As I’ve previously discussed on my blog , our engineering team has partnered with two System Center teams – Configuration Manager & Virtual Machine Manager – to deliver a new toolkit called Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) Migration...

“Get an inside peek into internal Microsoft development practices as Chris Adams documents his team’s move to Agile using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010, starting out with the Microsoft Solutions Framework Agile v5.0 process template and eventually...

During a ask-the-experts at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2011 in Las Vegas, a customer asked a question of how to utilize Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 to install Windows Server 2008/R2 and enable the Hyper-V role .  The customer...

As is usual for many of my posts, I like to document things that become somewhat as a “reference” for me because I know I will forget it.  The one side benefit to this is the fact that many of you might be looking for similar documentation. ...

During the past year, we’ve been working on building a new P2V toolkit that was recently released.  This toolkit, Configuration Manager P2V Migration Toolkit, aims at accelerating the migration to Configuration Manager 2012.  It is, though,...

I’ve landed.  My bags didn’t arrive so the first evening in Vegas was one of no relaxing.  I now can officially relax and get excited as we prepare for this great week.  As many of you already know, Microsoft is preparing for this week...

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 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...

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...

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...

I recently was perplexed as we have a rather volatile TFS setup where users are often added to the system and taken out often.  Beyond that, we use Work Item Template (WIT) security scoping to say what users can do what and when.  For example...

Recently, I was doing some Hyper-V physical hosts moving and I found that one Hyper-V host getting managed by VMM got in a state whereby it found itself “sick.”  I describe sick meaning that Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM) could no longer manage...

As the leader of your agile project, you’ve been tasked by management to keep your project running and ensuring that you can accurately ascertain what work is completed vs. what is still not completed.  In my previous post, Soup to Nuts – TFS 2010...

If you run a lab or data center that includes Storage Area Networks (SAN) for shared storage then you’ve most likely run into switching technology .  For example, in our engineering lab we have 20+ physical hosts connecting to a fiber-based Host...

We recently ran into an issue when we were trying to add iterations, or change existing dates for an iteration,  to a project in TFS Dashboard.  The TFS Dashboard , made by Telerik , uses dates provided in the file created by Work Item Manager...

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...

Our development team is, as many of you already know, deeply integrated with Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010. It shouldn’t shock anyone to hear that we are also taking a deep investment on the new Application Lifecycle Management...

We recently did a slight shakeup of all our service accounts as our engineering lab that we use to test our code against uses all of the System Center products.  This is by design since our team is in the division that focuses on Microsoft’s Enterprise...

The IT Showcase team at Microsoft who aims at sharing how Microsoft uses their own technology to deliver IT to 280,000 clients world-wide.  Our team built the technology that previously wasn’t available as part of Configuration Manager 2007 , and...

It’s ending summer here in the US and the heat is raging in the Pacific Northwest and with that comes the great event – service account password change.  Alright, I might exaggerate a bit as they are completely not related events but it seems that...

As you know, our team spends a lot of time running software development projects such as the MDT 2010 Update 1 UDI feature set . We are a very agile team with a few PMs, couple of test, and a handful of developers. I manage this team of 8 and I’m very...

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 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...

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...

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...