Did you know that there was integration between System Center 2012 Operations Manager and Team Foundation Server 2012? This integration is designed to facilitate communication between operations teams and development teams, which is part of an industry movement known as DevOps. The goal is to accelerate Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) by quickly providing development teams with as much relevant and useful information as possible about a production incident. Since System Center 2012 Operations Manager already has a deep understanding about your production systems and the applications which are running in those environments, this integration puts that information at the fingertips of the development team without requiring back-and-forth human interaction to solicit these details.  Brian will spend some time talking through how this works, the benefits of DevOps and some real world examples of this awesome partnership at work. Now there is even a great image available so you can kick the tires with minimal setup, thanks to Brian Keller: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/02/07/devops-virtual-machine-with-team-foundation-server-2012-and-system-center-2012-now-available.aspx. Please note the higher base system requirements to run this image, it's a bigun'.

 

Brian A. Randell is a partner with MCW Technologies, LLC. Brian spends his time between teaching Microsoft technologies to developers, working with new and emerging technologies like Visual Studio 2010 & Team Foundation Server, and consulting worldwide for clients that that range from large Fortune 100 business to state governments to small businesses. In 2010 and 2012, Brian and his team built samples and demonstration content for Microsoft to be used for their worldwide launch activities for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. Brian enjoys helping people get the most out of their software. He does this through training and speaking at events such as VSLive!, Tech•Ed, and Microsoft’s PDC. In addition, Brian shares through the written word. He is a co-author of Effective Visual Basic, has written articles for MSDN magazine, MSDN Online and other publications. Brian is a member of Pluralsight’s technical staff. In addition, Brian is currently an Microsoft ALM MVP. You can reach Brian via his blog at http://www.mcwtech.com//blogs/brianr/ or on twitter as @brianrandell.

Date:               Wednesday May 15^th 2013

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

Agenda:          6:30PM Dinner followed by a presentation and demo at 7pm

Registration:      http://chicagoalmug.org/

As always, please be sure to register as Aon Center security will NOT allow individuals to access the building without being pre-registered.

This is both a call to arms and a last notification of the awesome topic being covered at the Chicago Visual Studio ALM User Group tomorrow night.

In my day to day dealings with companies I often find that they are not managing their database in any way  ::commence slow head shake:: And in my head I am screaming while I politely smile and calmly ask how they keep track of database changes, how they test updates to the schema, and what their rollback process is. Some companies do actually have some solid processes around those types of things, but many have nothing but a rosary and a case of Redbull. They just backup their servers nightly, and rolling back changes is a nuclear option. There is a better way people!

Ideally, you have you database schema, and any executable database code checked into SOME source control management system. By which I mean you have the SCRIPTS necessary to create those things in source code (see screenshot below). Without a good tool, establishing that can be tedious, daunting, and usually isn’t done, period. One of the things I love about Visual Studio  is its slick handling of database asset management (which has been around since VS 2008). In no time at all you can reverse engineer a database schema and all dependent objects into a database project in Visual Studio and check it in. Yes, just like that. That’s of course just the beginning but I’ll keep this soapbox rant short and expand in future musings.

The tools get better and better with each new version and the SDET tools that plug-in to VS 2012 are the best yet. Here is a quick preview of what that experience looks like in Visual Studio 2012.  I am running Ultimate but you would have the same look and feel in just plain old Professional as well.

 

Now if you are still a hard core SSMS user, fear not. You can still get some of the awesomeness of TFS working for you in SSMS, but finding out where to set that up can be tricky. Quick tip, if you already have TFS installed at your company, really you just need the TFS connector and to flip the switch. 

And now for the info on the user group, there’s still a little time left to sign up. Do it, DO IT NOW!!

Visual Studio and TFS 2012 for managing your SQL Server Database Assets

Do you have SQL Server database assets you should be managing? If you have a SQL Server database you certainly do! Do you use TFS to manage your other software assets like architectural diagrams, source code and build scripts? Are you using that same great toolset to manage your SQL scripts?  If not, you SHOULD be.

