Applied Visual Studio Team System : Team System

Attending the PASS Summit

andy — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 08:33:00 GMT

Steve Jones makes some good points in his blog post Training. I find it difficult to believe the short-sightedness of some organizations when it comes to training events like the PASS Summit.

This year's Summit - like all previous years to date - had enough top notch presentations and labs to make it worth the cost of admission, travel and expenses, and the cost of allowing a database professional to leave work for three days combined. More than enough.

Like Steve, I don't get it.

Also like Steve, I bet we'll see these DBAs at the 2008 PASS Summit in Seattle - and working for another company.

I wonder if those responsible for denying database professionals opportunities for training factor in the cost of hiring and training a new DBA every six to eighteen months?

:{> Andy

Technorati Tags: EMPs Database Professionals PASS Training Changing Jobs

Thanks to PASS Attendees!

andy — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:19:00 GMT

I'd like to thank the people that attended my sessions at the 2007 PASS Summit in Denver this week! I had a blast and hope you all did as well.

The code will be available from the PASS website and on a DVD. For those in my sessions, I promised I would post the code here for my custom Counts test condition for Team Edition for Database Professionals. Free registration to VSTeamSystemCentral.com is required. The site has been live more than two years. I've sent a total of two emails to registered users during that time. And I never share email addresses - ever.

Extending Team Edition for Database Professionals with custom test conditions is fairly straightforward once you understand it. (Like everything else in life, Mr. Obvious...)

If you are completely new to coding and would like to build a custom test condition for database testing, fear not! The last part of Chapter 4 (entitled Testing the Database) of the Wrox book Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers is dedicated to a beginner's walk-through of building your first custom test condition.

Yes I am promoting my new book. There's a reason: it's a good book.

:{> Andy

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At the 2007 PASS Summit!

andy — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 05:19:00 GMT

I'm at the 2007 PASS Summit!

I was wandering around the Colorado Convention Center earlier today in shorts, unshaven, tired... looking like I'd been rode hard and put up wet. But I caught the last half of Gert Draper's excellent presentation on Team Edition for Database Professionals! Gert is the man.

I'm presenting on the same topic tomorrow (yeah, I know - great move there, Andy...) and then on SSIS Development practices Thursday. This promises to be the geekiest week I've had in a long time!

:{> Andy

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Getting Ready For The PASS Summit!

andy — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:31:00 GMT

The PASS Summit is less than two weeks away!

I'm getting ready for my presentations. I need a couple laptops to host virtual servers for the demos, so I bought some new gear to take with me.

Check out my Network-In-A-Bag!

It's a power strip, a couple CAT6 cables, power supply, and a NetGear 1G 5-port switch - all in a 1 gallon Ziploc bag.

:{> Andy

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Testing With VSTS Sample Chapter Available

andy — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:29:00 GMT

The cool people at Wiley (Wrox) allowed the cool people at Solid Quality Mentors to post my chapter, Testing The Database, from the upcoming Wrox release Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers!

:{> Andy

Technorati Tags: Team Edition for Database Professionals Database Testing Unit Testing Wrox Solid Quality Mentors Wiley

New Book! Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers

andy — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:18:00 GMT

Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com!

I was honored to work on this book with three testing gurus: Tom Arnold, Mike Frost, and Dominic Hopton.

The book covers many aspects of testing. More than just what to test, why to test is also covered. Although the book covers testing with Visual Studio, non-Microsoft technologies are referenced.

The book is written for developers practicing test-driven and test-first methodologies, and for test engineers. It provides great insight into the Visual Studio testing framework.

I got to write a chapter on Testing the Database. I use Team Edition for Database Professionals in the chapter to build a database project, then test it. I'm really happy with the chapter. The last section contains a detailed, step-by-step walk-through of building a custom test condition in C#, then integrating it into the TEDP test conditions. I wrote it assuming no experience with the Visual Studio 2005 IDE and little or no experience with software application development. I wrote it so database professionals with no exposure to application development could write their own custom test condition.

The book should be available in September!

:{> Andy

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Iteration = Maturity

andy — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:01:00 GMT

Introduction

I was recently reminded that iteration matures software.

