The keynote was rapid fire today. The Microsoft team crammed in a lot of great stuff in a very compact time. I thought I would share my notes, some announcements I heard, and a few thoughts about the opening Keynote for TechEd 2010.

Visual Studio 2010

Of course, Visual Studio is of particular interest to me. I really loved that they got the word out on the new Testing tools especially showing how a bug can provide a full IntelliTrace log for developers to step into the code as if they (and not the tester) found the bug inside a debug session. This “time travel” debugging experience is both an amazing feature and a huge benefit for developers. Look for an upcoming post form me on enabling and creating IntelliTrace logs with Visual Studio and Test Professional.

System Center and Application Deployment

It has been some time since I have worked much with System Center. It looks like some of the promise from the older (2005 / 2008) “architecture” tools in Visual Studio is now baked into System Center. They showed deploying your application through environments using a graphical interface to build VMs. They also showed some links with Test Lab Manager (part of Test Professional). 

Cloud Computing

A lot of time was spent discussing Cloud Computing an Azure. One of the biggest announcements for developers was that Azure now supports .NET 4.0. They also announced new Visual Studio tools for Azure that enable configuration and deployment right from Visual Studio (which simplifies the prior web deployment option). Of course, my book just shipped and its tool late to add this in :( … so look for an update via a blog post / video.

Many other interesting things where discussed for Azure, including: you can extend your on premise Active Directory identity to the cloud, Microsoft is enabling people to create their own internal and external clouds, and hosting providers are now on board to enable repurposing the clouds.

Also heard that Intellitrace (see above) is now supported in Azure.

SQL Server Management Studio will soon support SQL Azure management. This will give admins a like experience. They also showed DataSync to keep Azure and other databases in synch; a real need for many moving to the cloud.

Windows 7 SP1 coming in July

No announcement of features / fixes, but SP1 is due to release in July.

Win7 Phone

Windows Phone 7 was also a big focus of the keynote. Of course, Microsoft announced long ago that they intended to reboot their phone platform (thankfully). Obviously, the competition is already way out there (iPhone and others). However, there is no denying this thing is great. It does a nice job of being BOTH a “work” and “life” phone; you can see they spend a lot of time thinking about this and keeping both somewhat separate in the UI but right there for the user.

The phone can also be managed by policy (a big deal for those moving from Blackberry).

The biggest differentiator, however, may be the integration with Office and SharePoint. You get a real nice experience using the Office apps (Excel, Word, etc.) but you also get great connectivity with SharePoint … really nice.  I was also impressed with the simplified typing in the touch screen (something my current phone does not do well).

And, you can write apps using Silverlight!

Windows Intune

Microsoft announced Windows Intune beta to manage all your PCs from the cloud. Very promising.

Those were the highlights from my perspective. Plan to hit many dev topics and will update with more info later.

Microsoft Test Professional allows testers to capture their testing activities as a video and include that video content as part of a bug report or as validation evidence that a test case passed. However, I noticed that this feature does not “just work” out of the box. It requires some additional installation and configuration.

You should follow these steps to setup Test Professional 2010 for video capture:

Step One: install the required software. You need to install the 32-bit version of the Windows Media Encoder. Of course, you need to download this application first (link to download encoder). The actual link you need to download is highlighted in the image below .

Step Two: If you are running Windows 7 (or Vista) you also need to install the Windows Media Encoder update. You can get this update here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929182. You need to run the update as Administrator (right-click, Run as Administrator).

Step Three: Once Windows Media Encoder and the update is installed, you need to open Test Professional and configure your tests to capture video. To start, select “Organize” from the top of the tool. This will take you to the “Test Plan Manager”. Here you should see your test plans. You need to open the test plan for which you intend to configure video capture. The screen show below shows an example.

