So if you haven’t been to Chicago Code Camp yet, you should! I know, I know, there are SO MANY conferences in the Chicago area, how do you choose? It’s true, there are a lot of good ones but here are some benefits to CCC:

a) Because it is community- driven, there is some amazing sessions, including a few sessions on TFS and agile. Here are the ones I am hoping to attend (to be fair I am GIVING two of those talks):

• Agile Games: Games with Cards and Dice: Mike Clement
• Setting Up Your Team Foundation Server Environment For The Long Haul: Angela Dugan
• Agile Testing in a Waterfall World - Elevate Traditional QA!: Angela Dugan
• Empowering Teams as an Individual Contributor: Tim Stall
• King Tut Architecture: Pyramids, Patterns, and Tests: Gary Pedretti
• On Premise Team Foundation Server 2013: Jim Szubryt

Other great sessions cover a wide variety of topics like Windows 8, TypeScript, PowerShell, Unity 3D and Azure, JavaScript and Elixir.

b) it’s FREE for a full day of techie goodness, lunch included. Yeah, you read that correctly, FREE.

c) it’s super easy to get to. It’s right off of 294 and the parking is free.

d) it’s on a Saturday so you don’t even have to miss work! OK, so maybe you don’t see this as an advantage, but I do.

e) Polaris Solutions is a Platinum sponsor and will have a booth. So stop by, say hi, and pick up one of our sweet little booklets on Agile practices.

So register now before it sells out, and check out the full list of sessions here: http://www.chicagocodecamp.com/Public/Sessions

This is one of my favorite dialogs :)

Not RTM of course, I am not THAT cool. Hopefully that is coming soon because not everyone has the freedom to install pre-release software and this one is CHOCK FULL o’ goodness. I was hoping to upgrade my company’s server last weekend, but thanks to Comcast’s unreliability I ended up barely getting it downloaded, and then upgraded my personal on-premise TFS instance. And I’m loving all the new stuff! Here are just a few of my favorite things ::cue Julie Andrews!::

1) Tags.  Tags have always been a nifty way to add useful metadata to work items so they could be easily identified, sorted, and filtered on the backlog. But everyone, EVERYONE, wanted to be able to query on tags.  Also, they wanted to work with tags outside of the WebUI.  Now you can! (requires VS 2013.w2 as well)

2) Charts. I *love* the work item charts as you may have figured out from my previous post on them.  Such a simple and easy to learn way to visually slice and dice your shared work item query results. My customers love them too! Another frequent request is “why can’t we pin these to our team dashboard?”  Well, guess what, that is an option too! So now that Team home page just got EVEN MORE useful :)  Keep in mind you can only pin charts based on the types of queries you can make a team favorite, so SHARED queries.  Also notice that now to pin something to the team homepage, you have a new option:

3) Test Plan printing. I know right?! Before your only option was Test Scribe and while it was handy, and free, it was not really customizable. Now from a quick click from the Test Hub on the web, you can request a “hard copy” of Test Plan artifacts for sharing with others via email, or as HTML. Sweet huh? And notice all the links, so an active TFS user could jump right into MTM to see or edit the items he is reading about.

There is a lot more than this, but it’s already a pretty long blog post.  So check out Brian’s blog post and the MSDN download page for the CTP to find out more about the new features available in TFS 2013 Update 2.

Have you been considering attending VS Live this year?  They are really expanding their locations this year, holding events in Orlando, Redmond, Las Vegas, Chicago and even Washington DC. It’s a great event both to network with like minded technology geeks like yourself, as well as to get some great education around a HUGE number of topics.  Once again, the Chicago ALM User Group has secured a special discount code for members and friends for a couple of these events. So if you were wanting to attend, now we can even save you $500 with our exclusive discount codes: UGCH09 (Chicago) and UGLV10 (Las Vegas).

Topics will include:

➤ Windows Client

➤ JavaScript / HTML5 Client

➤ Azure / Cloud Computing

➤ Cross-Platform Mobile

➤ SharePoint

➤ SQL Server

➤ ASP.NET

➤ Visual Studio / .NET

➤ Windows Phone

$500 Discount off regular registration price for ALMUG friends and family using discount codes below.  Discount does not stack on top of early bird discounts. Prices range from $1,795 - $2,095 without the discount.

