Need help selling ALM? (or Application Lifecycle Management explained)

David Chapell just released a set of papers the could help you out if your in a shop with a poor ALM implementation and you need some help selling ALM to your management.

All papers where sponsors by Microsoft but they are not aimed specifically at Microsoft Visual Team System but rather at the concepts behind ALM and how it aligns to business strategies and processes.

• What is Application Lifecycle Management?
• Application Lifecycle Management and Business Strategy
• Application Lifecycle Management as a Business Process
• Tools for Team Development: Why Vendors are Finally Getting It Right

If you want to read Mr. Chapell's original post you can find it here.

The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - MIX Videos

A picture is truely worth a thousand words ... I just realzied that I've forgotten to post this (I wanted to read Dan's book first, which I have done now). The book which I can recommend if you wish to get some inspiration and ideas on how to communicate best with picture is called The back of the napkin.

Anyway Dan held a very inspiring talk at MIX09 earlier this year called The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures and even if you do not intend to read the book you should take an hour out of your scheadule and watch this video.

Hear Dan Roam talk about persuading people with pictures. Whether convincing leadership to back a project, getting a VC to fund a business, building consensus on a project team, or selling a new technology platform within an organization, nothing is more powerful than a simple picture for discovering and developing technological concepts and business ideas. This session shows how to use the pictures we've created to persuade other people to take action.

Power to the all the black pens out there you know who you are...

From Business To Buttons 09: The Zen of presentation design & delivery

If you like me where unable to attend From Business to Buttons 2009 and watch Garr Reynolds deliver his keynote about the Zen of presentation.

Over the years presentation software such as PowerPoint has gotten better, but presentations largely have not. The presentation tools have advanced, but we have not. Why? Part of the problem has been a focus only on how to use the tools themselves rather than on how to clarify and amplify our ideas and messages through through fundamental design and storytelling principles.

You are able to watch a recording of the session here:

Lets do the wave together

If you haven't already checked it out you should really take an hour and a half from your scheadule and take a look at the unveiling of the new project from the creators behind Google Maps.

They announced Google Wave at the annual Google developer conferance and I'm dying to get an account for this piece of communications software, it will most likely change the way you communicate digitally like ICQ did way back in 1996 with instant messenging.



The product will be open source (at least the majority of the code) and it will have a where rich extensibility API and last but not least everything is based on open protocols. In the launch they previewed serveral very cool bots that where built ontop of the APIs, these bots where able to participate in realtime in the conversations providing services such as translation and spellchecking.

By far the two coolest features of the product was the instantaneous syncronization of the changes in a messages (at one point in the demo they where five people simultaneously editing the same wave message) and the playback feature where you could be thrown into a conversation and simply play it back to see how it had evolved over time.

Read more about it in the following post: Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

TFS Administration Tool Version 1.4 in now available for download

Today we release v1.4 of TFS Administration Tool (you can download it here) which closes a total of seventeen work items from the list of feature requests and defects.

The major thing in this release is the support for Reporting Services for SQL Server 2008, you can read more about the details of the release over at the blog of Michael Rumiers who is the co-ordinator for the project.

And be sure to stay tuned and check in often at the projects homepage since we are working hard already on a possible new version with a lot of new features previously unavailable in the tool.

What's New in Microsoft SQL Data Services

Nigel Ellis one of the architects on the SDS team gave a very intressting talk at Mix09 which you can view here:

What's New in Microsoft SQL Data Services - MIX Videos

It's a talk that really doesn't present any really new fantastic technologies and that's the beuty of it all. The key take away from the session is that it most likely will just work provided your using the basic relational functionality of SQL Server.

You can expect to get your hands on a public CTP around July 09.

Some things that I found very intressting was the talk about data partioning that would let us use distributed queries in a very easy way. Also coupled with the data syncronization features (based on the sync framework) that will enable tight integration with onpremise instances of SQL Server, we can expect to actually start pushing out parts of our applications in cloud bursting scenarios (this was a headache for me prio this release it was simply not worth the effort on a exsisting application).

