Rosario November CTP is now available

According to Jeff Beehler's

I'm happy to announce that the next Community Technology Preview of Rosario
(officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name "Rosario"
November 2007 CTP) is now available. Customers can immediately begin
downloading the VPC images from our download page.

Download and check what's coming up next for Visual Studio Team System!

How to use solutions and projects between VS 2005 and VS 2008

Having two team members working on the same solution, one using VS2008 and the other using VS2005, what are the odds they can actually work together??

Once solutions are opened in VS2008 you'll not be able to open them back in VS2005 as the version number in the sln file is changed to 10.00, there's an obvious workaround of changing the version number back to 9.00 but this is not supported of course.

On the other hand projects opened in VS2008 and converted can still be opened in VS2005 (I actually tried it and it worked normally :):)) So the other workaround that you can use is to have separate Solution files, one for VS2008 and one for VS2005 with your projects added to them so that both team members can work normally.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 is now available on MS Downloads

This package is an add-on to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. It provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic. The project system includes:

• Visual Basic and C# Project templates
• Intellisense and code generators for XAML
• Debugging of Silverlight applications
• Web reference support
• Integration with Expression Blend

TFS 2008 Power Tools

According to Brian Harry below is the TFS2008 Power Tools Plan.

The week of 11/26

VSTS Web Access - They released a CTP that is compatible with the TFS 2008 object model a couple of months ago. This build will continue to work against the TFS 2008 RTM. Next week they will release a "final" TFS 2008 compatible TSWA. In addition to the bug fixes done, it also includes:

• A set of easily accessible urls to various information - work items, queries, file history, etc. for easy linking from other applications
• New custom control samples
• More efficient memory management
• Documentation
• And they are now set up to start producing localized versions (although they will come out over the next couple of months).

Mid December
MSSCCI Provider - They've updated the MSSCCI provider (that enables TFS access from VS 2003, VS 2002, VS 6 and a host of other IDEs) to use the TFS 2008 object model. In the process they've fixed as many bugs that have been reported as they could. The updated MSSCCI provider will be available in Mid-Dec.

TFS Power Tools - The main TFS Power tools package will be released in mid-Dec. They are currently shooting for the week of the 17th. It will be compiled against the new TFS 2008 object model and all of the VS addins will work against the VS 2008 IDE.
Note, the add-ins will not work against the VS 2005 IDE - in September, they shipped the final version of the Power Tools that target VS 2005.
From here forward, all Power Tool releases will target the VS 2008 client or later. Of course, keeping consistent with our TFS 2008 compatibility goals, the old and the new Power Tools will both work against either a TFS 2005 or a TFS 2008 server. So you can continue to use the Power Tools that are compatible with your IDE against whatever version of the server that you have.
In addition to VS 2008 IDE compatibility, this new Power Tool release includes:

• Build Notification Tray app - They're releasing their first Power Tool version of the build notification tray app. This tool allows you to monitor the current status of automated builds easily. You can be notified immediately when a build fails (or succeeds even) so that you can address it promptly.
• Process Template Editor - They've made bug fixes and small improvements to the Process Template Editor that include:
  - Making it more discoverable by moving it to the VS Tools menu
  - Substantially improved the performance - particularly when there are many states
  - Fixes for all of the serious bugs that users have reported.
• Best Practices Analyzer - The Best Practices Analyzer is a tool we first released in September that is designed to help diagnose problems with TFS installation and help you quickly correct them. In this Power Tools release, we have updated it to support TFS 2008 and the wide array of addition configurations that TFS 2008 supports.
• WI & WIT Destroy - We have added support to the tfpt command line to enable permanent deletion of work items and work item types. We added server side support for it in TFS 2008 but did not have time to get the client side support done. So until that makes it into an official release, that support will live in the Power Tools.
  

Tips for upgrading from TFS2005 to TFS2008

Grant Holliday posted a Tips for Upgrading TFS 2005 to TFS 2008 article that I find very interesting.

Hopefully will try it this week max early next week.