Your price: $1,595 after discount

Chicago Event Links

May 5-8, Chicago Hilton

VSLive Chicago homepage: http://bit.ly/UGCH09

VSLive Chicago registration page:  http://bit.ly/UGCH09Reg

Las Vegas Event Links

March 10 – 14th, Planet Hollywood

URL will direct to event home page: http://bit.ly/UGLV10

URL will direct to the registration page: http://bit.ly/UGLV10Reg

So, you might have heard, but this cloud thing really isn’t just a fad. And if you’re a TFS user, you might have thought to yourself “Wow, Lab management is pretty rad, but I still don’t have the hardware of personnel required to manage all that infrastructure. It would be awesome if I could extend Lab Management into the cloud!” Sad trombone…

We felt that way too here at Polaris.  So we rolled up our sleeves and worked through some of the challenges to make it happen.  Chris Taylor is going to be talking a lot more about it, and doing some demos, at the February edition of the Visual Studio ALM user group this month, at the Aon Center in Chicago.

Be sure to sign up soon! http://chicagoalmug.org/ 

Description:

With the introduction of Lab Management in 2010, Team Foundation Server presented the opportunity to do automated build-test-deploy on Microsoft Hyper-V servers.  Although the tool was extremely powerful and cost of entry far less than any physical implementations it didn’t offer the flexibility of working with pre-existing physical labs as well as other virtualization platforms like VMWare or Parallels.  In Team Foundation Server 2012 Microsoft addressed this by introducing the “Standard Lab” environment in parallel with the “SCVMM Lab” environments.  This now allowed for any combination (virtual or physical) of machines to be added to a lab environment and provided nearly all the same functionality as provided in the SCVMM based environments.

At the same time, Microsoft had been working diligently on their Azure platform, all based in Windows Server 2012 and finally opened up the ability to both provision new virtual machines as well as exposed this functionality to other applications via the Windows Azure SDK. 

Polaris Solutions saw the opportunity to use Windows Azure as a virtualization platform to run automated tests and deployments and the tools necessary to accomplish it.  Come learn about some of the tooling that has been constructed to compliment an existing TFS infrastructure and create hybrid-cloud solutions to further lower infrastructure and  testing costs while creating a more quality product.

Speaker Bio:

Chris Taylor is a Senior Consultant at Polaris Solutions based in Chicago.  Prior to joining Polaris Solutions, Chris spent over 5 years in the Payment Card Industry developing applications for commercial and government credit card programs while extending TFS to integrate seamlessly with traditional enterprise software practices while allowing teams to be more agile/iterative within themselves.  Since joining Polaris, Chris has been focused on improving software quality and integration test automation using Microsoft Lab Management, CodedUI, Windows Azure, and Windows 2008/2012 Hyper-V. 

So I had heard a rumor that there was a Chicago chapter of the Chicago .NET User Group.  As in, actually in the Chicago city limits. So if you’re a city-dweller and cannot normally get out to the meetings that have been held at Downers Grove for so long, there is hope! My buddies at DevMynd Studios are graciously hosting this group once a month in their swanky new offices.  Parking and other transportation information is on their site.

More info:

Supporting asynchronous programming means more than sprinkling the async and await keywords throughout your code. Understanding and adhering to the Task Asynchronous Programming (TAP) Model makes it easier to compose asynchronous operations, and to achieve the greatest benefit from the async features added to C# 5.
In this session, you'll learn the rules for the TAP model. You'll see the benefits of adhering to the TAP model, how to compose TAP based methods, and how to ensure that the async methods you write adhere to the TAP model. You, and other developers that use your code will benefit from following the TAP model.

Presentation by Bill Wagner, author of Effective C#

Find out more about Bill:
http://www.thebillwagner.com
https://twitter.com/billwagner

Wednesday, February 5, 2014 6:30 PM

DevMynd Studios 2035 W. Wabansia Ave. 2nd Floor / Enter the Black Door, Chicago, IL (map)

Register here: http://www.meetup.com/chicago-net-user-group/events/160797432/

If you are a TFS user, especially if you are a TFS administrator, then you know that with every release of Team Foundation Server that there is a rev of the process templates. And if you work on a TFS server that has gone through a number of upgrades, it is possible that your Process Template Manager dialog will start to look like this:

So many choices!! Which one to choose? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… ::cough, cough:: Back in the early days, there were only 2 out of the box templates. I know, craziness! How did people survive with only Agile and CMMI? Well, there were always the custom templates that you could get off the internet, but that is a can of worms I am not opening in this post.  For now I want to focus solely on the OOB templates.

Over the years, the templates grew up, work item types got added, fields got renamed, workflows got streamlined, and in 2010 a new template was born. But who can remember which one came out with which version of TFS? Usually it’s not a big issue until you are working on a server with lots of legacy team projects, and you need to know what the original base template was. Pro tip, the TFS Team Project Manager can really help you to answer this question AND we found a bug that they recently fixed allowing you to compare 2013 templates all the way back to 2008 templates! Well, I started keeping track, and I get asked questions about this often enough that I figured I would just share my reference.