Did you that know some of the same great ALM features that you love about TFS for your source code can be applied to SQL 2005/2008/2012 stored procedures, table definitions, functions and other schema objects? And that's not all, there are also tools for doing schema comparisons, static analysis, unit testing and deployment of your database assets.  Jim will be giving an overview of the database tools available with VS and TFS 2012.

This is a meeting NOT to be missed.

Join Us Wednesday, April 24, 2013 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Location:Microsoft-Downers Grove 3025 Highland Pkwy, Ste 300, Downers Grove

Speaker Bio: Jim Szubryt is the TFS Product Manager for the Enterprise Workforce at Accenture in Chicago and is a Microsoft ALM MVP. His TFS Team supports 2,500 developers in the global development centers and works with teams on implementing ALM processes. His blog can be found here.

Agenda:6:30PM Dinner followed by a presentation and demo at 7pm

 

Magenic is hosting a FREE Code Mastery event at the Chicago Microsoft Office on Tuesday April 30th from 8:30AM – 4PM

Code Mastery delivers high-quality technical content, designed to present you with meaningful and insightful learning experiences. Come spend a day with Magenic's best and brightest - you'll be glad you did. Our featured speaker is Rockford Lhotka, Magenic's CTO, Microsoft MVP, and creator of the popular CSLA.NET framework.

The event is free and food will be provided. Learn More OR Register Now!

Featured Topics:

· Introduction to Web API

· Understanding Azure Mobile Web Services

· Mobile Enterprise Deployment

· ASP.NET with MVC

· HTML5/CSS3/JS

· Effective Design for Mobile Apps

· Integrating iOS with Azure Mobile Services

· Getting Started Building Amazing Windows Phone 8 Apps

So as a Midwesterner I often feel like we get screwed when it comes to big, cool tech conferences.  ALM Summit is always in Redmond, TechEd is always in Vegas or L.A. (blech), and there are a large number of other big tech conferences that are primarily only held on the West Coast (Mix, VS Live, etc.). So this big news so far this year has been that VS Live is coming to Chicago in May, for one. I’m pretty excited about that, especially with the sweet discount I was able to get for it (see the blog post I linked to above for a $500 discount code to VS Live Chicago). 

Now don’t get me wrong, we have a lot of great, smaller conferences, for instance Chicago Code Camp in a few weeks, and Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee next weekend, are both very good conferences and are both FREE to boot. But another awesome conference you may have missed out on last year was ThatConference. What conference? ThatConference. Yeah, I know, the name is clever, and sometimes confusing, but mostly clever.  It is the next big thing in my opinion, because not only is it owned by, organized by, and delivered by people you know from your local community, but the range of topics is pretty amazing too.  .NET, Ruby, Java, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Tablet, Surface, iPad, you name a technology/platform and it is probably going to be represented there.

As an added bonus, it is a VERY family friendly conference being held at an awesome water park in the Wisconsin Dells, just 3.5 hours from Chicago if you live in my neck of the woods.  Kalahari Resort also has go-karts, laser tag, a large arcade, an indoor ferris wheel, a number of great restaurants and bars, and even a salon and spa if you need a little R&R with your tech!  Stay a few extra days, the room rates are amazing and last year we also got some pretty nice perks (a.k.a. free stuff) from the resort because we were attending the conference.

Call for speakers just opened today and is only open for 2 weeks so hurry up and get your submissions in! Don’t worry if you think your topic is too broad, too niche, too whatever, just get it in there.  There is a great submission guide available on the session submission site too so check it out! The range of topics being accepted is pretty large, as we hope to provide a really well rounded set of options for attendees.  If you have more questions, or would like some help creating your session write-up, join us every Wednesday at noon CST for Q&A on G+.

 

Hope to see you, and your sessions, at ThatConference this summer!

August 12th - 14th, 2013

Kalahari Resort, Wisconsin Dells, WI

 

ThatConference is also on facebook, or Google Groups if you have questions or comments for the world at large.

What is Chicago Code Camp? Well, it’s in its fifth year of awesomeness and if you haven’t checked it out, go do it now.  CCC is a free, community-driven developer conference. Over 350 people have already registered so far! This year, they’ve even adding a full day of Windows Azure boot camp.

