There are a lot of new features coming in the next release of Visual Studio and related products. They are easily discoverable but I thought it would be helpful to bring as many videos and screen casts as I could find into a single list for easy consumption.

A word of warning though, I can’t be held responsible for the feelings brought on by the realisation that you can’t use any of this stuff in a supported way right now. Just try to relax and think how much better, faster and easier your job will be when it is finally released.

General

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010

In the spirit of an agile sprint, see how to use the next version of Visual Studio Team System to manage user stories and re-factor existing architecture. Learn how to diagnose real production problems, debug in-production virtual labs, capture test data to eliminate the no-repro bugs, transparently plan, monitor, and adapt software projects.

Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features

Dive deep into the next version of Team Foundation Server (TFS), and learn how TFS has factored its learning's about usability, industrial scale, geographic distribution, manageability, and development process into the next version of the product. See a demonstration of build automation, policy checks, parallel development, new project planning and tracking features, such as agile planning, end to end traceability, reporting, and dashboards, administration and ops --all designed to improve transparency and velocity for teams from size 5 through 50,000.

A first look at Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2010

Visual Studio Team System Web Access has become an increasingly popular way for people to access Team Foundation Server. In this interview we meet Hakan Eskici who demonstrates some of the upcoming features his team is working on for Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2010.

Project Management

Agile Planning Templates in Visual Studio Team System 2010

Stephanie Saad shows us a quick demonstration of how Visual Studio Team System 2010 will enable teams to be more agile. In this demonstration she shows the new Agile planning worksheet for Excel which can be used to easily balance resources, manage your backlog, and generate ad hoc reports.

Enterprise Project Management with Visual Studio Team System 2010

Ameya Bhatawdekar, a program manager for Team Foundation Server, took a few minutes to take us through the end-to-end storyboards for how Team Foundation Server 2010 will integrate with Microsoft Project Server to enable true enterprise-wide collaboration. Note that this is not a demo of working software (yet), but it's the next best thing - a detailed storyboard walkthrough of mocked-up screenshots.

Requirements

Requirements Management and Traceability with Visual Studio Team System 2010

How can you ensure that a requirement has been sufficiently tested? How do you track the work that goes into a specific feature? How much work is left to do before a feature is completed, and how does that feature relate to bigger scenarios or user stories?
Siddharth Bhatia, a senior group program manager for Visual Studio Team System, takes us through an end-to-end example of how Visual Studio Team System 2010 will help an organization manage their requirements throughout the lifecycle of a software project.

Architecture

Architecture without Big Design Up Front

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), code-name "Rosario" Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. See how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of your code. Learn how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.

"Bottom-up" Design with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect

Suhail Dutta, a program manager on the Visual Studio Team System Architect team, gives us a demonstration of the "bottom-up" design approach which will be possible with the Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect product.
With "bottom-up" design, you can quickly reverse engineer an existing code base to construct models and examine relationships between pieces of code. Suhail also shows off some of the new UML designers coming in Visual Studio Team System 2010.

"Top-down" design with Visual Studio Team System 2010

"Top-down" design is an approach that the Visual Studio Architect team is enabling with their upcoming release, Visual Studio Team System 2010. In this "humanized screencast" we asked Mark Groves, senior program manager, to show us a demonstration of the new UML designers the team is building and how this can be applied to a "top-down" approach when building software.

Development

Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio

Visual Studio has built-in tool support for agile practices such as Scrum, XP, and others. The next version adds practices like test-driven development, continuous integration, and single product backlog. See how these can be applied at scale and across geographies.

Web Development and Deployment with Visual Studio 2010

Welcome back to another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week video. In this latest installment, we catch up with Vishal Joshi, Senior Program Manager on the Web Development Tools team.  In this video, Vishal shows us what is being done in Visual Studio 2010 around web development and deployment. Covered are topics like JQuery support, HTML code snippets, better Intellisense, and a whole slew of new features around web deployment.

An early look at Team Foundation Build 2010 with Jim Lamb

In addition to being one of the nicest guys I know, Jim Lamb also knows a thing or two about build automation. Jim is the program manager responsible for the Team Build capability of Team Foundation Server. Team Build was one of the biggest areas of improvement for Team Foundation Server 2008, but that hasn't stopped the team from doing even more landmark improvments in Team Foundation Server 2010.
Jim shows off how Team Build 2010 will take advantage of Windows Workflow, build agent pooling, distributed asynchronized builds, and two new types of build called "buddy builds" and gated check-ins.

