• A great UI for managing the tasks in a sprint
• Cloud based hosting, so you don’t have to worry about upgrades and server hardware
• It connects to Windows Live for authentication so you don’t need to create an Active Directory account for your clients

Below is a video of how Microsoft use Team Foundation Service to run their internal scrum teams. It provides great insight into how the tool works, but also shows you how a standup meeting should run. The key takeaways for me are:

• Stand-up meeting happens in a corridor
• Each team member can easily switch the taskboard to their view (showing what they’ve worked on)
• “Parking” issues so the stand-up is quick

Check out Methodology - Do you do Daily Scrums (aka stand-up meetings)? for more details about how SSW runs scrums

The solution to this is to manually install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express and call the instance “CRM”. This allows CRM to continue and skip over the installation of SQL Server Express.

Hope this helps others who get stuck with the install.

If you use TFS you can easily keep track of the Work Items that you’ve completed today

You can then just copy and paste the results into your timesheets

One of the biggest reasons why it’s this large is SSW’s policy against auto-archiving and never permanently deleting anything. As a result my Deleted Items folder was actually 2.1 GB!

Now, I don’t actually need all of those items as they do span back about 4 years. So the goal is to only bring down the current year’s deleted items.

To get the unix stuff going I’ve customized the DefaultTemplate.xaml and added an extra InvokeProcess that calls a PowerShell script to copy files to Unix using Pscp (for secure remote copy), compile code using Plink (allows remote command execution over SSH) and finally copy the Unix binaries back to the build server.

The PowerShell script takes in a number of arguments like remote server details, remote paths, usernames etc. So obviously we don’t want these being set via the arguments property for the InvokeProcess activity because:

• Need to check out and modify the build template and checkin
• The build workflow isn’t exactly the nicest thing to modify 
• Can’t reuse the template for other environments (UAT and Production)
• Can’t quickly make changes and queue a new build

What you should do instead is to define new Arguments for your template.

So let’s take a look at adding a the following fields to Product Backlog Item WIT of the Scrum 1.0 template:

• Deployed in Version
• Actual Hours
• Estimated Hours

Note: I know Actual/Estimates aren’t part of Scrum, but the higher-ups like to track it. It’s “Scrum-But” :)

1. Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Types | Open WIT From Server

From here you can start modifying the Work Item Types (WIT) in existing Team Projects or create new WITs.

The most frequent requests I get from TFS users is to:

• Add additional fields to a work item like “Deployed in Version”, “Actual Hours”, “Estimated Hours” or “Client”
• Add additional steps in the workflow to capture progression through the life cycle e.g. In Testing, In UAT
• Add new reports e.g. SLA metrics, Changelogs

I will cover doing each in a series of posts.

I see WebMatrix as an entry level tool to get people who don’t necessary have a development background a quick way to build and customize websites (using the templates and editors) on the Microsoft platform. It lowers the barriers to entry because you have one lightweight tool (7MB + about 20 MB of dependencies) that can edit web pages and manage your SQL. If the user wants to do more than they will need to step up to the visual studio offerings like if they wanted debugging support. I think of it as a step up from Notepad :)

Not sure whether the express editions of Visual Studio were downloaded and used much as the site is a bit confusing with sightly too many product skus, and maybe this is why they made Web Matrix – to drive adoption of Microsoft Web technology for users who don’t want to pay.

Too many “Express” offerings http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/

• Visual Basic 2010 Express
• Visual C# 2010 Express
• Visual C++ 2010 Express
• Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
• All - Offline Install ISO image file
• Windows Phone Developer Tools
• Microsoft Captions Language Interface Pack

Peter is right in that Microsoft tends to suffer from too many offerings (e.g. LINQ 2 SQL & EF, Microsoft Dynamics CRM/Great Plains/Axapta/Navision/SL) and a consolidation of the tools would make sense.

Too much choice is actually bad and can be mentally exhausting 

The details are posted here on connect - Visual Studio SP1 (or specifically VSTO sp1) Issue with config file location

The bug was caused by a change in the way VSTO 4.0 SP1 reads the Manifest value in the Windows Registry. Previously “[TARGETDIR]MyWordAddIn.vsto|vstolocal“ was valid but the URI has changed in SP1