The CTP of Visual Studio 2010 was announced at PDC. One of the coolest features in Visual Studio 2010 is the Lab Management.

Lab Management leverages virtualization to enable software development and test teams to build higher quality apps. Lab management accelerates setup/tear down time and eliminates no-repro bugs by creating better integration across dev and test teams throughout the application lifecycle.

Did you know that:

• 30% of testing time is spent in setting up machines and labs
• Under 30% utilization of test and dev assets
• “No Repro” bugs often slip into production impacting project success

Lab Management leverages virtualization and allows multiple checkpoints to be created across lab environments (consisting of multiple VMs). Since the checkpoints are part of the same image as opposed to having to clone at every state snapshot, that reduces the proliferation. In addition, lab management ties the environments to the notion of a project which allows the lab administrator to clean up the images as projects are completed.

Lab Management is built on top of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and thanks to SCVMM managing VMs on multiple hypervisors, Lab Management supports both Hyper-V and VMware ESX out of the box.

Want to see how it works?  get more details?

We have a special guest in the next ALM user group: Shay Mandel, Principal Manager from Microsoft India. Shay will introduce the lab management and will talk about it, historycal debugger and aftershock.

The meeting will take place at Microsoft Ra’anana, Dec 24, 17:30.

Please register to the session here.

See you there!

The team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management

Tags: Team System 2010

The December meeting of the Israeli ALM user group in Microsoft focused with the fascinating subject of Agile Development and the steps that a software organization should implement to achieve the transition.

You can download the slides here:

Tags: ALM UG

Yes.. It was only two and a half months ago when I wrote about receiving my Microsoft MVP award. I was quite honored to receive this award.

The reason that I have to give up my MVP award is that today I joined Microsoft Israel to the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group.

My official job title will be Developer Evangelist which means that I will help customers to choose the best technologies that Microsoft offer.

Many who know me, know that I pretty much talk tech to anyone who’ll listen and that I’m very passionate about it. My professional career has been focused around Microsoft technologies for the past 10 years so, needless to say, I feel like this is the perfect role for me.

Finally, What about this blog? don’t worry. Currently, I’ll continue write here about Team System anymore

-Maor

Tags: MVP

Visual Studio 2008 provides new features for .NET Framework debugging.

To configure VS 2008 to debug .NET Framework:

Start Visual Studio 2008 and bring up Tools > Options > Debugging.

Set the following two settings:

• Turn OFF the "Enable Just My Code" setting
• Turn ON the "Enable Source Server Support" setting

Under the Debugging category, click Symbols.

Set the symbol file location to be: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols

specify the cache location > check the "Search the above locations only when symbols are loaded manually" option. Enable the "Search the above locations only when symbols are loaded manually" option.

That’s all, you are ready!

Now all you have to do is start debugging. set a breakpoint somewhere in the code and step into. if it’s .NET code, go to the call stack, In the Call Stack window, right-click a frame for which symbols are not loaded. The frame will be dimmed out.

Point to Load Symbols From and click Microsoft Symbol Servers or Symbol Path.

That’s all.

Tags: Team System 2008, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Team System

This is a special treat!  The next ALM user group has a special guest: Shay Mandel, Principal Program Manager from Microsoft India.

Attention – the meeting will be at Dec 24, 2008

Shay will be visiting Israel at the end of December and very happy to talk in the user group. Shay will talk about the new Microsoft Lab Management and Visual Studio 2010.

So much was said about using Virtualization in production and Data Centers, but Virtualization is even more amazing when it is used in the development lifecycle. In this session you will learn how to leverage virtualization and the new tools that are available in VSTS 2010 to speed up the development process, enhance collaboration and improve software quality.
You will see how you can easily save a lot of time by using the new Lab Management tool to use virtual machines for easily deploying isolated environments for each developer and tester. Deploy the application automatically. Run tests and file actionable bugs that enable easy debugging, even weeks after the bug was filed, as if they occurred just now. Automate the build process and the continuous integration.

The meeting agenda

Speaker: Shay Mandel, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft India

17:30 – 18:00 Assembly

18:00 – 19:00 Lab Management for smoother ALM process

19:00 – 19:15 Break

19:15 – 19:45 New tools in VSTS 2010 – Proteus (historical debugger) and Aftershock (change impact testing).

About the speaker:

Shay Mandel is part of the VSTS Lab Management product, based out of India. The team have exposed the product only very recently, and it will be part of VSTS 2010 

The team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management

Please register to the session here.

See you there!

Tags: Team System 2010