Planet SCM

The final article of the Global Bank: A Scenario for Visual Studio Team System 2008 series is now available.

From the overview:

Are you wondering what you can do in Visual Studio Team System 2008 that you couldn’t do before? We’ve created a series of articles to show you. In this series, we'll explore how Global Bank uses Visual Studio Team System 2008 to help design and implement a new online service.

Global Bank: Adding New Services to an Existing Web Site

The first article in the series. Follow along as Alan creates the list of requirements for the new service and Ken uses these requirements to design the system.

Global Bank: Updating an Existing Database to Support New Services

The second article in the series. See how Alice implements the new table and stored procedure that are required for the new service.

Global Bank: Coding the New Service, Part 1

The third article in the series. Follow along as Martin begins coding, debugging, and testing the new service.

Global Bank: Coding the New Service, Part 2

The fourth article in the series. See how Martin uses unit testing and profiling to test the accuracy and robustness of his code.

Global Bank: Testing the New Service and Fixing Issues

The final article in the series. Follow along as Ellen uses web tests and load tests to check the performance of the new service.

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Today, we launched a new site on MSDN - the Microsoft Tester Center!

The Microsoft Tester Center showcases the test discipline as an integral part of the application lifecycle, describes test roles and responsibilities, and promotes the test investments required to deliver high-quality software.

Source: Tester Center Home

The aim of the Microsoft Tester Center is to provide a place for software testers to share their experiences and best practices, and to shed some light on how we do software testing at Microsoft. Testers from across Microsoft have contributed content for this site, and the first couple of articles are now available in the MSDN Library:

• Best Practices: Code Reviews
• Life-Cycle Performance Testing for Eliminating Last-Minute Surprises

Visual Studio Team System embraces the entire software development team. Software testers are one of the key benefactors of this expansion in the Visual Studio product line. While Team System provides the tools software testers need to be successful, this site will help provide some of the knowledge testers need to make the best use of those tools and to cultivate the software testing community.

The team that is working on this site is eager to receive your feedback and contributions:

Contribute to This Site: Submit your articles, book reviews, videos and more. Email us to find out more.

Submit Your Feedback: Send email.

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Some of the most laborious writing that happens in creating Visual Studio doesn't happen in code. I'm talking about the millions (literally) of words that go into the product documentation and other content to support the product. As with most aspects of the product, we thrive on your feedback to help create a better product. See Kathleen McGrath's Weblog for a post (Wanted: Feedback on Visual Studio Content) about the many ways you can contribute feedback about the Visual Studio content.

Gathering customer feedback is a critical part of the Visual Studio documentation process. Your feedback helps us determine whether we are writing the type of content that is most useful to you, and whether we are covering the tasks and scenarios that you need the most help with.

Starting with Visual Studio 2005, we regularly update our online documentation using a continuous publishing process. This enables you to get access to latest version of the documentation quickly and easily. It also gives us the opportunity to respond to feedback that we receive about our documentation and continuously make improvements.

There are several ways you can give us direct feedback, and here are four easy ways to let us know about your experiences with our documentation and how we can improve it.

Source: Kathleen's Weblog : Wanted: Feedback on Visual Studio Content

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Take a look at a proposal (Visual Studio Team System User Education : Scenario Topics) from David Chesnut of the Team System User Education Team that looks to replace the current orientation-style topics found in the product documentation with something a bit more useful. As always, your feedback is crucial and greatly appreciated.

To me, scenarios represent something fundamental. Documentation should map technology (e.g. work item lists) into the problem space the user is working in (e.g. to track project progress). These serve the same purpose as an abstract in a lengthy technical document: Telling the reader succinctly the key points of the content section so they can decide if they need to read any further.

Source: Visual Studio Team System User Education : Scenario Topics

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For dealing with complexity of a different sort - enterprise architectures - see Roger Sessions' new white paper in the MSDN Library: A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies. I'm sure there are some parallels I can find with my problem (Managing Complexity) and ideas I can borrow. It's also interesting to see in his conclusion that it's less about choosing one methodology and more about mixing the right blend, much like software development methodologies.

Twenty years ago, a new field was born that soon came to be known as enterprise architecture. This paper covers a broad introduction to the field of enterprise architecture. Although the history of the field goes back 20 years, the field is still evolving—and rapidly so.

Source: A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies

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I created a page on the Visual Studio site with the customer & partner quotes: Happy Anniversary, Visual Studio!

March 2007 (March 19th to be exact) is the Visual Studio Decennial since it marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Visual Studio 97, the first release of Visual Studio. Microsoft PressPass has a page o'quotes from numerous Microsoft customers and partners (Comments on the 10-year Anniversary of Microsoft Visual Studio, March 2007), and Prashant Sridharan is celebrating the anniversary in his keynote this morning at VSLive! in San Francisco, where Sam Gazitt is making his on-stage debut.

Source: Rob Caron : Visual Studio Decennial

Has the MSDN Library made your life - at least when it comes to your development efforts - simpler and more productive?

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