I wanted to provide a wrapup on all the news coming out of TechEd on Team System, but Chris Menegay beat me to the punch.

Team System news from TechEd

Today Doug Neuman, PM/Team Foundation, gave a talk on the new Enterprise Source Control features in Team System. Here are a few notes:

• Support atomic check-in; if someone is checking in 5 files while someone is trying to get those same 5 files, the person getting the files will either get them all or none of them, which, I’m assuming, means they’ll get the older versions of the files.
• Check-in policy. There will be 3 check-in policies included out of the box:
  • check-in must be associated with a work item
  • code is clean after a static analysis is performed (an automatic code review in a sense)
  • must pass associated unit tests before check-in is allowed
• Check-in policies are fully extensible with the extensibility kit
• Shelving allows you to save your changes in the database without checking in and you’re able to share your shelves with other developers.
• There is no limit to file storage.
• Email check-in notification out of the box.
• A 3rd party provider, SourceGear, is building non-windows client support for Unix and Mac, called Allerton.
• Partners are also building tools to integrate with Webspere and Eclipse development environments.
• Therewill be VS2003 integration supported at some point close to release date. In the short term, teams still working on VS2003 projects will be able to use the Team Explorer for access to the sourcecontrol features. Microsoft will be providing a full integration add-in tool for VS2003 shortly after release. The customers spoke and Microsoft listened!
• Microsoft will be providing a tool at release date to migrate VSS databases to Team Foundation. This tool will maintain the history from VSS.
• There’s talk of also providing some sort of way of replicating changes to between your SourceSafe and Team System repositories to help with a smooth migration.
• Team Foundation will not support pinning or sharing concepts. They found that this led to bad SCM practices.
• Supports Shared or Exclusive check-outs
  • some files are hard to share
  • can scope for entire Team Foundation or based on file type
  • latest version required for check-in
• File versions aren’t assigned based on the number of times it was checked-in but is assigned based on the changeset it was associated with. So if there is a file called foo.vb (v3) and bar.vb (v5) and you checked them in as part of changeset 10, the would both be versioned at 10.
• Microsoft recommends using branches for your promotion modeling.
• When creating branches in the source control system, files aren’t copied between branches but a pointer is designated in the database. A pointer for two branches would point to the same file plus any additional deltas.
• Team Foundation works very well in a distributed environment by employing a file cache mechanism at the off-site location (from where the main source repository is located).
• The source control system uses HTTP/HTTPS protocol as it’s network transport. Optimized for high-latency, low-bandwidth environments.
• Blame support may be coming in V2. Microsoft calls this bythe much friendlier name, Annotations. It basically allows you to view a file and see which user last modified each line.

I thought Doug’s session was by far the best session I attended during TechEd, but than again, it’s the one of the topics that I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I just wish they would’ve had Doug’s talk earlier in the week. The room was pretty much filled and that’s a lot to say for a 1PM session on the last day of TechEd. Look for more information on Microsoft’s new Enterprise Source Control system coming out in the form of whitepapers on MSDN in the near future.

So… another TechEd comes to an end. Kind of sad in a way. You don’t want it to end. There’s still so much more to see… sessions that you missed that you wish you didn’t… people you wanted to meet but didn’t get a chance to. So much to do… so little time. I want to thank the Team System group for providing me with an invite to attend the show. I heartfelt thanks goes out specifically to Rob Caron, Ajay Sudan and Michael Leworthy. It was a pleasure to meet each and everyone in the Team System group and I hope I’m able to foster our relationship even further down the road. It was also a pleasure to finally meet some of my virtual VSTS compatriots in person as well, Mickey Gousset, Richard Hundhausen, Steven Borg, Chris Menegay and Jean-Luc David. Here’s looking forward to PDC! I hope to see you there.

Today flew by! I spent a great deal of time with theTeam SystemDesign Tool guys (Alex and Bill). I had a really interesting discussion with Bill about how you might be design an application based upon it’s parts – what defines the application or what parts do you compose to define your application. If you think about it, the application designer let’s you design your application at the application level (I have a web application with these inflows and outlfows), but wouldn’t it beneficial to probe depper into that application and define the moving parts that makes up your application? A very interesting discussion indeed. It really made me think on how difficult this task can be for a tool to both design and interpret an application and all it’s parts. I would almost expect this type of funcationlity to make it into V2 of the application design tool. Let’s hope!

Tonight was the infamous attendee party at Universal Studios. Tons of food and free drink (although only beer (minimal choices), wine and soda). The party was from 7PM – 11PM and it went by fast. I wish we had more time at the park to relax and enjoy ourselves, but you feel compelled to take in as much as possible and find yourself running from one thing to another. We pretty much were able to hit everything we were able to. I anticipated that The Mummy would be the ride dujour during the night and the one with the longest wait. But it wasn’t bad. They shuffled you through there pretty quickly. We ended up riding it twice and I would have to say that the 2nd time through was better than the first. Maybe it was because we had the last row of the car and we were lifted out of our seats a couple of times. Quite a hoot indeed.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most Microsoft events typically have at least 3 keynotes during the week? Is it that there isn’t much to say? I would beg to differ… there’s plenty to talk about.

Today I decided to try my hand at some of the Hands On Labs. Although the offering for the number of labs was impressive, I was pretty dissapointed to find that most of the labs I wanted to work on where unavailable. I was told that there was either a technical problem with the lab or it just didn’t plain work. I guess the idea is to take the lab offline, correct the problem, and bring it back online. I’m not sure how successful that was because it seemed like quite a few “important” labs were offline for quite a while if not for good.

I happened to catch Alex Torrone’s talk on the Application Designer tool in Team System. One of things that caught my eye during the session was the concept of having custom validators that you can apply “best practice” describers to validate your application designs. The idea is to take something like best practice information from someone like the patterns & pratices group, script out those best practices into a validator, and attempt to validate your design with those best practice definition. A more concrete example might be security descriptors for your web server. Verifying that past vulnerabilities are being addressed properly. My explanation doesn’t do it justice. Keep an eye out for maybe a white paper or two or even an updated webcast on the topic. Very interesting stuff.

Tonight’s event was the “Influencer” Appreciation Party. There’s quite a large turnout that took over two clubs/bars across the way from each other. We had a great time, but man was it hot in there. We staked out the joint and found the coolest spot near the dance floor where they had these enourmous fans cooling off the hot dance moves. While taking in the scene we happened to notice our favorite DE, Chris Mayo, striking a pose or two. I just wished I had my camera with me. Those pictures could’ve come in handy when I needed a thing or two from Chris. :)

We finished the evening off by partaking in a night cap at the Ritz with about 25 or so “influencers” in the hotel bar. After a great conversation with Rob Caron and the event coordinator for TechEd (whose name is escaping me) on what types of liquors and ingredients I need to stock my bar at home, I was introduced to what might be my new favorite summertime cocktail, a Mojito. The things you learn at TechEd!

The Team System group has finally made available a VPC image containing all of the Team System components loaded up and ready to go. If you’re at TechEd, stop by the Team System cabana and pick one up. Hurry up though, they’re in short supply.

If you don’t happen to get one at TechEd, I am told that the ~8GB download will be available on MSDN soon.