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

As I posted earlier, I’ll speak at the next Tech-Ed in Eilat (6-8 April 2008). This is a great honor for me!

My session will be about MSBuild & VSTS for Database Professional.

The session is title less for now…. If you have any idea – please send it to me.

In order to give you a great presentation, help me to decide about it’s content:

• Do you have any unanswered questions around VSTS for Database Professionals?
• What do you like most and least about VSTS for Database Professionals?
• Do you have any stories you would be willing to share if you used VSTS for Database Professionals?

The next days are critical… I’ll choose a title and announce the session’s agenda. If you have any suggestions, thoughts, advices,wish list, feedbacks or anything – comment it here or send me and email please.

Thanks!

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

My company, SRL, organized yesterday very interersting presentation which delivered by Mr. Brent Carlson, CTO and co-founder of LogicLibrary, on “New methodologies and governance in SOA implementation“.
The event focused on explaining how to avoid SOA becoming ABOS (A Bunch Of Services), by managing (governing) the process of creating those services and making sure the organization re-uses it’s pre-existing resources.
It is common known that we we need a solution that enables enterprises to understand what assets exist, where they’re located and how each fits into a company’s business and technical landscape.

So, how can we satifty this need? ….Mr. Carlson introduced LogicLibrary’s solution: Logidex application, with which the governing mentioned above can be done. It seems this is relevant to very large organizations, not medium and small companies.

Maybe I didn’t understand him well , but I had the feeling that Logidex sees TeamSystem only as Source Control repository and expect to get other inputs from other applications (Like defects management system etc.). I came back home very confused and I prommised my self to investigate this issue more deeply.

Tags: Misc, Presentations

Microsoft’s best professionals in Team System, ASP.NET, Architecture, WCF, WF, SQL Server and more, open three days of concentrated courses. You can check the courses list here.

I will be talking about VSTS for DB Professionals. You can read more about it here.

Tags: Misc, Presentations