Branching and Merging Visualization with Team Foundation Server 2010

Is your source control branching out of control? How much time have you wasted trying to discover which branches your code changes have been merged into? What are the code-level differences between your main, test, and production branches? Branch visualizations to the rescue!

Test

New Web Test Debugging Features in Visual Studio Team System 2010

In this video Ed Glas shows off new Web test debugging features in Visual Studio Team System 2010, including Search in playback, view recording log, jump to Web test, and Add Extraction Rule from Playback.

10-4 Episode 18: Functional UI Testing

In this episode of 10-4 we look at a new type of test coming in Visual Studio Team System 2010 known as the coded UI test. Coded UI tests can be created to automatically navigate through your application's UI, which in turn can be used to verify that the paths your users might take through your application are working properly. You can also add validation logic along the way to verify the properties of objects within the UI. Much like unit tests can quickly surface regressions on a method or function level, coded UI tests can bring the same level of rapid automated testing capabilities to the UI layer.

UI Automation Testing with Visual Studio 2010

Just playing with some of the new Testing features in Visual Studio 2010 and thought people might be interested in the new interface for Camano and a new feature for CodedUI Tests...pulling the automations strips directly out of TFS!

Lab Management coming to Visual Studio Team System 2010

Today at TechEd Barcelona, Jason Zander announced that Visual Studio Team System 2010 will feature a brand new Lab Management capability to help organizations raise the bar on software quality. Lab Management will integrate with the rest of the Visual Studio to help testers more easily test a variety of configurations in a virtual lab environment, and help developers more easily repro bugs by delivering snapshots of those virtualized environments after bugs are discovered. I had a chance to sit down with Ram Cherala and Vinod Malhotra to get an in-depth look at how this will work.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Leveraging Virtualization to Improve Code Quality with Team Lab

Would you like to test fixes in a production-like environment before checking them in to source control? The Visual Studio Team System (code name "Rosario") release of Team Lab improves productivity and quality while reducing the cost of building and testing world class products. Learn how Team Lab provides a fast and easy way to create a test environment and tear it down, target specific test environments, and take snapshots of an environment for easy deployment.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services

In this session we present processes and tools from the upcoming Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" release and Microsoft Research and show how we deliver on quality, scalability, and experience goals for the new class of applications that demand rich UI, service consumption, and frequent release.

Manual Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2010

Naysawn Naderi takes us through manual testing in Visual Studio Team System 2010. Naysawn shows off how the manual testing capabilities allow not only for better authoring and execution of manual tests, but can also be a tool to help automate portions of manual tests as well. Finally, Naysawn shows how to turn a manual test into a coded test which can then be fully automated.

Historical Debugger and Test Impact Analysis in Visual Studio Team System 2010

Are you tired of constantly setting breakpoints to hone in on a pesky bug? How would you like to be able to step "back in time" through your debugger? The Historical Debugger in Visual Studio Team System 2010 promises to revolutionize your debugging experience. Habib Heydarian takes us through a demonstration of just a few of its capabilities.
But wait... there's more! Habib also shows us the new Test Impact Analysis feature his team is working on. With Test Impact Analysis it's possible to determine which of your tests will be... well... impacted by the code changes you're making! Not only does this mean that your unit test suite can run more quickly, but it can also lead to better testing and fewer bugs in software projects.

Automated User Interface (UI) Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010

Come hear about the new Visual Studio Team System 2010 tools and APIs for helping test a broad range of UIs that can consist of Winforms, AJAX, and Windows Presentation Foundation. See how to use Team System 2010 to ensure UI and application quality.

I dug a bit deeper on the unanswered questions and with some help from the sales team...

What is the availability of TFS for Volume License Customers?

This month, sometime. The full MSDN versions are already available so check your VL web site for keys regularly.

What TFS licenses are required for the sync tools e.g. TFS Migration and Sync Toolkit?

The answer to this one is "it depends"... The main point to be aware of is what users are doing. I am not a licensing expert and if in doubt you should probably speak to one but as I understand things, Microsoft changed the licensing model a little in TFS 2008 so that we allow an unlimited number of users in your company to create any work item, query for work items they have created and view or update any work item they have created all without a CAL.

