We’re just done with the second day of the latest ALM Live tour. This time the focus is “quality assurance using Continuous Integration” and it’s been very interesting to hear other peoples view on this. I believe the key takeaways this time are test automation and project transparency. Focus on what you want to visualize using the CI process and many more in the development organization will benefit of the metrics that comes from CI and TFS. Why should only the build master be interested in the information in a build report? Presented diffrerently it's of direct value to project management, test management and quality assurance. The same goes for the quality indicators (test rates, code coverage, code churn etc), with the right presentation these values will be very valuable for the project management and not only the development team.

For you who want the presentation it can be downloaded here.

Other resources mentioned in the presentation:

Tools for Agility, Kent Beck

http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?FamilyID=ae7e07e8-0872-47c4-b1e7-2c1de7facf96&displaylang=en

Team Foundation Build Reference for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6466b53d-d80b-4c31-8f5c-dfb5d32e9411&DisplayLang=en

Custom Build tasks

http://www.codeplex.com/MSBuildExtensionPack

http://www.codeplex.com/sdctasks    

PSExec for remote administration

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx

nDepend

http://www.ndepend.com

Build Wallboard

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/buildwallboard

TFS Deployer

http://www.codeplex.com/tfsdeployer

Yesterday at a VSTS summit in Barcelona, Dag König and Joachim Rossberg and myself had the opportunity to talk to Brian Harry and Sam Guckenheimer, two of the key people behind Team System and Team Foundation Server. Some of the highlights in the interview include Brian talking about the history of TFS (and VSS) and Sam reasoning about agile development and wether to use tools or not.

Listen to the interview.

Yesterday Marcel de Vries published the first release of the TSWA translation project we've been working on at Codeplex. It's been quite interesting to translate a huge number of terms. How do you translate terms like Work Item, Changeset or Workspace? Anyhow, I think it looks nice in the web client and that was prio #1 in my case.

The project include a MSI setup so it's really easy to get it installed and running. It does require the TSWA SP1 to work, since it's the first release to support custom language translations.

In the v1 release there's seven translations included:

·         Croatian, done by Ognjen Bajic

·         Portuguese (Brazilian), done by Igor Abade and Ramon Durães.

·         Turkish, done by Cengiz Han, Coskun Sunali and Okan Tekeli

·         Danish, done by Gert Christiansen

·         Swedish, done by myself.

·         Polish, done by Marek Byszewski

·         Dutch, done by Marcel de Vries

Apart from these there's built-in translations for English (US), Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean in TSWA 2008 SP1.

Read Marcel's post for more information about the future of the project.

Comments and corrections on the Swedish translations are welcome. Please post to the issue tracker on Codeplex.

It's time again for me to get on the ALM Live tour. This time the topic is around how we can use TFS to improve the quality of our development project. In particular we'll look how a continuous integration process can help us build software with higher quality by integrating often and by providing transparency in the development process.

Key topics this time:

• Build automation including continuous integration.
• Integration of tests and code analysis in the builds.
• Automated generation of release notes.
• Generation of key metrics from TFS

We'll also look at how status and metrics can be communicated in the project using reports and dashboards.

The event will be in Stockholm, Malmö and Göteborg as usual and the dates are November 25-27.

More info about the event, including registration, here. See you!

The Team System team has released a new version of the power tools for TFS. This is a pretty big release with lots of good stuff (again).

My personal favorites this time are:

• Source Control Shell Extension. The source control folders can be mapped directly to Windows directories, which gives you an efficient way to perform version control tasks without starting Visual Studio. Users of Tortoise for SVN should now feel confortable with TFS. Here's a snapshot of the shell integration:

• Team Members. A new folder in the Team Explorer that lets you view and interact with people on the team.
• Improved search in source control. It's now possible to search of files based on dates, comments, check-in notes and more. A sample screen:

Download the power tools here.

Read more about the release in Brian Harry's post.

As of TFS 2008 SP1 the Team System Web Access (TSWA) SP1 supports multiple languages. And as expected that support covers the larger languages, to which unfortunatly Swedish didn't qualify as one.

I've had a couple of customers asking if it's possible to get TSWA in Swedish and so I looked around and found a project on Codeplex that aims to add additional localization support for TSWA, the Team System Web Access Translation Project managed by Marcel de Vries (Team System MVP). Apparently I've got too much free time so I decided to join in and contribute to the project with the Swedish translations. The project is getting closer to a v1 release and I'll get back with more details when it does.

Languages Currently in Development in this project:

Dutch
Portuguese (pt-pt)
Portuguese (pt-br)
Norwegian
Turkish
Danish
Swedish

Base Language already available from Microsoft for TSWA

English (US)
Chinese Simplified
Chinese Traditional
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Japanese
Korean

Back from an intensive week at Microsoft PDC08. It's been a great week with lots of interesting keynotes and sessions and bit different PDC than the others I've been at.

I was mainly coming to the PDC to get all the latest news about Visual Studio Team System and the Software + Services platform. I'm got more than I was asking for... I'm really impressed of the breadth of products we were shown! I mean, all the new stuff in VSTS 2010 would easily fill a week of content. But that was just a part of the puzzle... The big topic this time - Windows Azure, or the "cloud" OS, shows what powerful solutions a big player like Microsoft can come up with. Not just is it a new OS for the cloud space, it IS the cloud as well. With Microsoft backing up a platform with a hosting environment, the S+S vision may now be closer than I'd expected. As a PDC attendee we can now all go and create services in Azure and start getting familiar with the idea of having our software running outside of our own datacenters. A both compelling and somewhat scaring possibility.

As for VSTS 2010; much of the new stuff had already been revealed by Brian Harry and others a few weeks back. It's great to have some time to listen to the product team present their solutions. The 2010 is an impressive release. There are so many new features it almost feels like a new product. But the bulk of the new stuff goes into areas where the product has suffered from the "v1" syndrome and it feels good to have those areas covered as well. I'm talking about improvements in project management (yes, now we'll get those hierarchical work items), simplified reporting, vastly improved tools for test management including a new stand-alone tool called "camano" and finally a much improved architecture edition with both architectural visualization tools as well as full UML 2.1.2 support.

Apart from all good content it was really nice to have time to catch up with old friends, discuss the impressions with other colleagues and the opportunity to talk to the people writing the software we use every day.

Finally, and a bit surprising, the next PDC (2009) was also announced at the last day of PDC08.  

Below are references to some of the new stuff presented at the PDC:

Visual Studio Team System 2010

• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel 9
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Overview
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP)

Windows Azure

• Windows Azure, Microsoft.com
• Azure Services Platform, MSDN
• Introducing The Azure Services Platform, David Chappell

Dublin

• Windows Server Application Server Roadmap
• Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation 4.0, Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 and Windows Server “Dublin”
• Oslo, WCF, WF & Dublin PDC Bits Review, Alan Smith