Now, I don’t *think* I have missed any versions here.  All of the major TFS releases, and some minor releases, have been covered.  But I’d love some feedback if you notice any minor versions that I may have missed. And I’ll come back and update this when TFS inevitably gets another update, and another rev of the templates :)

Join Us Wednesday, January 29, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

In case you missed the annual Christmas Edition of the ALM user group, we are holding another special event for the New year in the Chicago location. In December, we took an Open Spaces approach to our meeting and it went very well. Open Spaces is sort of an “unconference” thing if you have not participated before, where you enter into it with no formal agenda and let the attendees decide what is important and/or interesting to talk about. So think of a topic you’d be willing to lead, or a topic you would like someone else to lead.  We will write them on a board, pick some locations for groups to gather, and then you vote with your feet, bouncing around if need be.  We had some great topics presented last month - InRelease in the real world, and automated testing tips and tricks with VS 2013 CodedUI. There was a LOT of active discussion and some great deep dives.

I’ll have lots of fun giveaways including pens, stickers, and a few more books. I’ll also have special prizes for people who lead an Open Spaces discussion during the meeting.

So I hope to see you at the Chicago meeting this month! Register soon to make sure we save you a seat: http://chicagoalmug.org/

Location:      Microsoft-Chicago 200 E Randolph, 2nd Floor, Chicago

Speaker Bio: You, me, anyone who is interested in speaking!

Agenda:       6:30pm dinner --   7:00pm Open Spaces Kickoff – 9:00pm Wrap-up

So since it is the beginning of the year, I am re-evaluating my conference choices this year. I always assumed that after I left Microsoft I would attend LESS conferences, and do less public speaking, not more. Turns out I have more time to do fun things like that now :)  Here is what is on my radar for 2014:

ALM Forum: April 1-3, Seattle WA. This is a rebranding of the ALM Summit from year’s past.  Some great speakers lined up including Sam Gu and Ken Schwaber! I may be going to Agile 2014 instead of this one sadly, only so many conferences I can attend in one year. Reasonably pricey at about $1,400 for a conference pass with an extra fee for some of the pre and post conference workshops. But even at that price, it’s been well worth it every year I’ve gone.

QAI Quest: April 7-11 Baltimore, MD. A global quality engineered software based conference.  I’ve attended 4 of the 5 past conferences but this year I just have too many to also make it to this one. Mainly focus on Quality Assurance, and in the past year or two they have started adding a lot of agile talks as well.

Build: San Francisco CA. Sold out in record time, as usual. Glad I got to go to a PDC before I left Microsoft because this is one of the hardest tickets to get, second only to CodeMash which is going on right now!

NewCodeCamp: Northeast Wisconsin Code Camp (Formerly Fox Valley Day of .NET) March 22nd, This is an expansion of Fox Valley Day of .NET, and will encompass whatever sessions community members wish, not just Microsoft technologies. Still FREE!

CCC: Chicago Code Camp. April 26, Grays Lake IL. Always FREE! Always packed with great speakers, definitely not missing it this year.  Polaris Solutions is a Platinum Sponsor so look for our booth, and stop by and say hi while you’re there. I will be there!

ALM Chicago: May 1-2 Chicago IL. A Chicago conference run by a local consulting firm out of Wisconsin focusing on agile practices and tooling. Cost is between $249 and $499 depending on when you register. So register before the end of this month, before the price doubles. I will be there!

VSLive Chicago: May 5-8 Chicago IL. $1800 early bird. I attended one once, about 8 years ago. I remember it being pretty valuable as long as you weren’t focusing on bleeding edge stuff. Great speakers and topics, but not as wide a range as what you get at events like Build and TechEd.

TechEd NA: May 11-14, Houston TX. I’ve actually never been to a TechEd, can you believe it? I’ve always heard there was some amazing content and speakers at this one too.

Microsoft WPC: July 13-17, Washington DC. This is for Microsoft Partners, so not sure how many of you would really be interested in this one. Lots of great content and networking opportunities for sure. Also, last year I finally got to meet Mary Jo Foley in person :)

Agile 2014: July 28 – Aug 1, Orlando FL. I’ve never been to this one, but I always know when it’s happening because my twitter feed lights up with exciting chatter about all of the awesome things people are learning. Hoping to attend, and maybe present there this year. A bit pricey at $2400 but it’s 5 days long!

ThatConference: August 11-13, Wisconsin Dells WI.  I admit, I am biased, but I love this conference! Organized and run by a bunch of techies like yourself (including me!), it’s for the nerds, by the nerds. Also, inexpensive (~$400 for a full conference pass) and super family friendly.

