Yeah I got to see him again. Aren't I lucky. Believe it or not, not even employees get to see him that often. So events like this are special.
Oh and September & November will be special this year for Microsoft
I made my part really short. I could have talked a bit longer, but I wanted to be sure that the people form China had enough time. I had a few more details I could have discussed and talked about, but I decided to save it more for one on one conversations and code discussions.
Planning. You should do some planning on not just deployment, but in how the product is used and what the future plans are.
The core of Team Foundation Server is 2 main server components. Application Tier and the Data Tier.
Common Deployment scenarios. Proof of Concept, Full Deployment, and Beta Deployment.
For the Beta Deployment make sure you have clear goals. Have the ability through partners or internally to assist to the team. Customization is key to these customers. Address the full deployment areas. Education on the product is critical. Make sure they understand the ins and outs of what the product is.
For Full Deployments these are key items to take away. Organization, processes, and Team Projects need to be understood, quantified, measured. Security and trust models should be reviewed. Plan for high availability. Globally distributed deployment or local only? Capacity planning for hardware sizing and load requirements. Integration points with the products and technologies.
Extranet scenario is not 100% complete but more is coming. MSDN has lots of information.
High availability is recommended to allow failover and SQL Server mirroring is the primary tool to use.
Future features will rectify to resolve some of today's short comings.
Team Projects are the central organizational unit. Team Projects are difficult to reorganize. So keeping those concise and consistent is important. Limited delete and project rename capabilities.
Area Path is the functional breakdown of an application
Create a new team project for every application being developed is a general recommendation.
The other thing to consider is the branching and merging scheme. Changing in the middle of a project is difficult to do. Feature branches are the main way it is done within Microsoft. Avoid branching if you don't absolutely need to. Keep full configurations of source together. Merge frequently so that conflicts are kept to a minimum. Use tests to validate branch functionality.
Educating your users on the new tools should be part of this migration process. Revise your automation tools to work with TFS instead.
There are two converters that ship out of the box, [SourceSafe] and Rational ClearQuest. There is another one is in the works for ClearCase and working with the community on others. The code is hosted on CodePlex.
Andy Lees led the second general session about Windows 2008 and "Orcas"
Windows Server 2008 is really containing a lot of vitalization technology for free.
The .Net interoperability story is phenomenal. Performance versus websphere is much higher up to 5 times better (metrics and samples coming soon).
Silverlight and Expression Suite is something to allow better experiences beyond AJAX. The tools are really starting to come together for designing the Silverlight experience. Too bad it still does not help me with my drawing & creating animated screens.
Microsoft has launched a lot of products recently. The latest is Windows Home Server.
There were some great comments on what is happening in the consumer market and why Microsoft is perceived to be less innovative or cool.
This time I get to present on Enterprise Search with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Norm Juda is one awesome dude. He wants to make sure that we (the sales and technical support people) can discuss with and talk back to the product groups so that the things we see are linked back into the product or that we see a way to do something that we have not seen before.
He is always adamant about building the internal community that brings the information for the customers to the forefront.
We also discussed how [Sliverlight] is one of the keys for integrating the "design experience" into the developer experience.