Step Four: From the Test Plan, look for Test settings. You should have a drop-down that allows you to set a group of settings that can be applied to one or more test plans. Select the test settings group you wish to edit (or create a new one) and click the “Open” link. An example is shown below:

Step Five: Inside the test settings screen, select “Data and Diagnostics” on the left side of the form. Scroll down to “Video Recorder” and select the check box. The image below shows an example. Note that you can also click the Configure button to indicate if you wish to save videos for passed tests and at what point the video should recycle during a recording.

Step Six: The next step is to do some testing. When you start your tests, however, you need to choose “Start and record”. The image below shows an example of running test cases against a website using a video recording.

Step Seven: You can now just test and the video will be captured based on your settings. This includes a video stored against the test results and available for developers when bugs are logged. For example, the image below shows how you create a new bug while testing.

Notice that when you log the bug, each step in the repro steps includes a link to the section of the related video that relates to that step. The image below shows an example.

Step Eight: You can now view the video. It can be viewed by a developer when the open the bug in Visual Studio. The following image shows the bug and video link.

You can also link to the video in the test results. Open these results from Test Professional and notice the video links. The following image shows an example.

Clicking on any of the video links will launch the actual video content at the relevant point in the video that corresponds to the step or bug. The following image shows the video running.

Hope this helps!

I had the pleasure of presenting to the Pittsburgh community today at Code Camp 2010.1. My talk was on extending Visual Studio for the community, packaging your extension (using VSIX), deploying that extension to the Visual Studio Code Gallery, and discovering that community content from within Visual Studio.

The talk went well—very interactive. Thanks to all those that participated! We did all of the following:

1. Installed the Visual Studio 2010 SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio, bottom left)
2. Wrote code: we wrote an MEF extension to the code editor for counting lines of code (including comments and whitespace). See below for a link to this sample code.
3. Packaged the code: created a VSIX project to include the extension. See below for a link to this project too.
4. Deployed to the Code Gallery: Created a page and deployed the VSIX project to the Visual Studio 2010 Code Gallery to make it discoverable to Visual Studio. See below for a link.
5. Discovered the extension: used the Visual Studio Extension Manager (Tools | Extension Manager) to find and install the extension from the code gallery. See Image below:

Key Downloads / Links for this Example:

• The Visual Studio SDK: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio, bottom left
• The Slides from the Talk: Code Camp - Community Development.pdf (271.41 kb)
• The MEF Extension Code: CodeCountAdornment.zip (88.63 kb)
• The VSIX Project Code: VsixCodeMetricInstaller.zip (76.76 kb)

I have the privilege of delivering the keynote at the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate event. This event is local to Pittsburgh (in the Microsoft office). The event is scheduled for Thursday, January 21st.

This event is a sneak peek of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010.

You’ll get a chance to learn about the improvements Microsoft has made to Modeling and Testing/QA tools in Visual Studio 2010 for you or others within your organization. You’ll get a comprehensive overview of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, which is the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) core of Team System. We’ll present enhancements in version control, reporting, project management and build management.

Event Agenda (Thursday, January 21)

8:30 - 9:00 a.m. | Registration
9:00 - 10:00 a.m. | Keynote
10:15 - 11:45 a.m. | Lap around VS 2010
11:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. | Lunch
12:15 - 1:30 p.m. | Agile Management with TFS
1:45 - 3:00 p.m. | No more “No Repro”
3:15 - 4:30 p.m. | Architecture for Everyone
4:30 - 4:45 p.m. | Closing, Evaluations & Raffle

Click to register for the event (it’s free)!

I posted earlier on the cloud container at PDC09. I wanted to add a few more pictures that I took of this awesome hardware.

The Front

Notice the slotted panels: this is where air comes in through the water-drip cooling filter.

The Back

Air is pushed out the top of the container. Not sure if these glass panels are just for the show piece or if they exist in all the containers.

Inside

In this version, you can actually walk inside the unit in order to do maintenance. You can see the filter panels (left). You can also see the environment monitoring units hanging from the racks.