MVP Summit: Novemberish, Redmond WA. Only for MVPs, so if you’re not an MVP and you’re a passionate Microsoft technologist this is something to work towards. I went last year, and the access to product team people, industry experts, and other MVPs was priceless. Hoping I earn another pass this year.

STLDODN: mid-Novemberish, St Louis MO. Attended last year for the first time and it was a blast! Great people, awesome sessions, pre-compilers for some deeply technical hands on learning experience. Another really inexpensive one too, coming in at about $300 for a pass, with the pre-compilers being just a little bit extra.

Are there any big ones that I have missed? What are you planning to attend this year?

So it’s been snowing in Chicago, a LOT. I am in Oak Park, specifically, and holy moly did we ever get dumped on. Here, in case you think I’m being a big baby, this was my back deck at 7am this morning and it’s STILL snowing quite hard. There’s almost 10 inches of snow on those chairs right now, and there’s a pergola over them!

Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is that I get to work from home this week, thank goodness, and ran across a great set of training classes on Microsoft Virtual Academy to fill some time. It’s free, yes FREE, and there are a LOT of technologies to choose from including ALM.  Although I’ll admit the ALM stuff is pretty light and scarce, and mostly focuses on 2012, so I’ll be nagging some folks about that soon. But there are also classes on Azure, HTML 5, even licensing!

Here is the current list of tools and technologies covered:

Clicking on Visual Studio I find a lot of great classes to get me up to speed on Windows development, HTML 5, you name it! What you see below is just the first few that came up, it’s a LONG list.

Best part is you can build up a nice little wish list since you may not have time to take everything today. So build a training plan, or several, and save the classes you like and take them at your own pace. Easy!  I already had one started from a while ago, but need to go back through and update it with some new classes, obviously :-P

So dig in by starting here. And get some of those Microsoft certifications knocked out while you’re trapped in your house by snowmageddon.

I’ve had a few people I know run into this recently, and there does not seem to be a lot of guidance out there about process template customization, in terms of troubleshooting or tips and tricks. While running through process template updates to move clients from TFS 2005/2008/2010 to TFS 2013 I would occasionally encounter one of the annoyances of working with XML by hand:

Oh THAT is helpful.  And if you’ve ever seen the contents of a process template you know this could be one of about a million different problems in hundreds of files.

Now if you do a lot of template customizations, well just stop it, right now, please. The more you customize the more you need to maintain, the more you potentially have to upgrade by hand when you move to a new version of TFS.  There are times when heavy customization is necessary, but I often find people customize without understanding what the OOB template does in the first place. Unless you are checking your templates into source control, being very methodical about isolating changes and testing, and commenting your changes just like you do with your application code, you’re going to run into problems during upgrading. But chances are you’ve already gone down the path and here you are…

Enter TFS consultants. I prefer to do most of my process template editing directly against the XML using Notepad when I can. I know, it’s a bit old school, but there are a lot of us out there so I figured why not share? Inevitably, you misspell something, miss a closing bracket, enter an errant blank space where it does not belong, the common XML “bugs” that can be really difficult to track down.  And as you know, Notepad does not have a debugger.  So like me, I’m sure at some point you’ve tried to upload an updated process template using the TFS Process Template manager and seen the dreaded “TFS30139: The process template is not configured properly.” ::SIGH:: Now what? Well, if you followed my previous advice and were methodically checking in distinct changes, you know what you last changed. Kind of like CI for process templates :)

Enter the power tools. The TFS Power Tools contains a great process template editor that you can use in place of a lot of the command line tools for importing and exporting work item type definitions. You’ll need to install it on a machine running Visual Studio Professional or better, FYI.

It gives you some great visualization tools, allowing you to edit fields, configure the forms, visualize and edit workflows, states, and transitions, and an easy way to open and dig through all the nitty gritty details of everything else that a process template entails too.  As an added bonus, it will give you MUCH better error diagnosis information if something is wrong. So for the previous error, I attempted to open the process template. But this time I got a much more friendly message, pointing me at the issue:

Because I knew that the last thing I changed before my last successful upload of the template was the ProcessTemplate.xml file. I knew exactly where to look and lo and behold, I’d left off a closing bracket at the exact location specified by Visual Studio. So I made the quick fix, successfully imported the updated template to the collection, and checked in the updated template file to SCM. Much better!

There are lots of potential tools and editors out there for process template editing, and everyone develops their own style. I often find myself leveraging several different tools in conjunction during a process template upgrade, it can be a lot of trial and error.  They all have advantages and disadvantages, I’ve tripped over a few myself (like this little quirk with the Team project Manager extension if you’re trying to compare 2008 and 2013 templates). I should blog about some of those adventures too :)

Hopefully this gave you some new options you may not have been aware of before.