Steps to Uninstall VS 2008 Beta2 before installing the VS 2008 Final Release

Below is the complete list of potential Beta2 components to uninstall in a recommended uninstall order:

• Remove "MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta"
• Remove "Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5"
• Remove "Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools"
• Remove "Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 for Devices"
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools"
• Remove "Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Pocket PC"
• Remove "Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Smartphone"
• Remove "Crystal Reports 2007"
• Remove "Visual Studio Asset System"
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component / Microsoft Web Designer Tools"
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime"
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
• Runtime Language Pack" (non-English editions only)
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime 3.0"
• Remove "Microsoft Document Explorer"
• Remove "Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 Language Pack" (non-English editions only)
• Remove "Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0"
• Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5"
• Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1"
• Remove ".NET Framework 2.0 SDK"
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Remote Debugger"
• Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta" (64-bit platforms only)
• Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5"
  

After finish uninstalling any/all of the above items, it's recommend to reboot prior to installing the final VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 release to make sure there is no setup state still on the machine.

Make sure to post in the Visual Studio 2008 Setup and Installation Forum on MSDN in case you run into any installing/uninstalling issues.

TFS 2008 System Recommendations

Just came across a great post by Brian Harry about TFS 2008 System Recommendations.

We have just completed our testing for TFS 2008 scalability and are ready
to publish the final recommendations on server sizing and hardware
configurations. If you want to compare this to the TFS 2005
recommendations, you will find them here.

Team Explorer 2008 Standalone Available

For those in need to install Team Explorer 2008 only, there's a separate download available on MS Download: Download Visual Studio Team Explorer 2008

Having Team Explorer doesn't alleviate the need to also have a TFS Client Access License (CAL) except when using TFS Workgroup (5 user limit), accessing Codeplex or when only filing a bug.

MSDN Virtual Lab: Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008

MSDN Virtual Lab: Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008 is available on MSDN Virtual Labs here.

In this lab you will use the powerful new CSS editor in Visual Studio 2008 to
manage styles sheets in web pages. You will also try out other new tools like
the new DataPager control and the new LINQ Data Source.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 Released

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 is released.

It is the official software development kit that allows developers to integrate tools, editors, designers, languages, and other features inside Visual Studio 2008. Key features in the VS 2008 SDK include:

• Visual Studio Shell development support
• Enhancements in Domain-specific Language tools
• Visual Studio Package development and testing support for C++, C# and Visual Basic
• Code samples and documentation covering toolbox controls integration, general IDE integration, Domain-specific Languages (DSL), Team Foundation Server extensibility, Data Designers extensibility , and other areas
• Support for Windows Vista

For more information and news about VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility), visit the VSX Developer center at http://msdn.com/vsx and the VSX Team Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/vsxteam.

What's New in Visual Studio 2008

Adam Gallant posted a long yet amazing post from the new product guide including what's new in Visual Studio 2008 including all the product pieces and editions.

Check the post here

Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit

Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit is available on Microsoft Download Center

The Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos.

This content is designed to help learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management.

Visual Studio 2008 RTM Released on MSDN

Visual Studio 2008 is now available for MSDN Subscribers to Download.

.NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster

The .NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster is now downloadable as XPS or PDF format on Microsoft Download Center.

There is also an XPS format file which prints over 16 letter or A4 pages for easy printing.

Visual Studio 2008 RTM this November!!

Finally the long waited Visual Studio 2008 will be Released to Manufacturing at the end of this November as announced today by Microsoft.

Horray !!

TFS Build Lab 1.0 Released

TFSBuildLab 1.0 is released on CodePlex, it is a project to simplify the day to day operations when using automated builds on TFS.

This project handles common Team System issues such as:

• Continuous integration builds
• Scheduled builds
• Build queueing
• Event notifications
• Manual and automated build cleanup

Below is a list of 1.0 features

Service

• Automatic rescheduling when adding new scheduled trigger.
• A report for displaying statistics from the triggers and retention policies.
• Support for overriding build script parameters both for CI and queued builds.
• Support for only deleting the build drops.
• Support for configuring retention policies based on build quality.
• Performance improvements by introducing caching

Admin Client

• Added feedback when delteing multiple builds.
• Support for forcing recaching on the server.
• Support for overriding build script parameters on queued builds.
• Support for overriding build script parameters on triggers.
• Added range paramters when listing log entries to limit the result data.

Checkin Policies

• Removed the need for TfsBuildLab when using the restricted paths policy.

Build Task

• New custom build task to use overloaded parameters (LoadOverriddenProperty)

Many of these issues are handled in the upcoming TFS release, but they wanted to have a good implementation until then and was also aiming to be as forward-compatible as possible.