 

So if you’ve been to CCC before, go ahead and stop reading because you’ve already registered and know what an amazing free event this is, right?  If you’ve never been, well, it is worth the trip up North (or South if you are in Wisconsin)!  Chicago Code Camp is free, and covers a WIDE variety of great tech topics.  As someone clearly passionate about ALM, I was particularly happy to see the number of ALM related topics at CCC this year, and as usual the speakers are really great too. 

So mark your calendars (April 27th to be specific) and register right now!

 

Here is just a sampling of the ALM sessions:

- Introduction to Git and Github - [Joshua Gall, Aurora Healthcare]

- This *IS* Agile Development - [Gary Pedretti, Centare]

- Version control TFS 2012 - [Prasanna Ramkumar, Magenic]

- ALM with Visual Studio 2012 - [Raj Krishnan, Microsoft]

- TFS 2012 - [James Szubryt, Accenture]

 

More great sessions and speakers are outlined here: http://www.chicagocodecamp.com/Public/Schedule.  Stoked yet? You should be.  Did I mention this is also FREE?

 

Click here to register for Chicago Code Camp 2013

 

19351 W Washington Street Grayslake, IL 60030

In case you missed it, the Visual Studio ALM product team has been BUSY.  While they release cool, new goodies to TFS Service on a weekly basis, releases to on-premise TFS happen about once a quarter these days. In the last 5 months, they have made available 2 major updates to Visual Studio and TFS 2012; specifically VS 2012 Update 1 and recently, CTP 4 of Update 2.  Just a few of my favorite new features that we plan to demo on March 27^th include a web client for Microsoft Test Manager, customizable Kanban columns, support for Git, and work item tagging.  And there is a LOT more that we probably won’t even have time to talk about in depth.  Can’t make it to the user group meeting? Be sure to download and install Update 1, and Update 2 CTP 4 and see the new features for yourself! It is even a “go-live”, which you can read more about on Brian’s blog.

 

Join Us Wednesday, March 27, 2013 from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Description:  As you probably know, the Microsoft Team Foundation Server team has moved to a more regular cadence of pushing out updates to Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio. In the last few months we've seen 2 major updates released to on-premise TFS 2012 and Visual Studio 2012 (Update 1, and Update 2 CTP 4), and many smaller and more frequent releases to TFS Service. There are far too many to cover in just one meeting so on March 27th we will be talking about the updates specific to the web-based Agile Planning tools, MTM and the TFS-Git integration.

Agenda:6:30PM - Dinner and networking, 7:00PM - Presentation and demos

Speaker Bios:  Edward Thomson is a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, where he works on cross-platform version control tools for Team Foundation Server. Before joining Microsoft, Edward worked on numerous source code control tools for Microsoft and Unix platforms.  Angela Dugan is the ALM Practice manager for Polaris Solutions and spends most of her time migrating customers to TFS and streamlining their software delivery processes. She has over 14 years of experience in the software industry including 5.5 years as a Microsoft ALM Tools evangelist and over a year as Polaris Solution’s practice manager focusing specifically on Visual Studio and TFS.

Bonus speaker: Martin Hinshelwood is going to be in town and is going to tag-team with Ed and I to cover even MORE great Update 1 & 2 features! Martin is a Senior ALM Consultant at Northwest Cadence, is a Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP and a certified Professional Scrum trainer.

 

Location: Microsoft-Chicago 200 E Randolph, 2nd Floor, Chicago – you can park in the Aon center for a discounted rate after 6pm, but your best bet may be SpotHero if you choose to drive. I’ve seen $8 parking ½ block away using their service.

As always, please be sure to register as Aon Center security will NOT allow individuals to access the building without being pre-registered. http://chicagoalmug.org/

So in case you’ve missed my excited tweets/blog posts on what is coming in VS2012 Update 2, I wanted to spend a little time covering one of my favorites. If you’re a TFS Service user you’ve probably already seen this, but occasionally I run across people who go into autopilot and miss the new bells and whistled that magically appear every week or two. I know I have done it.

