary
  • Test Case Readiness
  • Test Plan Progress
• SharePoint Project Portal

Below are screenshots of the Sprint Burndown and Release Burndown reports included with the template.”

More info http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aaronbjork/archive/2010/07/19/announcing-microsoft-visual-studio-scrum-1-0.aspx

At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC, Microsoft have announced their cloud-in-a-box offering: the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Very interesting.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/appliance/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/07/12/just-announced-at-wpc-the-windows-azure-platform-appliance.aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/dunnry/Introducing-the-Windows-Azure-Platform-Appliance/

This is great news: Microsoft have released a Hyper-V machine that contains integration between Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server 2010. Both products are great releases and it is even better to see them working together.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=f221c660-161b-43ca-95f3-e0e4aad8d43e

“This image will expire Dec 30th, 2010. This VHD release is available in English only.
This community technical preview of Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server 2010 Integration allows teams to share data between the two servers. This virtual machine includes enterprise project plans in Project Server mapped to team projects in Team Foundation Server, along with sample data to highlight key integration scenarios. The walkthrough documents provide four scenarios that simulate the interactions between the project manager, working in Project Server, and the software development team, working in Team Foundation Server.
The value of Project Server and Team Foundation Server integration is to provide up-to-date project status and resource availability across agile and formal teams; help project managers track high-level requirements and allow the team lead to manage the details; and permit project managers to live in Project Server and manage projects across the enterprise while development team leads live in Team Foundation Server and manage their software development project. With this tool, the Project Management Office (PMO) is able to plan, collaborate and track real-time progress made by formal or agile teams.
This virtual machine is running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition R2. It contains a full installation of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Project Server 2010, with Office 2010 and all necessary prerequisites.”

Lately I have been reading and working on performance and security. It reminded me of the value of Visual Studio and Fiddler and their extensions.

As you may know I love the work the Patterns & Practices do, such as the Application Architecture guide. Next to the apparch guide, J.D. Meier and the others have created and gathered great info on performance and security. The content may contain some aged pages, but don’t let that put you off: concepts and principles of performance and security, or any other non-functional area, remain current and applicable. Still it is good to know that Windows Azure gets its own security guidance.

While I am promoting J.D.’s work, why not take a look at his recent Getting Results material. It is a great source of inspiration for me and points out clearly what to do more and what to do less. And it is very easy to start performance tuning yourself too…

The Visual Studio product teams have a very open culture, which we learned once more during the MVP week in February. Well the product teams are surrounded by MVPs and Inner Circle partners who also share their knowledge and expertise under the Rangers-flag. The Rangers provide real-world guidance for common questions and requests. These are their latest projects:

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance

Getting started with Team Foundation Server 2010 (contains things like capacity planning)

TFS Integration Platform

TFS Virtualization Guidance

How to virtualize TFS 2010

Requirements Management

How to do requirements management in TFS 2010

TFS Upgrade Guide

How to upgrade from older versions to TFS2010

TFS Branching Guide 2010

How to do merging and branching in TFS 2010 version control

Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide

How to do performance tests using TFS 2010

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/willy-peter_schaub/

From the CHM: “Enterprise Library consists of a collection of application blocks and core infrastructure. All of these are reusable software components designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges.

Enterprise Library also provides many highly configurable features that make it much easier to manage repetitive tasks, known as crosscutting concerns, which occur in many places in your applications. These include tasks such as logging, validation, caching, exception management, and more. In addition, the dependency injection container it provides can help to simplify and decouple your designs, make them more testable and understandable, and help you to produce more efficient designs and implementations of all kinds of applications.”

This diagram shows the blocks and their dependencies:

A first look at the new config tool:

For more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2010/04/20/microsoft-enterprise-library-5-0-released.aspx

Today is a big day for the Dutch developer community: we are launching Visual Studio 2010! Visual Studio is so much more than a developer tool today: you can create UML diagrams, visually analyze your source code, plan agile projects and iterations and reproduce complex bugs. All of this works in an enterprise environment where multiple development teams and many users share the same platform. Installation has been simplified and administration too. However, the biggest investments have gone to test and lab capabilities: the testing features are great so now your manual and functional testers get great tools too. Lab management expands the testing features in a sense that you can create virtual machines as clients for your applications and you can create snapshots of bugs and test runs, which developers can simply resume and take over for debugging.

Recently Ewald Hofman and I presented two sessions at the Microsoft Application Platform Conference. Gerard van der Pol envisaged an ALM Showcase track in which all phases of a development project would be presented. 

Yesterday and today we repeated this concept in a slightly different form. Together with Marcel, Edward, Hassan, Clemens, Rob, Rene and Gerard we had a lot of fun doing the interactive sessions.

11:10 - Planning the Showcase Application

13:30 - Modeling the Showcase Application

15:05 - Developing the Showcase Application

16:30 - Building the Showcase Application

09:15 - Planning, Design and Developing the Showcase Application (Recap Day 1)

10:50 - Using Version Control

13:15 - Selecting an Optimal Branch and Merge Strategy

14:50 - Performance testing

16:15 - Testing the Showcase Application

The most important part was to co-present the sessions: so there is a presenter and a code monkey who does the demos and presents where necessary. I think this made the sessions more attractive to the audience since there was continuous presenting and demos. Hopefully the audience enjoyed it too.

And it was an honor to share an agenda and speakers room with Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Hanselman!

Cameron Skinner blogged about this cool new vsix: It combines the reference architectures from Microsoft Patterns & Practices Application Architecture Guide with the new layered diagram features in Visual Studio 2010.

Just download the vsix from here and open it to install it to your Visual Studio 2010 RC. Then create a layered diagram in a new or existing solution, open the toolbox and there you have five new templates:

• Mobile Application
• Rich Client Application
• Rich Internet Application
• Services Application
• Web Application

which you can just drag and drop to the design surface to create a fully AppArch compliant solution from scratch. In the above screenshot you can see the Rich Internet Application template, that I used. How cool is that. I expect a lot more extensions to the diagrams in the months to come.