Category: TFS

Outline of MSDN Application Lifecycle Management Library for Visual Studio 2010


The navigation of MSDN is very bad currently and I get easily lost in all the content.  But the content is great!  So I’ve created a cheat sheet for myself that you might find handy too.  It is a four level deep outline of all the MSDN content under “Development Tools and Languages”->”Visual Studio 2010″->”Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management”.  The table of contents is two levels deep and the actual document goes four levels deep.  Hope this helps!

MSDN Library – Visual Studio 2010 – ALM – 4 Level Deep Outline

Creating an 2010 Team Foundation Server instance in the cloud


As a TFS consultant, I need to know everything there is to know about the product.  I really didn’t want to spend $1,000+ on hardware to have it running all the time, so I looked into using Amazon Web Services.  I had a little trepidation because I really didn’t know how much money it was going to cost me, but I figured “what the heck” and gave it a try.  Here are my results or more specifically my first month’s bill:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
US East (Northern Virginia) Region
Amazon EC2 running Windows
$0.12 per Small Windows Instance (m1.small) instance-hour (or partial hour) 1 Hrs 0.12
$0.48 per Large Windows Instance (m1.large) instance-hour (or partial hour) 16 Hrs 7.68
Amazon EC2 EBS
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage 18.569 GB-Mo 1.86
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests 5,159,946 IOs 0.52

This comes out to $10.18, which really isn’t that bad.  I tried the small instance first, but it didn’t have enough RAM, so I went with the more costly Large Instance.  This was plenty of firepower.  As I recall, it had about 6 GB of RAM and multiple cores.  I put SharePoint 2010, TFS 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 on it and everything ran smoothly.  I am thinking of bundling the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) to make it easier for others to get started.  Please contact me or leave a comment if you’re interested.

MSF for CMMI Process Improvement 5 – Process Guidance in Word format


Well people loved the MSF for Agile Word doc that I posted so much, I thought I’d go ahead and post my Word doc of the CMMI process also.

I think the CMMI process gets a bad wrap because, well, it has the CMMI name in it. CMMI has become synomous with heavyweight, formal processes that developers hate, but this process is still iterative and lightweight. Plus it provides you with rich Work Items such as Change Requests (an almost necessary evil). So give it a go too, you never know… it might fit better than the Agile template!
MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5 – Process Guidance

Updated it on 12/13/2010

MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5 – Process Guidance