Moving my blog to new location

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/leshka/

Vote Now for Imagine Cup People's Choice Award!

Imagine Cup started back in 2003 as a way to get students involved in the connection between people, information, and systems.

So what IS the Imagine Cup?

Simply put, it’s the world’s premier student technology competition. Beginning with local and regional competitions, Imagine Cup 2011 comes to an exciting finale at the Worldwide Finals held in New York City, United States from July 8-13,2011. . Overall, the idea is to show how technology can help solve the world’s toughest problems.

The theme of this year’s Imagine Cup is “Solving the world’s toughest problems with Technology” (e.g., poverty, energy conservation, environment, global health, etc.).

Two teams from Universities in the Heartland District have made it to the US finals for IMAGINE CUP. The teams are LIFECODE (Software Design) from Wayne State University, and MINTRUS (Game Design) from  University of Louisville.  Team LIFECODE and TEAM MINTRUS are made up of exceptional students, with brilliant ideas, and big hearts.

Part of the competition is public voting.   Each of you, your friends, your family, or others can vote for each team once per day.   LIFECODE and MINTRUS are currently in the bottom 3^rd for voting,  so let’s give them a boost and get them some more votes from the best district in the US.  Visit the below links to the team’s Facebook pages, and give them your Votes:    

   

Visit the IMAGINE CUP facebook page, learn about the projects and vote TEAM LIFECODE using the blue “vote” button next to their TEAMNAME and Picture.   Click this link.

 

Visit the IMAGINE CUP facebook page, learn about the projects and vote TEAM MINTRUS’ facebook page, using the blue “vote” button next to their TEAM NAME and Picture.   Click this link.

Codemash Talk: Demystifying Visual Studio 2010 Database Tools

If you are interested in the power point presentation from my CodeMash 2.0.1.1 talk on database tools you may find it here.

The earlier version with extended deck is located at COALMG:
http://www.coalmg.org/2010/09/september-meeting-follow-ups.html

DogFood III Conference –Nuts and Bolts of Visual Studio Scrum v 1.0 Process Template

The presentation deck that I used at  Third Annual DogFood Conference is available for download or viewing on my skydrive.
For additional information please check out following resources:

• Sharpen your Scrum Game with free Scrum Assessment
• Review Scrum by reading 21 page Scrum Guide available from scrum.org
• Learn more about Professional Scrum Developer Program
• Download Visual Studio Scrum v1.0 Process Template
• Interested in learning more about Scrum and Visual Studio 2010, consider taking one of the upcoming classes.
• Follow ScrumDotOrg for updates on the state of scrum.

Presenting at DogFood v3 Conference (#dogfoodcon) - Nuts and Bolts of Visual Studio Scrum v1.0 Template

Please join us for the 3rd Annual Dog Food Conference (http://www.dogfoodcon.com/dogfood/).  There will be speakers from MS Gold Certified Partners, MS MVPs, IT authors, community leads, and MS corporation subject matter experts and evangelists.  There will designated areas for hardware demos from  HP, Polycom, Dell and Windows Phone 7. Agenda and schedule for hardware demos at download agenda links.

When: November 4-5, 2010  8:10–4:30 PM
Where: Microsoft Office - 8800 Lyra Dr, Suite 400, Columbus, OH 43240
Who should attend: CIOs, IT Managers, IT Pros, developers, collaboration specialists, CISOs, business analysts, project managers

My Abstract:
Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These tools represent some of the best opportunities for success and to experience a focused and smooth software development process. For TFS 2010 Microsoft heavily invested in Scrum and is moving some internal product teams onto the approach.

This session is not about Scrum in depth, (for that please visit scrum.org) but rather, we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and how this fits into Scrum using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server. We will cover in detail:

• How to successfully gather requirements
• How to plan a project using TFS 2010 and Scrum
• How to work with a product backlog in TFS 2010
• The right way to plan a sprint with TFS 2010
• Tracking your progress
• The right way to use work items
• Leveraging built-in reporting and Project portals available on the SharePoint dashboard
• Reports targeted to the Product Owner / Project Manager

You will walk away knowing how to interpret and understand a project health and progress. Visual Studio ALM is designed to address many of the problems faced by teams using traditional approaches. It does

so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help management better support the software development processes.

