In a recent meeting, some folks on my team needed some guidance on load testing the Web application that one of my feature teams are developing. The questions on load testing subsided rather quickly and prior to pluggin my ears with my headphones for...

We’ve recently in our group migrated to TFS 2010 Beta and in order to support this, we’ve had to make some changes to our local machines to successfully connect to projects hosted on our TFS 2010 server.  In today’s blog, I wanted to do a quick demo...

In today’s post, I thought I would share with you some XML that drives some of our dynamic provisioning. The power of dynamic provisioning is found in taking a base image of a Server operating system that has nothing enabled and customizing it using the...

As we build out our dashboard to show our progress on our software projects, we quickly enjoyed the luxury of the new TFS Dashboard views that utilize Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) web part Page Viewer.  This web part connects to a URL on the...

In this final post for this series, I wanted to outline how Visual Studio SCRUM 1.0 is alike and differs when doing planning compared to MSF Agile v5.0 .  As I pointed out in my post last week , MSF Agile v5.0 ships as a process template with Team...

With the introduction of the new Microsoft Visual Studio SCRUM 1.0 template, software development & project managers are now given multiple options for Agile that is supported by Microsoft. The “Agile” terminology is vastly over used by...

There are situations, especially when running your virtual infrastructure on Storage Area Networks (SANs), that you are unable to effectively delete a virtual machine.  There are many reasons why your VM is no longer needed such as you’ve moved to...

If you are an agile team, you are going to love TFS 2010 and especially it’s crucial dashboard capabilities that help you better plan and track your time. Software estimates are an art more than a science and it is one of the keys to growth for an individual...

As you may know, my engineering team migrated off of the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and over to a full enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2010 (MOSS) in order to utilize the deep integration between TFS & SharePoint. This process is one...

A few months ago I was scrambling around trying to locate documentation on this feature called “VLAN” trunking. You see, we had this environment that we did our engineering testing in that consisted of multiple VLANs all serving various purposes and we...

If you are like us, we have a huge investment in Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 that includes many groups and many teams.  Fortunately, we are the only team doing development and our project are different from the rest of the organization which...

If you spent some time reviewing my blog on how to build a “reporting” dashboard that shows status of your development projects you will notice quickly that is a real nice way to review your work in your daily Stand-up.  It gives you the ability...

In my earlier post , I focused on bringing to light that MSF Agile v5.0 vs. Visual Studio SCRUM 1.0 had differences and one was just in their use of terminology.  Whether it was user story or product backlog item (PBI) the usage was very close minus...

If you are like us, we are always on the cutting edge (what do you expect – we work for Microsoft <g>) and because of this we have to often find unusual methods to work around the fact that OEM’s are not always “up to speed” and releasing installers...

We use TFS 2010 for our work item tracking, source control, and build services.  Beta 2, which is the currently released version of TFS & Visual Studio 2010, is nice and a very strong upgrade for those using 2008.  I’ve spent a lot of time...

I’ve been dealing with a “application” these days that is absolutely driving me nuts. In short, this application that runs in user-mode context and displays data on the screen while locking the keyboard makes for a difficult situation...

In today’s post, I want to spend some time sharing how to use the virtualization tools that our team (MPSD Development) built as part of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit (ConfigMgr P2V). In previous posts , I shared...

In today’s post, I will focus on how I worked with our System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) team to build the actual infrastructure and setup alerting for our infrastructure to ensure that if our Configuration Manager Distribution Points (DPs) are...

After spending a lot of time talking to customers after we integrated code-name “Modena” into the powerful, and enterprise-ready Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 , it was obvious that our engineering team needed to spend some dedicated effort in helping...

My secondary job is to maintain our engineering lab (part of the mantra of “Do More with Less”) as we don’t have anyone dedicated to this role.  This lab is running completely virtualized minus our SQL infrastructure which is running on a 2-node...

There are often times where you have a need to expand a LUN when running enterprise systems.  This is a trivial action in most cases because you simply add physical drives to the array and then use Disk Management to extend the drive to encompass...

If you’ve decided to integrate your TFS 2010 infrastructure with Microsoft’s enterprise-ready SharePoint Server 2010 (MOSS) then you are in for quite a store, both good and potentially bad. MOSS is extremely powerful platform that many customers of ours...

As you’ve seen in my post previously , there are some great ways to enhance reporting in TFS 2010 through the use of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). This is very important for obvious reasons such as communicating with organization leaders on the status...

It seems that many people will get the first iteration backlog workbook working and then they will copy & paste it for future iterations. This is what we started doing until we found out just how messy this really is. The Agile iteration backlog workbooks...

As I’ve mentioned several times, we run our engineering lab on much of the latest & greatest.  There are many who would argue that this is a luxury (one afforded to those who work at a Software company such as Microsoft) and I wouldn’t have a...