So what is not in v1:

Distributed Transaction
Distributed Queries
Hosted CLR
Spatial Data
Service Broker
Reporting
Business Intelligence
Reference Data

Sql Data Services - A real cinderella story!

About 2 weeks ago David Robinson of the Sql Data Services team announce that they where planning to announce some really mind blowing changes to SDS at MIX09.

Earlier this week (I've been a little slow on my blog reading) he announce what's comming and sure enough:

Tables?...Check
Stored Procedures?...Check
Triggers?...Check
Views?...Check
Indexes?...Check
Visual Studio Compatibility?...Check
ADO.Net Compatibility?...Check
ODBC Compatibility?...Check

Personally I have been spending some time trying to figure out how to best model and implementing a solution ontop och both SDS as well as Azure Storage. So I'm naturally curious about whats going to happen with the ACE model (which in the first place felt some what strange since the Azure storage platform offers similar support, not to mention that it is rather limiting compare to a traditional relational model) and sure enough it is a deadend in SDS (personally I think this is very good that Microsoft is drawing a clear line and positioning the two different technogies like this, it will be a major improvement for the Azure platform making it an even stronger platform for the cloud):

What about the ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) data model and developer experience? Since Windows Azure storage has a similar data model (property bag) and developer experience, we will stop supporting the current ACE Model sometime in the future.

So when will we get our hands on this goodiebag? Well acording to the SDS team the CTP will be around summertime 2009. So in the meantime go ahead an read the original posts to get more details on this:

The no spin details on the new SDS features
First round of Questions and Answers

Minority Report is coming to a neighbourhood near you!

Yesterday I watch a presentation from TED 2009 where Pattie Maes from MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group demos a new technology that see called Sixth Sense (there are seems to come alot of intressting innovations from the Fluid Interfaces Group, I recently blogged about another new technology called Siftables which also came out of this lab).

It basically comes down to a device that is pieced together from equipment about $300 consisting of a projector and some mirrors hooked up to your cellphone that enabled you you to project and interact with information on any surface (just like Tom Cruise in Minority Report altough still abit rough around the edges), this opens up alot of oppertunities but instead of reading my ramblings take 15 minutes out of your schedule and whats the demo:

Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense | Video on TED.com

Finally a proper book about MSBuild and Team Build

I just finnished reading Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build and even though I know of several posting about this book I figure they could do with some more praise :)

I approached this book with and expectation that I already knew my fair share about the build process in Team System but was pleasantly suprised that there where a few nuggets that I was unaware of so it paid of to read it after all. Otherwise I must say that the book is well structured and is down to earth with a lot of practical examples from real world scenarios. I truely wish that I would have had access to this book back in 2005 when I started out with build automation in Team System.

The book is a must read for anyone considering working with build automation using Team System (atleast until VSTS 2010 comes out and changes it again). Also if you want to truely understand MSBuild and how your projects are built by Visual Studio (although you will come along way when working with Visual Studio without reading one single row of MSBuild script).

Personally I will keep my copy on my desk as a reference and flip through it when working with the nitty gritties of the build scripts.

FathomDB a relational database in the cloud

I've been playing around with how to store your data in a cloudbased environment, mainly I've been looking at the various offerings from Microsoft (Azure Storage & SQL Data Services).

Even though I like the concept of being able of putting my data in the cloud, I find the current data model available some what limiting when compared to a regular relational database.

Well the other day I stumbled upon a new product called FathomDB, which comes to the rescue with a DaaS (Database-as-a-Service) offering. Initially they offer MySQL running on Amazons EC2 platform but it sounds as they will offer more backend platforms and possibly more database engines in the future.

I'm currently waiting for my beta account and will probably blog more about my experiences with FathomDB in the future.

It's also worth noting if your intressted in DaaS that there is alot of buzz about Microsoft going to offer SQL Server as a DaaS also. At the very least we can expect some intresting news in mid march when Mix09 takes place.

Visual Studio 2010 IDE Goes WPF!