One of the features that recently showed up on TFS Service is a web client for Microsoft Test Manager, specifically around manual test execution. “WHAT?!” you say? YES, indeed. Now you can view test plans and test suites (they need to be created using the MTM client right now), create and manage test cases, execute manual test cases and create rich bugs FROM YOUR BROWSER ::head explodes from the awesome:: This will revolutionize tesst case execution for some of my clients that have been a little uneasy about installing the MTM client on all of their environments, and on end user tester’s machines. It does not have full feature parity with the full Microsoft Test Manager product (yet) but Microsoft has discussed the possibility of growing these tools over time. Here is a sneak peak of where those tools appear from within the Agile Planning web tools while logged into TFS Service (or if you have a test instance of TFS 2012 with Update 2 CTP 4 installed).

Don’t laugh at my burndown report, it’s a demo project so it isn’t updated in real-time and sometimes looks less-than-ideal if I’ve gone too long without doing a demo. 

Again, unless you have installed VS 2012 Update 2 CTP4 on your on-premise TFS server you will only be able to access these testing tools from a TFS Service instance, and I would NOT recommend putting a CTP on production (YMMV of course). That being said, let’s take a super quick look at what else you get with this new feature. 

Here is a view of a simple test plan with a couple of Test Suites and a handful of test cases already assigned to those suites.  Note you have options to: create new manual test cases, edit existing manual test cases, remove test cases from test suites, set Outcome to Pass/Fail/Blocked/Not Applicable and quite a bit more! I specifically say MANUAL test cases because exploratory testing is not currently supported on the web. You can also, at a glance, see who is assigned to execute each test case, the target environment configuration, as well as recent Outcome. You can even filter by tester and outcome!

On of my favorite productivity features is the ability to open the test case in the same window as the management tools, and edit it on the fly. You have similar capabilities in MTM in the Track Tab, ir if editing other types of work items in Team Explorer, and I definitely have wanted this ability in MTM for a while now so I love this!  Maybe a small enhancement, but as I spend a lot of time in MTM, any avoided clicks are a time saver for me and it adds up over time. In the upper right-hand section of the web tools you can see a “test case pane” option which can be set to Off, bottom or right. What you see below is the “bottom” option, and in the previous screenshot you may now notice it was set to “off”.

Another feature I will show off in this post is the actual running of a manual test case, which is similar to the desktop client version of the Manual Test Runner tool with a few caveats.  Note you still see each step, expected results, and data driven fields are still provided for the user running the test.  You can also set Outcomes for each step (pass/fail) as well as for the test case as a whole (pass/fail/blocked/not applicable). Notice you also have the ability to pause test case execution which is a feature of MTM 2012 in general :

  

An important thing to notice that is absent is rich text support in the test runner itself. You also do not have a built-in tool for snagging screenshots. A bummer, but not the end of the world when you consider the major benefits that a light-weight, no-install testing tool gives you. 

The last feature I want to highlight is rich bug creation from a test execution session. The support for rich bug creation has always been a really nice advantage of MTM, and the web tool gives you many of the key features that makes TFS such a clear win for defect tracking. Not all of the data collection is supported right now, but the big ones for me have always been repro steps and traceability which is there, as you can see:

Again this is meant to be lightweight, and hey, you never know what you might see in a future update!

There is a LOT more that I could cover, but this is really just a pleasure cruise around the highlights of the new web client for doing manual testing. If you want to learn more about MTM, agile testing, and pretty much anything new and cool in the area of Quality Assurance, check out Anu’s blog, it has always been an INVALUABLE resource. Also be sure to download and read the Test Release Management Guidance released very recently by the ALM Rangers.  It can help lead you down the right path in terms of managing your test plans based on your team’s process and product release cycles.

So in case you haven’t noticed, Visual Studio Live is coming back to Chicago after many, many years of not being here.  This makes me very happy because a) I don’t have to pay for a flight and hotel in L.A. or Seattle, and b) well, see a) because cost is one factor that makes attending great conferences like this so hard to do for some of us.  Regular price of admission is $1,995 for the full 4 days, which isn’t bad when you think of all the awesome content you get.  Early bird registration ends soon and saves you a paltry $200 but wait, I can get you a MUCH better deal than that.

