June 2005 - Posts

Ok, I won't install the June CTP :(
18 June 05 03:54 PM | dmckinstry

 Well, I was anxious to install the June CTP of VSTS this weekend.  Aside from the general interest of what’s changed, I’m really interested to dig into the database and data warehouse updates to do more reporting investigations.  I understand the databases have been evolving quickly.

But based on Buck’s blog, I’ll hold off.  The June CTP is back to requiring two computers or VPCs and Team System is never a trivial install.  In addition, if sounds like the July CTP will be a significant release, even if not beta quality, so I guess I’ll follow Buck’s guidance and wait…  It’s hard to be patient but I guess I can hold off for my next Team System fix.

DevCon in Dallas - Sold out crowd and an overall great event
17 June 05 11:28 AM | dmckinstry

 Just a quick kudos to Brian Moore and the entire Microsoft team for putting on a fantastic VS2005 DevCon.  The event was sold out and from all indications, was a success.  I heard that they collected Along with Detroit, Dallas was the last DevCon this year.  I hope the event up there went as well as ours.  Not that anyone wants to see what they missed, but… https://www.chrysalisevents.com/vs2005devcon/.  Just talking to attendees as both as speaker and a sponsor, I received great interest and feedback on the event.

The event was at capacity with 450 people and, even after a few no-shows, they received ~439 evaluations.  That’s an excellent turn-out so kudos to the development community as a whole actively participating.  I think this shows that we have a healthy development community here in North Texas!

 

 

Team System source control and VS.NET 2003/VB6/...
12 June 05 05:50 PM | dmckinstry

Another exciting thing that I heard at TechEd:  The VSTS source control team is working on a MSSCCI interface into the Team Foundation Server source control.  What does that mean?  They’ve figured out how they are going to allow Visual Studio .NET (pre-VS2005) to access the new enterprise source control repository in VSTS!  What that really means is that users who want to move to VS2005 and Team System but still have to maintain ‘legacy’ Windows environments have a choice!!!  VB6, VC++ 6, VS.NET 2003 and other MSSCCI-compliant development tools can have integrated access a Team Foundation Server for source code control!  Halleluiah!

Repeatable profiling in VSTS
11 June 05 06:44 PM | dmckinstry

TechEd was great this year…  I attended a few great sessions, mostly on VSTS and BizTalk, manned my company’s booth and (of course) socialized.  I did get a chance to eat dinner with members of the BizTalk product team and also spent a lot of time hanging out at the Team System cabana.  Although I learned quite a few things, some of them made enough sense to pass them on…

When tuning an application it is nice to have repeatable test cases so that you can measure your progress during the tuning process.  That is impossible to do effectively if you are manually running a web site or other application that requires manual intervention.  The obvious choice is to use a unit test or a web test to drive the profiling session.  I thought I knew how to do this in previous CTP releases but couldn’t get it to work in Beta 2.  The Performance Explorer and the Performance Session Wizard do not know how to add a test-based profile target.  The solution is to add it from the test results as shown below.  That is, run your tests, right-click on a result, and select Create Performance Session.

This seems to work fine for C# unit tests.  I understand that there is a little manual clean-up that you have to do in Beta 2 for VB-based unit tests, although I’m sure that will be fixed.  In addition, the Create Performance Session wizard from Web Test test results seems to work but when you try to run the session it fails.  Again, I hope this will be fixed before RTM.