The History of Andy, Part 1

Like many DBAs, I was a software developer in another life. I built web applications - working my way up from HTML through DHTML and finally to ASP - and could regale (and bore) you young whipper-snappers with war-stories of how things were "back in my day". [/DanaCarvey]

But I won't.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

I'll share instead something I've witnessed many times since starting with software in 1975 - and something you probably already know: stuff changes.

And thank goodness stuff changes!

I recently ordered 1G of RAM from an online retailer. It should arrive before my next son (but that's not a given as Riley refuses to provide a tracking number - the doctors will induce Christy into labor Friday if he hasn't been born by then - but I digress...). I remember my neighbor John, who introduced me to computers, purchased a 256-byte RAM chip in the mid-1970s for about what I paid for the 1G. That's 256 bytes of RAM - not a typo. As I recall it was either a 14- or 16-pin IC.

Things have changed since then. Improvements in technology, brought about by building and improving upon existing knowledge, have brought us to a day when I can purchase 1,073,741,824 bytes for roughly the previous price of 256. I don't know how you feel about that. I think it's a good thing.

The idea of "building and improving upon existing knowledge" defines iterative development. Although the idea is relatively new to the software development field, it serves as the basis for engineering disciplines. Engineers iterate - build and improve upon existing knowledge - and we get more powerful hardware for the same amount of money. What's not to like?

Iteration - it's not just a good idea...

Iterative software development builds and improves upon existing knowledge within a specific domain. Most domains are defined by an application (wholly or in part), enterprise knowledge (again, wholly or in part), or - most likely - some combination of the two. For example, let's say you work for a large corporation as a software developer. Your domain could be the corporate website. In which case you possess knowledge about the business of the corporation and web development. You mix these together to do your job. In this case, you will probably pick up marketing savvy and current trends along with the latest AJAX techniques.

As you make successive passes (iterations) through the website design interacting with marketing, your domain knowledge is built and improves. As your domain knowledge increases, the website will become more valuable to the corporation - as will you.

Iteration adds value.

Got Iteration?

The same can be said for database development.

Perhaps you've experienced this in your own database development efforts: you receive a request for a database design to meet some desired functionality. Or you're handed a design and asked to optimize it. Or maybe even you had an idea to capture data - performance metrics or something similar - and you're designing a database solution to accomplish this.

You get into the development a few hours or a few days and realize a little tweak here or there would improve performance, or readibility, or better adapt the design to your intentions. So you make the tweak and continue.

This improvement leads you to re-examine other portions of the design and you make more tweaks. Maybe your last change broke things. Maybe you see an opportunity to add a parameter to a stored procedure and combine the business logic of three stored procedures into one.

A "Growing" Solution

Pretty soon, you have iterated enough to feel comfortable promoting, integrating, or even releasing the results - letting the effort move to the next step.

Depending on the nature of your efforts, it may not end there. If your database development is the back end of a larger application - say, the corporate website, for example - there will likely be requests for changes over time as the site grows (scales) in complexity and size.

When the requests come in you are not likely to start over. You will most likely build and improve upon your existing knowledge. You will most likely iterate.

Scaling forces iteration.

Voilà

This is how solutions mature - be they applications, databases, or both - regardless of who writes them or how many are involved in the development effort. It doesn't matter if the development team is one lady in a cubicle in the European Union or a development team of thousands at Microsoft.

Iteration matures software.

:{> Andy

Team System Web Access Power Tool!

andy — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 04:08:00 GMT

Microsoft (Brian Harry, actually) announces the availability of the Visual Studio Team System Web Access Power Tool!

Web-based TFS folks - get it while it's hot!

:{> Andy

Technorati Tags: TeamPlain Team Foundation Server TFS Power Tool

Sucking Up

andy — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 04:28:00 GMT

I am sometimes accused of sucking up but the truth is I'm just a nice guy who likes to compliment folks when they do a good job. Most of those folks are my peers, some of them happen to be supervisory, and that's when the accusations flow.

So be it. News flash: I didn't start complimenting folks because you commented about it. Can you complete this thought? ;)

In his post entitled Etiquette Rule #1 - Don't be a Sycophant Rob Caron quotes a Redmond Channel Partner Online piece on Microsoft Partner etiquette.