I just went through my backlog of blog posts (incredible how fast they pile up) and stubled upon a post by Jason Zander from the Visual Stduio 2010 team about the new look and feel of the IDE. As indicated by the CTP bits from PDC08 and the new .NET 4.0 designers we could expect more changes in the good old Visual Studio IDE. It looks very slick as you can see in the screenshoot in Jasons post A New Look for Visual Studio 2010.

Problems with getting the new TargetsNotLogged feature to work in VSTS2008 SP1

I guess many people have hade similar experiences as us since upgrading to TFS 2008 with build logs being way to verbose. Fourtunately SP1 fixed this problem for us like Aaron Hallberg describes in his post "Orcas SP1 TFS Build Changes".

Unfourtunately there was a misstake in this patch which lead to only the first project reference got eliminated (also described by Aaron in this post "TargetsNotLogged Hotfix Available"). But the good news is we have a hotfix (kinda obvious by the title in the above mentioned post).

So why the heck am I writing this post? Well as it turns out there seems to be a glitch in the installer when installing SP1 on a build server, the problem is that the new version of the file "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" is not installed. So what you need to do is to copy it from a development machine running any team edition and replace the one on your build servers, you can find the file under the following path: C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild.

Don't forget to make sure that you are copying the file from a machine that has SP1 installed.

UPDATE 2009-02-15: As Buck points out in the comment you only have this problem if you can keep your fingers out of the cookie jar :) (I know I couldn't) and have made any changes to your "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" file. If this is the case then the installer will not replace it since it doesn't consider it to be the same file since it used the original datestamp on the file when patching.

Also I missed that my good friend Mathias Olausson also posted some notes on this issue in particular he some info on how you could quickly verify if you have this problem or not which I completely forgot about:

open your "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" file and check that it contains the line <TargetsNotLogged Condition=" '$(TargetsNotLogged)' == '' ">GetTargetPath;GetNativeManifest;GetCopyToOutputDirectoryItems...

have a look a Improved build performance with Team Build SP1 + hotfix KB958845 to read the whole post.

Siftables, the toy blocks that think

I just watch the latest talk from TED 2009 given by David Merrill who is a grad student at MIT, where he is working on new technologies for interacting with digital media. In his talk he gives and absolutely awsome demo on their current project called Siftables, it is really awsome and I think this will have some major impact on how we think about interacting with computers atleast when it comes to dealing with digital media.

It's a short presentation only 7 mins so take a break from whatever your doing and have a look: David Merrill demos Siftables, the smart blocks

Getting started with Azure: Watch thoose VM hours!

About a week or two ago I recieved my invitation to participate in the Azure CTP, unfourtunately I was in the middle of reinstalling with Windows 7 Beta 1 then and discovered that the Azure SDK didn't function properly at the momement so I had to setup yet another development machine.

Anyways, I'm finally on track with the Azure stuff and started playing around it. It was a breeze to get a simple hello world kind of service up and running, altough I'm expecting to hit some snags later on once I get into more details in a more real world like scenario.

The warning though as the title of this post states is that you can go through your alloted VM hours quickly if you don't cleanup apropriately. I did some experimenting afer talking to a good friend that knew about some problems with running out of the alloted hours.

The VM hours starts ticking as soon as you have started to deploy to the staging server no matter what state your service is in once you've uploaded it the clock starts ticking. Given that you get 2000 VM hours you can run a service for 83 days, I'm not sure what the deal is if you upload multiple services since I didn't try that. So the leasson is delete your services if you aren't working with them.

Monitoring the health of your TFS servers using "TFS Performance Report Pack"

Grant Holliday is surely a swell dude :) before he joined Microsoft to work with Team System he gave us an awsome report to track performance on our TFS through a performance heat map report (you can find it here if you aren't already running it be sure to give it a try).

No he is back with even more goodies in what look like it will become part of a future power tools release, namely the TFS Performance Report Pack which is loaded with reports to monitor the health of your TFS servers (you can download it and read more about the reports here).