10-4, Next Chapter in My Life

I have been doing consulting work at Quick Solutions since April 2004, during this time I had a privilege to work with some of the brightest people. There is no need for me to list all the talented people that are (or were) working at QSI. Quick does not need any introductions, everyone in Central Ohio knows about the company; we even have a joke that if you want to grow in your career you have to work at QSI at some point of your life. 

As time is a continuum of change; the change in my life is a new job opportunity at Cardinal Solutions. I am looking forward teaming up with Jeff Hunsaker, Visual Studio ALM MVP (my new boss) to deliver the goodness of VS\TFS 2010 and .NET4. Working with Jeff will give me an opportunity to take my consulting skills to the next level.

As Archimedes said long time ago: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth” <>, but seriously I am looking forward contributing to Cardinal Solutions practices, meeting new clients/opportunities, expanding people's awareness of Microsoft tools, .NET, and agile practices.

How appropriate that my true first (zero based) day at Cardinal will fall on 10-4 !

So I have join the club of people that have problems with using Cisco VPN Client

If you are starring at the screen and see a messages like: “Unable to establish VPN” or “The VPN client agent was unable to create the interrocess communication depot” you may be in luck.

Assuming that you have checked the oblivious like, correct username/password or right server connection you may be a victim of “Internet Connection Sharing”.

I have been running Window Server 2008 R2 for some time and love it because of the power of Hyper-V with regards to managing my virtual environments.  One thing that I have done is shared my Wireless Adapter with my virtual Adapter so I can get internet connectivity to my VMs while I am connected to WIFI.

Little that I knew that it would interfere with my ability to use Cisco VPN.  I even un-installed and try to re-install the client to be greeted by more errors:

At the end all I had to do is to disable “Internet Connection Sharing” and Cisco VPN started to work.

I hope it will save you some time.

Accessing TFS2010 from Visual Studio 2008

I have run several times into a question: Can I (How Do I) connect to TFS2010 from Visual Studio 2008? The answer is YES you can, and here what you need to do:

1. Make sure that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 has been installed

2. Download and install Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for TFS 2010.

3. Configure connection to your TFS server.

In TFS2010 we now have ability to host multiple collections, groups of Team Project, so as result when accessing to TFS2010 we need to know what collection we are interested in.

General TFS connection constructed like:

http(s)://{Server Name}:{Port}/{Directory}/{Collection Name}

where as:

• {Server Name}, either the name of the server TFS2010 installed on (application tier) or Fully Qualify Domain Name that would resolve to the location of your TFS server
• {Port }, the port configured for TFS access
• {Path}, the path to installed TFS services
• {Collection Name}, name of TFS Team Collection

If you have installed TFS2010 following default suggestions it would be something like that: http://{Server Name}:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection

For example if you have downloaded VS2010 RTM Virtual Machine from Brian Keller’s blog then you can access TFS server from VS2008 by configuring connection string as:

4. But there are limitations on what you can do from Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer with TFS2010, some of the big ones:

• Creating new Projects
• Working with Hierarchical WorkItem Queries
• Managing Builds
• Reports
• etc

Due to all the new features made to TFS2010.

Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is out in the wild

Until recently only short lived eScrum template was the only attempt by Microsoft to bring Scrum framework into TFS Process. With recent attention to ALM, Microsoft took a second stab at Scrum template and they have made a fantastic job.  You can download the template from Visual Studio Gallery.

There are plenty blogs, I highly recommend that you check at least:
 Aaron Bjork, Announcing Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
 John Bristowe, Installing Scrum Template

Follow up on Two Day Visual Studio 2010 ALM Overview

Please provide us with feedback on the event by visiting speakerrate site:

Feedback on Day 1	Feedback on Day2
http://speakerrate.com/talks/3675-two-day-visual-studio-2010-briefing-on-june-22-23	http://speakerrate.com/talks/3676-day-2-of-vs2010-alm-briefing

Let us know if you are interested on the follow up events or more of the deep dive on specific topics.