In case you did not make it out to the last Chicago Visual Studio ALM User Group you may have missed out on the discount code that I was able to get for all of you.  Sign up right now using the links in this email (or the code UGCH1) and you’ll save $500 off of the $1995 registration too, so it would be only $1495 for the full 4 day pass! This discount only applies to the “Best Value” package including all pre-conference workshops. So no travel costs, no hotel stay, AND save 25%. How can you NOT go? 

 

Visual Studio Live! Chicago tracks include:

• ASP.NET
• Azure / Cloud Computing
• Cross-Platform Mobile
• Data Management
• HTML5 / JavaScript
• SharePoint / Office
• Windows 8 / WinRT
• WPF / Silverlight
• Visual Studio 2012 / .NET 4.5

 

Hope to see you at our next meeting, and at VS Live Chicago this May!

Hi Gang!  After a short hiatus for the holidays, we are back for a great discussion on using Team Foundation Server in conjunction with Powershell and TFS Deployer for automating the build and deployment of your applications. What kinds of applications you ask? ALL KINDS! And not even just .NET applications. Crazy talk!

Ismail Ahmed Syed is our first speaker of 2013, and he is graciously returning to the podium to demonstrate how you can utilize TFS build quality change events of TFS for deploying .Net Applications using TFS Deployer and custom PowerShell scripts.  He will also be talking about how you can achieve automated build and deployment processed for Non.NET Applications Such as JavaArch11, Tibco AMXBPM, IBM SPSS etc. Lastly, he will demonstrate how web transformations can be used for getting away from the manual task of writing configuration files for each environment  and  how the config files will be transformed automatically as part of the automated deployment using TFS Deployer.

This is a topic ANYONE using TFS should get a lot out of. Who doesn’t want a more streamlined and effective way to do automated build and deployment of their applications? Can't wait to see it myself!  Here are some important details and a link to registration:

Date: Wednesday February 27^th, 2013

Location: Microsoft Office - 3025 Highland Pkwy, Ste 300, Downers Grove, IL

Agenda: 6:30PM dinner and networking, 7:00pm presentation and demos

As always, please be sure to RSVP at least 24 hours before the event to ensure that we can get you registered with security. If you need to cancel, we’d also appreciate a heads up so we can have the appropriate amount of food, soda and supplies on hand.

Warning: this is most certainly NOT the most elegant solution to the problem. It’s a known shortcoming, or maybe it’s a feature, that you cannot limit access to an entire work item based on a user’s role in TFS.  I can limit transitions, and access to individual fields, but for very large and complex work item types, this is cumbersome and fragile. In a nutshell, I am trying to limit access to specific work item types, so that they are only editable by specific groups of people, and I had posted it to the forums to no avail.  So here is my ugly solution which for now, is sufficient. 

I started with Gregg’s post from 2009 that provided a workaround to my issue, but the error message thrown has changed in such a way as to make it even less intuitive as to what is going on. Below is the implementation of his suggestion and the resulting user experience:

The other issue with the above solution, is that it only prevents a user from CREATING that work item type, I need the user to also not be able to edit the item.

 

So I decided to try something a little different. I created a custom field, that is never displayed on any form, specifically for the use of locking down work items since we have several scenarios where we have to enforce read-only access to a work item type for certain users. I called it “UserAccessDenied”, since that is at least indicative of the issue when displayed to a user.

Like I said, the field is never displayed to a user, so it should never be populated.  We make that field required for any user that should NOT be editing the work item as below, which prevents them from saving it since it will always be empty:

 

Still not an awesome solution but at least now the provided error is a BIT more helpful, and the client was happy which is all that matters right?  

 

You can provide a better experience to the user if you have the ability to create custom controls or write listeners that capture work item events to handle this. Where I am, they want something easy to maintain that does not require any kind of code to be written or maintained. So it is what it is.  If you, like me, would find the ability to set access permissions at the work item level, vote on my suggestion here.

 

And as always, if YOU have come up with a better way to do this, I’d love to hear about it!