Going Global

I recently received a small package from Wiley.  I opened it to find a copy of my book (Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System.)  Only this copy seemed... different.  Why is Anaya Multimedia also listed on the cover?  Why is "Professional" spelled "Profesional"?

It turns out our friends at Anaya in Madrid have been at work translating the book into a Spanish language edition.  Very cool!

Everything from the chapter content, screenshots, and code comments, to the bios and acknowledgements have been translated.  Need a chapter on unit testing?  Try "Preuebas unitarias con el framework de pruebas unitarias"!  Test case management?  "Administracion de un caso de prueba".

It's a strange yet interesting thing to see your words when they aren't your words.

Hasta leugo! 

-Chris

Team System Public User Group Meeting - Dec. 21st

The Boston area's newest user group, the Team System Public User Group, will be having its first meeting at the Microsoft Office at 201 Jones Road, Waltham this Thursday (12/21) from 5:30-7:30.

Agenda from the site:

This meeting will kick off the user group as a whole and a presentation and discussion:

"The State of Team System"
A discussion and exposure of various Visual Studio Team System initiatives inside and outside of Microsoft. Expect discussion of SP1 which is imminent in its release. A lot of focus will be placed on an inventory of “Collaborative Community Source” projects and commercial third party applications as well.

For more information about the group and meeting, see Michael Ruminer's post on the new group.  From Michael's post:

This months meeting will focus on a meet and greet and then a presentation/discussion of existing initiatives around VSTS/TFS both inside and outside Microsoft and both third party commercial and collaborative source projects that exist out there. Are you involved in any? Do you know of any? Do you have a special project you'd like to start up? If so bring that info along so that if my inventory misses it you can fill us all in.

-Chris

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Now Available

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) has emerged from beta and is now available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1:

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 continues Microsoft’s investment in market leading development tools. Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customers and partner feedback, as well as internal testing.  The issues addressed range in severity from places where the syntax coloring was incorrect to customer reported crashes in various scenarios. In some areas, more than 50% of the bugs addressed were reported by customers through the MSDN Product Feedback Center and Microsoft Connect. Overall, Service Pack 1 offers custo

Through further advancement and feedback, Service Pack 1 also provides over 70 improvements for common development scenarios including:

• New processor support (e.g., Core Duo) for code generation and profiling
• Performance and scale improvements in Team Foundation Server
• Team Foundation Server integration with Excel 2007 and Project 2007
• Tool support for occasionally connected devices and SQL Server Compact Edition
• Additional support for project file based Web applications
• Windows Embedded 6.0 platform and tools support mers improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance for Visual Studio 2005.

Note also that if you're a Windows Vista user, work is continuing on the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Vista Refresh Beta:

For developers using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, Microsoft is in current development on an update to Service Pack 1 called the ‘Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Vista Refresh Beta’. This update builds on the improvements made in SP1 and delivers a first class experience for developers wanting to take advantages of the new features in Windows Vista. The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is expected to ship after the consumer availability of Windows Vista in Q1 of 2007 and is now available in beta.

Keep an eye on the above page for its release.

-Chris

Launch Event for Team System Edition for Database Professionals

[Cross-posted from my new blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen.  Please update your subscriptions.]

The New England launch event for Visual Studio Team System's new Database Professionals role is coming to the Boston area (Waltham) on December 14th from 8:30 AM - 1:00 PM.

This new Team System role complements the existing Architect, Tester, and Developer roles, providing many new features for working with databases:

The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of your choice
Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change
A New T-SQL editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans
SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled proje