A few weeks ago Matan & I had the honor to participate in  a panel discussing pros&cons of the Team Foundation Server, This panel hosted by Sela & Microsoft at Microsoft buildings (Ra'anana).

Here are some of our thoughts:

• The Centric approach of get all the items (tasks, bugs, impediments, sprints, backlog) in one place and can easily connect to your code, and easily generate graphs from the already entered details - is a great approach and make life easier.
• Adding tests to your code, using the VSTS is easier. Also adding simple automated build and integrate your tests to run on your nightly builds.
• We are now implementing in two separated sites on the same code, and we doing the synchronization by our self.
  Orcas Gonna solve the disconnected server problem.

I am not telling you that this tool is perfect, it is absolutely has its weaknesses but I think that this is a good decision to choose it.

For the next few weeks, I will lead a process of studying the new(some of them become old) products and technologies of Microsoft.

I am impatience to feel the new stuff, I should admit that I have a little disappointment while on some of the stuff we should do the research earlier, but hey what can I say, it is better late than never.

So what we gonna explore:
We will start with the basic of oracle 10g and the new version of ODP.NET, of course that we will finally start using VS2005 & C#, ASP.NET (2.0), we will have a deep dive into the Team Foundation Server (TFS), maybe creating some new work-items, we will create some workshops on TDD, more workshops about UI in ASP.NET2.0 using themes skins Master Pages etc.
We will write some new rules for the FxCop.
I will also do my best to focus on the WCF VS. COM+, so we could get rid of this nightmare.
I hope that we might have time to do some other workshops with C#3.0 and WPF.
We will also test and learn the GIS-Server 9.2, We are the first to do this in Israel, and even in the whole world you can count the users on one hand.
There are also some other small issues that we will handle in our process, and I let you know the important details we learn and develop.

I would like to mention my team-mates that will help our team to find the best stuff, and bring it to you: Avi Vorzel - my team leader, Nati Dobkin, Doron Yackobi, Matan Cohen, Yossi Shmueli and Meidan Alon.

I wish luck for all of us and I am sure we gonna have a lot of fun.

If there is more stuff you think I forgot please let me know.

Many people ask me about the differences between Team System and Visual Studio, and what is Team Suite. When I start my explanation and including informative data such as the Team foundation I can see their eyes roll inside their holes, and their face start changing colors.
Here I'll give short introduction to this subject.

First, I'll start with the Team System - there is no such product, stop using this name, I like to call this a framework or package.
You can see in their product information center: there is no susch product!

The 3-Team Editions: 

1. Team Edition for Software Developers- includes code analysis, performance  tools, code coverage, unit testing, Microsoft says that it also include the Visio and UML modeling, I didn't find such thing yet.
2. Team Edition for Software Architects - includes Application designer, Modeling tools, full synchronization between code and design elements, this edition not include neither code profiler/analyzer nor unit testing, web testing.
3. Team Edition for Software Testers - includes tools for testing and manage the result, you can connect between the test, failure and the code that reproduce this, this edition not include application designer, but the strange one is that this one not include the code profiler and code analyzer.

The all three includes of course the Visual Studio (Professional) with all the programming languages inside.

After we explain the core editions of Visual Studio 2005, lets mix it all together to one package called Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. 

Pay attention to the colors, this colors indicate the original colors from Microsoft products.

There is still one product we didn't talk about, the Team Foundation Server (TFS), this one includes management tools, full integration with the client products (all roles of Team Suite). TFS is a server side product which combine together all the relevant data of your projects, such as bugs, code, testings, performance data.

Remember the Team system? now I can explain to you why I call this one framework, when you are working in a company and you have both programmer testers and you want full integration you will probably need the Team Suite and the Team Foundation Server this two products called Visual Studio Team System, but still you will buy them separately.

What a programmer need more than sun, pretty women, good food and great lecturer talking about the great new features in vista, IE7, .net 2005, C# 3.0 and Orcas.

The Cocktail party at the first night was a great beginning for the real thing THE (Microsoft)party, I slept only 3 hours at every night.

Right now I need a drink or two, so I am going out for a party, when I'll come back I'll post here some pictures and impressions from the new Microsoft tools.

BTW,
I would like to thank to my team leader, Avi, which gave me the opportunity to be there, thanks again.

Yesterday I was in Microsoft Windows Vista Meeting,
and I'll gonna tell you my overview about the new tools they represent there:

1) Windows Vista Better Deployment:
WIM - new file format for images.
XImage - tool for creating such kind of images.
As they represent it there the replacement to others such as: Ghost, MagicIso, Drive Image, etc.
The Highlight is that windows Vista keep in single (Master.WIM) Image the Installation images.
Even when we will install new program (SP, for example) we will Add new Image to our Master single Image.
This will decrease file size, reduce installation time and IMHO, the most significant, it will decrease the needs of stupid guidelines.
WPE/PE - Windows PreInstallation Environment, great tool to configure and diagnose hardware problems(GUI Based). will be used before launching the setup process.

You Can Enjoy the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK).
Inside you can find the XImage.exe, WindowsPE etc.
(I didn't try this, yet!, but as everyone out there said it is a must, at least the two tools above.)

2) Windows Better Protection:
Microsoft Client Protection - new product which will help you protect you computer, network, servers, etc.
This tool provide single solution against threats, viruses, hijacks, malicious code, and spy-wares.
you can download a version for your XP in here:

3) Other Cool Tools:
Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager - Client Side Application which help you create friendly names to your different flash drives, auto-run feature and also backup feature for your files.
IMHO, it seems useless right now, but it is still cool tool.
Microsoft Location Finder - Client Side Application which find your location using your access points, ISP DNS, Subnet etc.
The funny thing is that when introducing this tool it showed us that we located in Dublin while we where sitting in Israel (blame the proxy).
Again, IMHO, there some people in Microsoft which are very bored, I won't use this.

T2S&S
(Time to shower and sleep)