So if those users are only using the external systems for the same purpose then they don't need a CAL. If, however, they are querying, viewing or updating any (i.e. other people's) work items in the remote system (that are synchronised to TFS) then a CAL is needed for every user doing these activities.

So in terms of a scenario... You have a dev team working with TFS but they send their product to a QA department who use Mercury Test Director. The contents of the Test Director database are synchronised with TFS. The QA department has lots of people working in it but they boil down into two types of user:

• The first type are testing the product and entering bugs. They also look at the status of their bugs and when the status changes to fixed they retest and close the bug.
• The second type also test the product and raise bugs but they also need to see bugs raised by other testers (e.g. they are in a lead role).

In this scenario, the first set of users do not require a CAL but the second do. It's quite easy for someone in the first category to fall into the second though e.g. if anyone in the first set is to be assigned a bug to close that they did not create then they also need a CAL.

There is also another kind of license, an external connector which may seem to be perfect in this scenario but it it not valid to allow people within your own organisation access to TFS.

What is the support situation for TFS running on VMware?

I can't find any definitive information on this but with other products  it's always been "best effort" support. What that means is that whilst PSS will try to help solve an issue on VMware they can't guarantee they'll get anywhere and may ask you to reproduce the issue without VMware in the picture. Also, the normal escalation paths and QFE process doesn't apply so it's very probable that any bug you might find that only occurs under VMware will not get fixed.

I spent quite a bit of time answering some customer questions on TFS today so it would be a shame not to share the answers.

What options are the for migrating from Subversion to TFS?

Currently there is a proposed feature for the TFS Migration and Sync Toolkit but no work has taken place on it - you can vote on the feature to increase its priority.

Alternatively, I found a couple of 3rd party tools from ComponentSoftware and Kyrosoft that claim to do the job at but I don't personally know anyone who has used them successfully.

What is the availability of TFS for Volume License Customers?

I'm still trying to find an answer to this one although I see it is possible to install the trial version and at a later date just re-apply your VL key without having to reinstall. See Brian Harry's blog for more details.

What TFS licenses are required for the sync tools e.g. TFS Migration and Sync Toolkit?

I'm still looking for an answer on this one.

What is the support situation for TFS running on VMWare?

I'm still looking for an answer on this one.

Can you create sub-folders in the team query areas of the Team Explorer?

Currently not possible. The two closest options are to either prepend a common string to query names to ensure they sort together or copy them to your favourites folder and organise them there.

How can you define different check-in policies depending on which folder path you are checking into?

This functionality isn't available out of the box but the TFS Power Tools have a "Custom Path Policy" which works with existing Team Foundation Server check-in policies. It provides a mechanism that lets you specify the source control path or paths upon which a particular policy acts. This initiates a scenario where you can enforce a different sets of rules for different source control folders. For example, one folder can have more stringent code analysis policy rules applied than another folder.

How do you configure an e-mail to be automatically sent on policy override?

You have a couple of routes for this but they all end up doing the same thing - subscribing to a TFS event. One of my colleagues wrote a piece on this a while ago. You can read it at Darren's blog.

Alternatively others have already gone to the trouble of coding it up. The first tool is probably the best (and more powerful), the second just a simple tool for managers

• http://www.codeplex.com/tfseventsubscription
• http://members.chello.nl/m.dekunst/SubScribeToPolicyViolation.zip

Can builds be restricted to security groups?

Yes,  the permissions you need to look at are:

• Administer a build (allows users to create new build types)
• Check-in (allows the user to check-in the build scripts)
• Start a build (allows the user to run a build)

There is a more complete description at IT Architect.

It seems that when you leave App Dev Consulting where I work for a DPE sales role they still let you write code so here is a shameless plug for a useful little tool that Neil Kidd wrote...

It is an addin to IE to allow testers to easily raise bugs to TFS that include all the information the dev will need to reproduce the error.

It automatically attaches:

• A screenshot
• HTML source of the page and any frames and IFrames
• Any style sheets referenced by the page
• Any script files referenced by the page
• Details about the user's machine and browser (OS version, browser version, screen size, ...)

I’ve blogged about it on:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukvsts/archive/2007/01/02/automatically-raise-bugs-from-ie.aspx