2010/12/08

VS/TFS – A lot of improvements

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In these days a lot of updates and news around Visual Studio and TFS are coming out by MS and I’d like to fix-up some useful links and features:

VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta (Source: bharry’s WebLog)

  • Released on 09.12.2010 it’s a Beta that appears to be very reliable and it’s also licensed to run on production servers. In terms of functionalities released it doesn’t appear to be huge, but technically it resolves many internal issues (memory leaks and performance) and build automation should be very reliable now.
  • Download links:
  • Functionalities
    • Local help viewer – …honestly I don’t care
    • Silverlight 4 tools - The Silverlight 4 tools are now included along with Silverlight 3 support.
    • Unit Testing on .NET 3.5 - In VS 2010, you can only run unit tests against .NET 4.0 and must rely on Framework compatibility to trust that your app will actually work if deployed on .NET 3.5.
    • Intellitrace for 64-bit and Sharepoint – Intellitrace – Anyway is still missing the Silverlight and unmanaged C++
    • Performance Wizard for Silverlight – Profile for SilverLight. I still hadn’t the time to test for it.
    • VB Compiler runtime switch (/vbruntime) – Key VB runtime components can be included as references in your application, making it easier for you to target new platforms as they are released.

Visual Studio Feature Pack 2 (Source: MSDN)

  • It was announced during the Inner Circle Partners Summit on November in Antwerpen and released on 15.11.2010
  • Licensed to VS Ultimate with MSDN, VS Premium with MSDN or VS Test Professional with MSDN
  • It’s a cumulative pack so it INCLUDES the Visual Studio 2010 Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack (aka Feature Pack 1)
  • Download links:
  • Functionalities
    • Testing features:
      • Important: Use Microsoft Test Manager to capture and playback action recordings for Silverlight 4 applications.
      • Use action recordings to fast forward through manual tests that need to support Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6.
      • Available to Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate)
        • Important: Create Coded UI tests for Silverlight 4 applications
        • Edit coded UI tests using a graphical editor
        • Important: Run coded UI tests for web applications using Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6
    • Code visualization and modeling features(requires Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate):
      • Important: Use the Generate Code command to generate skeleton code from elements on UML class diagrams. You can use the default transformations, or you can write custom transformations to translate UML types into code.
      • Create UML class diagrams from existing code.
      • Important:Explore the organization and relationships in C, C++, and ASP.NET projects by generating dependency graphs.
      • Important:Import elements from UML sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and use case diagrams as XMI 2.1 files that are exported from other modeling tools.
      • Create links and view links from work items to model elements.
      • Create layer diagrams from C or C++ code and validate dependencies.
      • Write code to modify layer diagrams and to validate code against layer diagrams.

TFS and Project Server Integration in Beta (Source: Microsoft Project 2010 Blog)

  • This is an hot topic in today IT organization because one of emerging need is traceability where TFS is great, and companies needs to correlate Project Portfolio Management solutions with Software Construction and QA processes and also to the Operations landscape.
  • The distribution of the integration will be done as a Feature Pack that is available ONLY to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
  • The integration can be downloaded only from MSDN download center (available to MSDN subscribers), access it and then look at:
    • Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta (x86) - (English)
    • Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta (x64) - (English)
  • The installation requires TFS 2010 SP1 Beta to be installed on the affected TFS Server.
  • Visual Studio SP1 Beta need to be installed on the clients that will leverage these integrations functionalities (I expect the Team Leaders only machines)
  • The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack must be installed on Project Server:
    • It supports Project Server 2007 and 2010 too
  • Functionalities
    • In terms of the functionalities supported I’ll dedicate a Post later on this topic but I’ve to say that I’ve some concern and there is room for improvements.
    • I don’t like the resource mapping from TFS to Project Server (but I need to perform some more test).
    • There are some constraints and assumptions regarding the Work-Items that you want to keep aligned with Project Server that you need to consider when you model and implements your ALM business processes
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