Since mostly of the time we have spent in the VS2010 IDE, here a set of Power Point Presentation that cover topics of our demos:

0. Agenda

1. Visual Studio Executive Overview presented by Randy Pagels is found on www.teamsystemcafe.net as well a numerous number of other useful resources

2. Presentation on scrum has been mostly borrowed from the PSD training course offered through www.scrum.org.  And if you are interested to learn how you can take advantage of VS2010 with Scrum framework, please see 5 day training class http://courses.scrum.org/classes/title/professional-scrum-developer-net.

3. Modified presentations on how to use Excel workbooks for planning iterations and sprints, originally created by Aaron Bjork is here.

4. Great overview of third party tools (TeamSpec and Storyboarding for VSTS) that can help us to manage requirements: https://cid-bf5e5c36e45ea1bd.office.live.com/viewpermissions.aspx/SDLC-in-a-Box/SDLC-2010/SDLC4-1.3-ManagingRequirements.pptx?ref=11

5. Architecture tools in VS2010 presentation.  If you are interested in learning more about Arc. Tools please visit Cameron Skinner blog and check out a great recording by Brian Keller on channel 9.  Also Microsoft updated its Visual Studio Training Kit it has a great set of labs walking you through various VS features including Architecture tools.

6. Database Tools in VS2010 presentation, it goes over some of thenew features and improvements from VSTS2008 Database Professional.

7. Brief Summary on TeamBuild, including Branch/Merge improvements and workflow steps.

8. Dev tools and Test manager deck (coming soon).

9. TFS2010 Reports presentation.

10. Additional resources of interest: Team Lab Management and TFS2010 overview.

 

Please keep an eye on upcoming Microsoft DogFood Developers Conference conference.  The site will be updated shortly to reflect 3rd Annual agenda. 

Danilo Casino has local user group section at the end of the agenda document, please check it out, especially COALMG (www.coalmg.org) a user group dedicated to ALM.

Two day Visual Studio 2010 briefing on June 22-23

What:
This Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) session will led by two community leads. This 2 day briefing will discuss ALM, from initial conception through requirements gathering, design, development, testing, build & review processes.  We also integrate the Scrum framework, integration with non-Microsoft development and offerings for Visual Studio 2010 Team System.

Targeted Audience:
Project Managers, Developers, Architects, DBAs and Business Analysts looking for ALM and researching Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio 2010.

Speakers:
Alexei Govorine, Quick Solutions, Manager of ALM Practice and  is a co-founder of the Central Ohio ALM Group, Twitter: @Leshka
Ryan Cromwell, SDS Consulting, Team Foundation Server Technical Specialist, Twitter: @cromwellryan

Agenda (draft version): 

Day 1 · June 22nd

• Keynote
• Business Value Overview
• Why Process
• Team Explorer
• Project Management
• Architecture Tools

Day 2 · June 23rd

• Development Practices
• Database Tools
• Team Build
• Test Manager
• Reports
• Retrospective

Additional information on Ryan’s blog.

Where: 8800 Lyra Dr, Suite 400, Columbus, OH 43240

When: June 22-23, 2010 from 9-4:30 PM, both days..

Registration: at Microsoft US Events

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010,ALM,Scrum,TFS 2010

Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010

 

Jeff Hunsaker and I presenting at the “Path-to-Agility” conference on how to leverage Visual Studio 2010 and Scrum framework .

You can download presentation from here.

Abstract:

Interested in agile software techniques and tools? Of course you are. Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 add a whole lot of agile goodness. We'll walk through a start-to-finish project leveraging some of the latest agile features such as: Excel Planning sheets, tracking tasks and prioritizing, traceability, continuous integration and testing. Prepare yourself for the recent TFS 2010 release-leveraging this tool to take advantage of Scrum framework in your projects.

