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Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation - Conclusion

Over the past few weeks ... sorry for the delays which were caused by events and other distractions q;-) ... we looked at the Rosario April 2008 CTP. This final post summarizes the major areas and features we looked at, cross references each related blog post and ends with our views on Rosario so far.

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 1) - Create Team Project

Nothing has really changed here on the public front, other than that we will notice the new names for the out-of-the-box process templates, i.e. VSTS Process for Agile Software Development v1.0.

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 2) - Project Management

This is an area with many exciting enhancements. The new Excel based Iteration Backlog and Product Backlog documents are a productivity boost, allowing project managers and team leads to effectively  plan and manage projects. The evidence of hierarchical work items makes MS Project a viable option again, however, it will battle to complete with the new Excel backlog documents.

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 3) - Architecture

Many of us were and are still frustrated with Team Architect. Well, with Rosario it is time to start cheering again and this area is probably the most exciting overall. Support for UML is a welcome feature, re-introducing an integrated modelling experience in Visual Studio, without constantly having to switch over to Visio. There are many more exciting enhancements due in future CTPs, which we will be monitoring closely.

So far we have support for:

• Logical class diagram
• Use case diagram
• Class diagram
• Component diagram
• Sequence diagram

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 4) - Version Control

Unfortunately visualisation of branching is not yet included in CTP12 ... have a look at http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/01/16/new-features-to-understand-branching-merging.aspx for more information on what is to come in this area. The source control environment in TFS has already been a solid and functionally rich environment in TFS2008, but new features are addressing productivity allowing the user to retire most command lien utilities and perform the tasks in one IDE, for example being able to drag-drop artifacts and enhancements in the merge/reverse-integration features.

• Some of the new features include:
• Editable source location fields
• Last check-in column
• Hyperlinks to local working folders
• Drag-drop support
• New history view showing labels applied across files and how merges were applied across branches
• Command-line check-in rollback
• Simplification of workspace mappings

See Martin's blog post on last check-in columns here.

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 5) - Build

Team Build has always been a scary environment for anything but the simple console application. Over time it has and is continuing to stabilise and grow in terms of features and productivity. Slowly but surely Team Build allows us to implement the automated build and testing processes and project teams should seriously consider the value of the "daily" build, the "solution pulse", indicating health and life of a solution. The new features, including workflow management are exciting and will add immense value to the project environments with more than just a console-application environment.

In Summary:

• A new automated build system based on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• Dynamic build machine allocation
• Distributed build functionality
• Tag'ing of agents ... is really "cool"

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 6) - Developer

Another area of productivity improvements encompassing:

• Historical debugger
• Test impact analysis
• Standalone debugger

There is lots more ... but again we were merely scratching the surface q:-)

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 7) - Tester

The introduction of the codename Camano test application has delivered comprehensive and in-depth support for test cases, automated and manual testing.

The current CTP does not yet support Win Forms application testing, but future CTPs are promising great innovations in this area.

Other than a temperamental Camano application which can be frustrating, the test environment looks extremely exciting.

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Part 8) - Database

Not being a database evangelist, I cannot do this area any justice. However, the features such:

• Data generation
• Ability to create an isolated database development environment
• Baselining of the isolated development environment
• Iterative database development in an isolated environment
• Incremental Deployment
• Refactoring
• Static Code Analysis

... all seem to be great productivity and quality tools.

Have a look at a great video on the database edition by Richard here.

Rosario April 2008 CTP Investigation (Q&A) - List of Questions and Issues

The Q&A post summarises a few of the questions we raised, issues we found and feedback from the product team and the MVPs.

Conclusion

All in all, my personal evaluation score is five happy smiley's. The new features are exciting and for a Community Technology Preview (CTP), this release has proven very stable ... so much so, that we are running Rosario CTP 12 on our XEN server in semi-production mode. We are using it for evaluation and evangelism purposes, but by using it in out internal production environment.

Catch me in the community and MVP chalk&talk areas at TechEd 2008 in Durban if you would like to discuss anything on Rosario. Microsoft SA (DPE) has advised me not to host any Rosario sessions under the MVP banner as everyone wants sessions on current, not forthcoming technology ... although I have noticed that Rosario is covered under the DPE banner.

Watch this space for an announcement on a more reader-friendly document which summarises the eight blog posts, as well as other information.

>> Update 2008-06-27
We have posted the consolidated series of TSF Rosario evaluation blog posts which records our experience and comments, Brian Harry's summary on the upcoming TFS 2008 SP1 and a few  tips & tricks in the Teched2008 Chalk&Talk companion handout (99 pages). As we will not be covering Rosario in the chalk&talks at TechEd2008 in Durban, we have published the document to SA Architect Community Server and DRP Community Server for your perusal ... chat to us at TechEd if you have any questions or comments on Rosario!