ALM days : save the date…

ALM days Cape Town is happening on 23 January 2014!

Team Foundation Consulting will be launching ALM days in Cape Town on 23rd January 2014!

Learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which will enable your software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively. This event provides insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.

Reserve your seat today!

Find out more at www.alm-days.co.za

The event is free and seats are limited.

Join us for an awesome day of ALM!

Launching…ALM days 2014 South Africa!

Finally, the time has come for us to launch the first ALM days in South Africa.

Team Foundation Consulting will be launching ALM days in Cape Town in January 2014!

Learn about updates to Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management offerings which will enable your software development teams to be more productive and to collaborate more effectively.

This event provides insight, advice, strategies and techniques to improve quality and ensure the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.

The event is free and seats are limited.
Date, venue and agenda to be confirmed soon.

Cape Town Event

If you are interested, sign up on www.alm-days.co.za and be first to be notified once all the details have been finalised.

We look forward to you joining us for a day focussed on Application Lifecycle Management.

Learn – Discuss – Question – Engage

Meet new & interesting people…

Introducing the Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Niel Zeeman

I have been an avid consumer of the ALM Rangers artifacts, articles and applications for a long time now.

Who are the Rangers:

“The Visual Studio ALM Rangers accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for feature gaps and value-add guidance for the ALM community.”

Some of the cool “stuff” that you should have seen before:

planning and upgrade guidance

branching and merging

and recently their DevOps tooling and guidance

And finally I will be on the other side of the fence

What happened to the TFS 2013 Build Templates?

I have had a couple people asking me “where are the build templates in TFS 2013?”.

Well they have been removed!
Don’t worry, they are still available though …

By default, they are now simply stored in TFS and not in the repository.

When creating a build definition you will notice that the default build templates can simply be selected (as per usual).

When you need to use a custom template, or modify the existing templates you can simple download the template,

make your changes and then upload the updated build template to the repository as per normal.

Microsoft has reworked things in the build templates, simplifying it quite a lot. Hopefully altering your build processes will no longer be such a daunting task!

TFS 2013 Power Tools

Finally! It felt really odd not having the trusted power tools available when working in VS / TFS 2013

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 Power Tools
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 MSSCCI Provider 32-bit
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 MSSCCI Provider 64-bit
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 Build Extensions

Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 RC Released

Some big news!! The release candidate for VS & TFS 2013 was released last night.

There are a couple of really nice features added since the preview. One of my favourites is the charting ability for work items. I have done quite a few custom TFS reports, and even though this may reduce the number of jobs that I have, it is VERY cool nonetheless…

The list of things that have been added is fairly large, hopefully I will blog about it in the future.

Note that this does have a “go-live” license, so Microsoft will provide support if you decide to be an early adopter and upgrade your production environments.

Feel free to contact us if you need more information around upgrade options...

Exam 70-498 : Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management

 

I finally got the time to go and write the “Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management” exam.

I was quite nervous about this one, as it has been a while since I have written any form of exam and because it is very “non technical” focussed. These “fuzzy” questions can often be very misleading.

Luckily I passed, fairly well actually, so I thought I would jot down some of my crib notes..

1) Know the TFS process templates

Especially the terminology and the artefacts that are included in the different process templates. The questions are almost a matter of disqualifying the incorrect answers and then you are left with what can only be the correct ones.

2) Have a good grasp on the methodologies / processes

Especially scrum! The scrum guide is a fairly concise guide and small enough to read in one sitting (even for me!), so there is no real reason not to work through it in any case.

Once again, have a good grasp of the CMMI, Agile and Scrum terminology, artefacts and processes.

3) Read

I really recommend “Professional Scrum Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012” by Richard Hundhausen. Even if you are not going to take the exam, a very good read indeed.

Have a look online, there are a lot of brain dumps available for this exam. I would take a look at the questions, but really scrutinise the answers. I looked over a couple and there are definitely plenty of wrong answers provided to the questions. Just be careful and don't learn the answers of by heart!

4) Work through the free jumpstart

Yes, there is actually a free jumpstart for this exam. Definitely worth spending some time on.

 

Done and dusted!

Good luck if you are going to give it a go.