Building modern software solutions requires that teams work together effectively. At VSTS live!, you’ll learn how to use agile software development techniques to build better solutions. You’ll find sessions on unit testing, build automation, and best practices in version control and more. While many of the sessions focus on using Team System and Team Foundation Server, many sessions will help you with your application life cycle regardless of tools or technologies used. So come learn from some of the best developers in the industry and learn how to build high quality solutions faster and more efficiently.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
VT3Mastering MSBuild, Intermediate
Walt Ritscher
9:45 a.m.
Microsoft quietly slipped a powerful build automation tool into the .NET 2.0 release. MSBuild is a task-based build engine that automates the steps needed to create your application. It easily performs critical jobs such as: running automation tests, creating installers, generating documentation or CHM files, and file management. Although it is completely integrated with Visual Studio, it's even more powerful when you learn how to modify the build files yourself. You'll learn how to extend MSBuild with your own custom tasks. We'll also look at several open source libraries that extend MSBuild with interesting tasks: creating zip files, uploading files to your production server via FTP, working with source control servers (VSS, Subversion, and Vault), updating SQL Server databases, writing to the registry and running FXCop. During this session, you see how to exert maximum control over your build process.
VT8Team Build 2008, Intermediate
Brian Randell
11:15 a.m.
This session covers how to define an end-to-end build process using Team System and Team Build 2008. First, you'll learn what's new and changed from Team Build 2005. You'll learn how to manage the build, do desktop builds, and how you can setup Team Build to work in a continuous integration environment. You'll then learn how to customize the build process to perform all your build steps, including running unit tests, creating custom-build actions, generating setup programs and deploying to staging servers. Finally, you'll get a crash course in the new managed API for working with Team Build 2008.
VT13De-Mystifying TFS Reporting, Advanced 
Benjamin Day
2:30 p.m.
If you’re using Team Foundation Server, it’s capturing a whole lot of data for you about your projects—code coverage, code churn, work item history, etc—and it’s all going into the TFS Data Warehouse. All that data is being captured so that you can easily figure out what’s happening on your project using Excel or SQL Server’s Report Builder. That’s great. Ever tried to actually do it? Ever looked at the TFS Data Warehouse? (Yeah. Clear as mud, huh?)
Then there are the SQL Server Reporting Services Reports that come out of the box. “Actual Quality vs. Planned Velocity”? (Whuh?) What do these reports mean? Better yet, how do you fix them after you’ve customized your Team Project’s Work-Item Templates? What are these “dimensions” and “measures” all about?
In this session, Ben will answer these questions and more and attempt to eliminate the mystery in the TFS reporting system. We’ll cover the reports mean, how you can access the warehouse with Excel, and then show you how you can customize the TFS SQL Reporting Services reports.
VT18Load Testing Your ASP.NET Applications, Advanced
Brian Randell
4:00 p.m.
Far too often, performance and scalability testing is not performed until applications are ready to be rolled into production. At that point it is too difficult to correct what may be fundamental problems in application design and architecture. This session demonstrates how to create robust load tests and run them as part of a daily automated build process. This regular load testing allows you to see performance problems as they are created, and fix them in a much timelier manner.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
VT23Managing Software Releases with Visual Studio Team System, Advanced
Brian Randell
8:30 a.m.
Team Foundation Server offers a wealth of tools to support new application development projects. But how do they apply to applications that are already released and need ongoing maintenance? What about the existing applications that you've migrated into TFS? Or your new applications once they've reached production? In this session, we'll look at branching, build and work-item strategies to help with managing and auditing the rollout of releases, and fixes for existing applications. Some of the techniques that we will examine are: promotion modeling, "merge by work item", cherry-picked merges, and builds based on branches. This approach will take into account application code, database schema and data changes.
VT28Efficient SCM with TFS – Best Practice, Intermediate
Jeff Levinson
10:00 a.m.
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Are you working with multiple products, multiple releases or common code? Don't know what source code is actually in production? Maybe you have a complex branching structure right now and it seems harder to work with than it should be. This session will show you basic and advanced branching structures, tips and tricks for promoting your code from development to production and how schedule affects the branching strategy. Learn things that the books don’t cover to make your development and release process better.
VT33Build Better Applications with VSTS for Database Professionals, Introductory
Jeff Levinson
11:30 p.m.
Not working with a tool to help you manage your database? Are you working with a tool but find that the objects in the tool don’t match the objects you’ve deployed? Still working with production data in your test environment? Not actually testing your database code? If you answered yes to any of these questions then this session is for you. Learn about Microsoft’s Database Professionals edition for Visual Studio Team System. Get an overview with demonstrations on how to use the features of this tool and what it can do for your organization! Write better quality code with DB Pros!
VT38Serious Team Foundation Server Source Control, Advanced
Benjamin Day
2:45 p.m.
Did you know that there’s a command-line interface to the version control system called “TF” with 33 sub-commands? Also, you can help ensure quality by configuring check-in policies. You can create your own check-in policies, too. Have you played around with branching and merging yet? TFS source control is seriously powerful.
In this session, Ben will show you how to become a TFS version-control power user. First, he’ll start with an overview of configuring source control, then dive into the TF command, give some advice on setting up your source control tree, some thoughts on branching & merging, and then show you how to create your own TFS check-in policy.
VT43Beyond VSTS 2008: Rosario, Introductory
Brian Randell
4:15 p.m.
As good as Visual Studio Team System 2008 is, there are many more features that could be added to improve your overall Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) experience. Visual Studio Team System code name “Rosario” is the version of Team System that follows Visual Studio Team System 2008 and is focused on three major areas: business relevance, quality focus, and improved collaboration. In this future looking session, we’ll dig into the most current CTP of “Rosario” that is available and examine Microsoft’s road map so you can prepare and plan for the future now.
