Tags: Developer Academy 4

Two days ago, at the annual conference of The World Summit of Cloud Computing (http://events.myreg.co.il/IGT2009/), organized by The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies (IGT) (http://www.grid.org.il), my college, Eliaz Tobias and myself, had the chance to co-present and speak on Microsoft’s recent announcements for the cloud.

Our presentation was part of the keynote which included a speakers from IGT, Martix, IBM & NetApp. This year, the IGT annual event focused on the business and technology aspects of Cloud Computing.

Our presentation included introduction of cloud computing, Software + Services, Windows Azure introduction, dynamic data center toolkit for private cloud (DDTK) and a real demo.

It was a great pleasure to present in such interesting and important conference. From the feedbacks we’ve got, people were very impressed from our roadmap and offerings for Public Cloud Windows Azure Platform, our Private Cloud with Dynamic Data Center Toolkit and services running on the cloud including Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS).

You can download the presentation from the “Presentations” page: http://blog.maordavid.com/presentations/

here are some pictures from the conference:

Eliaz during the presentation

I’m demonstrating Windows Azure

Tags: Events, Windows Azure

This month, the MS ALM user group invited 2 presentorS to speak to the group: Tal Wayn and Leonid Ore from Solidity. The meeting was focused on the fascinating world of Business Intelligence as it is implemented on top of the Team Foundation Server OLAP Cube. The motto of the lectures was: “You can’t control what you can’t measure” and the presenters discussed methods of using the information stored in TFS as part of the natural conduct of TFS usage to create reports and KPIs that can be used to measure, control and monitor the process of software manufacturing.
Statistics show that most TFS users seldom use the built-in reporting capabilities of the platform that come as an out-off-the-box feature, even less users create their own reports. The presentors demonstrated that to actually have a true benefit of using TFS it is not enough to collect information about development, testing, requirement etc. all this data should be used for the goal of improving the quality and efficiency of the software creation process.
In the files attached to this post you will find the following:
• Technical overview of the TFS OLAP cube
• Suggestions about reports you might want to add to your daily management routine
TFS Reporting
TFS OLAP Cube

Tags: ALM UG

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

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

The next meeting of the Israeli ALM UG will be focused on VSTS/TFS extensibility.

Save as Outlook Appointment:

VSTS is a great ALM platform. One of the main advantages of VSTS is it’s API which gives us the ability to write tools to make our daily work more productive.

We will talk about what parts and how we can customize and extensible VSTS.

The agenda:

17:30 – 18:00 : Assembly

18:00 – 18:45 : Part 1 – TFS API fundamentals

18:45 – 19:00 : Break

19:00 – 19:45 : Part 2 – Hands-On & code samples

Please register here.

The lecturer:

Shmulik Segal works as ALM group manager in Sela Group. Shmulik is a software engineer with rich and varied technical experience. In the past 3 years Shmulik assimilate many TFS projects and has proved experience in writing tools to VSTS.

Tags: ALM UG

Next meeting will be focused on the new features that were delivered with VSTS 2008 SP1 and the new Power Tools. We will also introduce the new testing suite (Camano) that will be shipped with the next version of TFS – Rosario.

Shahar Bracha (SRL ALM Group Manager) will talk about Visual Studio Team System Power Tools  which enables us better usage and ease when working with TFS.

During his session we will go over the new Power Tools and Service pack features  (such as: Web access enhancements, notifications support,  build, folder mapping and much more…)

For our second session Eran Ruso (SRL ALM Senior Advisor and QA Expert) we will go over Rosario in general and focus on Camano, a new standalone testing suite in Rosario.  Eran will also describe his experience as part of the first group that uses Rosario and Camano in production environments.

About the lecturers:

Shahar  is the ALM Manger at SRL Group, specializes in Microsoft technologies with an emphasis on the Team System, .NET framework and Web application architecture.

Eran  is a Senior Consultant at SRL Group, specializes in QA methodologies  and testing lifecycle.

Please register here to the event:

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032384162&culture=he-IL

Tags: ALM UG

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at TechEd Israel 2008. It was a great experience!

My Session went very well, if I do say so myself. I talked about controlling your database lifecycle with data dude.

In any case, if you were in my talk, I’d love to hear your comments (good or bad!) about it so that I can either feel good about it, or get better for next time.

Thanks to everyone that wake up for the talk – it was very well attended despite the time (9:00 AM after the midnight party…).

You can download here slides and demo:

Tags: Events, Lectures, Team System 2008, TechEd Israel 2008, VSTS DB Pro

Next week I’ll give a session at TechEd 2008 In Eilat, Israel. The session will introduce you how you can control your database changes and integrate it into your agile development methodology.

Do you want to control your database changes?

Do you want to test your database with unit test and even run static analysis on it?

Do you want better life and easier deployment of database schema changes to production database?

If one of your answers is YES, come to hear me.

Session Details:

• Session Name: ALM403: Control your Database Lifecycle with Data Dude
• Level: 400
• Time: 8/4/2008, 9:00 AM
• Location: Hilton Hotel, Ofir-Adom Hall

Session’s Agenda:

• What is Data Dude?
• Data Dude Features
• Test Your Database!
• Build & Deploy (MSBuild & Team Build)
• Case Study: nuconomy
• Q & A
• Summary

Microsoft opened up the meetings application at http://www.face2facemeeting.com/teched/. If you want to meet me and talk with me on development, WCF, LINQ, ALM or anything else – contact me! I’ll be glad to see you!

Meet you there…

Tags: Events, Lectures, MSBuild, Team Build 2008, Team System 2008, VSTS DB Pro