I've had interaction with Microsoft folks and this doesn't match my experience. Rob's response matches my experience instead, where he says :

If you use a competing product, I'd rather understand what our gaffe was that made it the more attractive choice. What could we do better to earn your business next time?
If you think one of our products sucks, please tell me why. What can we do to keep your business?

:{> Andy

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eScrum

andy — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 06:26:00 GMT

Microsoft recently released a new Scrum project management tool!

eScrum works with Team Foundation Server, so you'll need your own TFS server (you can build your own Team Foundation Virtual Server free!) to use this cool tool.

Scrum is one of the simplest and most visual of the Agile methodologies to implement. I've been privilieged to introduce Scrum into several large enterprises in the past couple years. It's just an awesome methodology!

:{> Andy

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Meltdown!

andy — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 19:46:00 GMT

A couple days ago the Vista Ultimate instance on my laptop when all Klingon on me: it was "a good day to die."

I'll never know why for sure. Indications point to COM+ and VMM giving up the ghost. They were good systems, may they rest in peace.

I tried to revive the old OS. It would run in Safe Mode and even Safe Mode with Networking, but that's just not the same as having all the functionality I know and love.

I've spent the last couple days (and nights) rebuilding a second instance of Vista Ultimate on the same machine. I'm about half done at this point. Today is SQL Server instances and Visual Studio Team System day.

It's not just the installs, there's the service packs and updates after the installations. Lots of installing.

But it's also an opportunity to rebuild the machine with a different configuration.

Back to installing...

:{> Andy

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How To Build A Team Foundation Virtual Server

andy — Thu, 31 May 2007 07:01:00 GMT

I've had to put this off for far too long, but it is finally complete: How To Build A Team Foundation Virtual Server!

Free registration is required to access the site. The site's been active 18 months and I've sent out two mass emails. In the future, I plan a newsletter - not sure of the frequency or content.

This tutorial on building your own Team Foundation Virtual Server starts with building a virtual machine in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and ends with testing the installation by building a Team Project.

All the software is available free from Microsoft - either completely free (as in beer) or in 180-day trial versions.

I've used these very setup instructions to build Production TFS servers. I've also converted the 180-day trial versions to fully-licensed versions. In Team Foundation Server, this is pretty simple: after you obtain your license key simply open Add/Remove Programs, select Microsoft Team Foundation Server, and click the Change button. One of the Team Foundation Server setup options is Upgrade - how cool is that?

My next project is similar - I'll be building a new Team Foundation Virtual Server for a pre-release version of TFS Orcas!

:{> Andy

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TFS Guide Beta 1

andy — Wed, 30 May 2007 08:39:00 GMT

Check out J.D. Meier's post on the TFS Guide Beta 1!

This is a cool document!

J. D. describes it as Microsoft's playbook for TFS. That's a fair assessment. The document is part of the Patterns and Practices Library, and it certainly belongs there.

From the document:
Why We Wrote This Guide
From our own experience with Team Foundation Server and through conversations with customers and Microsoft employees who work in the field, we determined there was demand for a guide that would show how to use Team Foundation in the real world. While there is information in the product documentation, in blog posts and in forums, there has been no single place to find proven practices for the effective use of Team Foundation Server in the context of a development project under real world constraints.

Required reading for anyone using or considering using Team Foundation Server!

:{> Andy

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Testing With Powershell

andy — Tue, 29 May 2007 07:01:00 GMT

I caught this article on Testing with Powershell by Dr. James McCaffrey in MSDN Magazine this month.

The article, combined with Kevin Hazzard's recent presentations at Richmond Code Camp and the Richmond .Net Users Group, piqued my interest in Windows Powershell.

Unlike other scripting shells, Powershell works with .Net objects. It exposes all parts of the .Net framework, but truly exercises reflection.

This makes Powershell ideal for quick, interface-free testing.

:{> Andy

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MSDN's New Look

andy — Mon, 28 May 2007 07:01:00 GMT

Frank caught the MSDN update a few days ago - I like it!

:{> Andy

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