Technorati Tags: scrum,visual studio 2010,tfs 2010,excel,agile

Robbins under my deck

For the second year we get robbins nesting under the deck.
This year we have setup wireless security camera to capture the action by the nest.
Enjoy the show:

Hyper-V … credentials may not be sent to the remote computer

After a few weeks of not using Win2008R2 I brought Hyper-V back online and unpleasantly greeted with the message box every time I was trying to connect to virtual machine:  

 

Afer poking around on internet the simplest solution was in the Hyper-V settings: and select ‘Use default credentials automatically’ in User Credentials section. 

Apparently cached credentials got out of sync.  After resetting I was able to get rid of the annoying message box

Help Columbus GiveCamp 2010 to Find a Place

UPDATE #2:
If you are interested in sponsoring Columbus GiveCamp, please see attached document.

Registration is open, sign in for the event here.

UPDATE:
Columbus GiveCamp 2010 has found a place for the July 9-11th event at ICC!
Stay tuned for updates.
*****

Columbus GiveCamp is in dire need of a facility to host July 2010 event. 

In 2009 while hosted at QSI over sixty volunteers were able to accomplish work on seven projects (Hopemongers, Fairy Goodmothers, Shiloh Baptist Church,  Family Institute College Choir Concert Series, Volunteer Earth, TECH CORPS Ohio, Northwest Plains District Family Camp)  in just two days!

Please help us to make 2010 event a reality and success, we are looking for a facility that can host around 60+ volunteers over one week-end in July with good connection to internet (must be wired and at least T1).  We will take of the rest: setup of the network, getting computers, and all of the clean-up afterwards. 

Contact me or Carey.

Find out more about GiveCamp.
GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals – from designers, developers and database administrators to marketers and web strategists – donate their time to provide solutions for non-profit organizations.
Some organizations may need a new website or a renewal of an old one. For others, GiveCamp helps them make the leap from Excel spreadsheets to true donor databases. And for still others, this is an opportunity to think strategically, with the help of a consultant, about their social media presence or e-mail marketing. This is about matching the needs of non-profits with the talent of our local technology-loving community.
Any 501(3) can apply to participate in GiveCamp. Accepted non-profits will be matched with a project liaison prior to GiveCamp who will help them shape their project and answer any critical questions to ensure the weekend is a success.
For volunteers, GiveCamp provides a unique opportunity to connect with the local tech community. A typical GiveCamp draws 75 to 100 volunteers. Individuals can work with their colleagues in company teams, or they can opt to be matched with fellow volunteers who have complementary skill sets.
Everyone is welcome to head home for the evenings – but there are always the diehards who work from Friday kickoff straight through Sunday afternoon. Food and drinks, especially of the caffeinated variety, are provided, along with game systems for breaks.

Video of my LasikPlus experience

After my wife has went though lasik surgery I have decided to do the same.
After spending mostly of my life being nearsighted (myopia) and have to wear glasses all the time I am looking forward to being able to see all the time. This morning when I woke I had a huge smile on my face, becuase eventhough the vision is still a little bit blury from the operation I did not need to look for my glasses.
(or perhaps I was still experience the effects of valium)

Below is the brief summary of the surgery, I spent more time waiting for the surgery than the actually getting the operation. It all boils down to:
1. prep and secure an eye
2. use laser to insert a layer of air into the flap
3. peel off the flap and use laser to re-shape corneal surface (you will hear the clicking sounds for that part, the screen goes darker)
4. put the flap back and do the same with the second eye

Tammy has recorded mostly of the operation:

Animal Shelter Fundraiser

Currently my wife is doing a fundraiser for a local animal shelter.  She is planning on delivering collected items on 12/13/2009.  This particular shelter is short on volunteers, low on the budget and supplies.
I have heard a rumor that a dog from that place got sick from eating a mildew food.

If you are interested in helping us with a drive, please contact me. 
If you choose to donate CASH it will be spend on buying items listed below.

The shelter is looking for following items:

• Paper towels
• Bleach
• Trash Bags
• Bath towels and wash cloths (new or used)
• Blankets (new or used)
• Pet Shampoo
• Collars and Leashes (new or used)
• Non-clumping Litter
• Cat and Kitten Food (no red dye please)
• Dog and Puppy Food (no red dye please)
• Dog Toys (hard chew)
• Puppy Toys
• Cat and Kitten toys
• Newspaper
• Laundry Detergent
• Distilled Water
• Aluminum Cans

So far we have 12+ dog toys, 10+ collars, a blanket, several towers, and 200+ pounds of dry and can food.

Update: Big thanks to Danilo Casino for making a donation, with my match were able to get an additional 500 pounds of dry food.

DogFood v2 Session summary on: Customizing TFS Process Template to Match Your Process.

My slide portion of the session has briefly covered customization and extension points on TFS. Due to time limitations I had to hide a significant portion of slides.  The full version of the PowerPoint Deck is available for download.

In summary, if you are planning on customizing process template I recommend for you to follow a few simple steps:
1. Start with documenting your process.  Do an ALM Assessment, as a mere a fact Microsoft has a great tool for it: Application Platform Capability Assessment.  Spend the time with all the people that are involved in the process and get a "Green Light" from the management.  Remember the process is not only for developers, but for the entire team (including business sponsors and clients).  Create an Action Plan of the implementation steps.

2. Templates shipped with current versions of TFS are not meant to be used as is, they are just blueprints.  Do not treat the process as paint, throwing it on the wall and seeing what will stick is not the best strategy for the development.

3.  Do not expect by customizing TFS process guidance to go fully integrated (dynamic) environment over night. It will take time, long time.  Use your Action Plan (created part of the ALM Assessment) to fully integrated ALM into VSTS/TFS.

4. Treat your TFS server as production server.  Do not go and try some new ideas against.  If you need to prototype a rule or workflow or workitem get yourself a test environment.  Once you know that it is working well in test server, then go ahead and implement it in your production TFS.

5.  Do not be afraid to make process adjustments on active projects (as long as you are following rule #4).  If your project needs a new rule/workitem/field/report/etc then just implement it.  At the end of the project do a retrospective and decide if the change is worth making part of the global template.  If you are not willing to change and adjust the process, chances are it will become stagnant and obsolete.  100 years ago ice houses and transporting ice down the rivers was a booming business, now days we just use refrigerators...

Happy customizations!

Customizing TFS Process Template to Match Your Process at the Second Annual DogFood Conference

On November 12th 2009, I will be presenting on TFS Process Template customization.

TFS is a very versatile tool that has a lot of features and capabilities. I think of TFS as a highly customizable/adoptable to my needs framework. Prior to using TFS we had a lot of different tools to manage our development progress; while we can still use them now, the beauty of using of TFS is that all the data is centralized and available from one tool. It does not matter if it is source code I am after or status report or the progress state of the requirement - I can find all this information in one place, using my everyday tools.

How do you know that the team is following the development process, standards, policies? TFS Process Templates helps to insure that development guidelines and processes are adhere by team members.
TFS comes with two Process Templates (MSF for CMMI Process Improvement and MSF Agile Software Development). In my opinion the two templates are there as an example and a starting for customization and should not be used as is.

I have seen a lot of organizations implementing TFS and using it only for source code management. I have heard many different reasons on why it has been done, starting with: we are just easing into using TFS; or we are not managing our development the "Microsoft Way", or we already have a good process and we do not want to break it, etc...

In my presentation I will show that it is easy to make changes to the process templates, we can actually make changes not only before the project starts, but during the active project. Its like magic going from fighting the tool to actually using it!

Eventhough DogFood conference is sponsored by the partner community, it would not have been possible without Danilo Casino, read more about the conference from Brian's blog.
This 2 day event will feature over 40 technology topics spread over 4 tracks. 

Come and join us: DogFood agenda and registration.

You can track me down at the conference during the "Ask the Experts" in the Executive Briefing Room (4th floor) from 2:30 to 3:40 on 11/12/2009 8800 Lyra Dr., Suite #400, Columbus OH 43240

COALMG Recorded Session: Application Lifecycle: Security!

Last time COALMG had Brent Huston talking about web application security, you may find the recording of the session on COALMG site