Brian Keller: Technical Evangelist for Team System

One of my favorite things to do with my mobile device (I use an HTC Dash Smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.1) is reading and deleting e-mail in my spare time - while on the bus, waiting for the elevator, walking between meetings, whatever. Real e-mail authoring (anything more than a sentence or two) still needs to take place on my laptop or desktop, but I've found that over 80% of the e-mail I receive simply requires me to read it, maybe send a quick reply, and delete it. I can do all of this in my spare time on my mobile device, which means that by the time I get back to my desk my Inbox only contains that 20% of mail which requires me to type a full-blown response on my keyboard. I'd estimate that this saves me a few hours a week.

So... why the blog post? What's the life hack? If you already own a mobile device with a data plan you're probably already doing the above.

One limitation of every mobile device I've seen is that it doesn't support permanent deletion. That is, "I want to delete this permanently from my mail server - don't just send it to the deleted items folder." My primary reason for wanting to permanently delete some items is the file size. Yeah, I'm sure somebody finds that 8MB spreadsheet from Bob in accounting useful, but not me, and I don't want it cluttering my Exchange Server storage quota (or Hotmail quota, or Gmail, whatever - even with gigs of storage space this fills up after enough emails from Bob in accounting). In the past, this has prevented me from being as successful as I'd like with my "read and delete" strategy since I later spend time re-visiting these emails and trying to remember that I was ready to permanently delete them.

Hence I devised the following simple but effective "life hack" to help me permanently delete items from my Inbox. Hopefully it's useful for others!

Step 1. Create a folder in your Inbox where you will store items that should be permanently deleted. I called mine __________PERMDELETE. The underscores are optional, but they are there so that this folder appears at the top of my Inbox tree and I won't have to thumb through lots of other folders to get to this one.

Step 2. Using your mobile device, move items into this folder which you want to permanently delete. On my Windows Mobile device I click "Menu -> Move -> Thumb-down once -> Select" - it's a 2-second operation per item.

Step 3. Periodically when you are at your laptop/desktop simply visit this folder, press CTRL+A (select all), then SHIFT-DEL (permanently delete). You could also configure auto-archive to periodically permanently delete these items.

That's it! I've been using this process for a few months and believe it or not it dramatically streamlines my email management. You could use a similar process to create folders such as "______READMORE", for items that require a full-screen browsing experience, or "______READATWORK" for items which require you to be on your corporate network to act on.

I'm getting ready to head off on vacation for a few weeks. I'll be backpacking through Patagonia with some friends.

But while I'll be off the grid for a few weeks, I won't be without some cool tech gadgets. I just installed the newly free TrueSpace 7.6 on my laptop to play with on the loooong plane ride and while I have some other downtime. My Zune is literally FILLED with video podcasts that I found on Zune Marketplace. And I'm stocked up on rechargeable batteries. What can I say... I'm a geek? But I'll also be hiking a few hundred miles over the next few weeks, so at least I won't be stuck at a desk!

Here's an interview I did for Channel 10 last week showing off some of the gadgets we're taking on the trip. See you in late August!

This is a great idea! Nice write-up, Laurent.

For more great ideas on how to get the most from Live Mesh check out the Live Mesh Scenarios Directory.

Today the XNA team delivered some much-anticipated details regarding the forthcoming XNA Community Games which will allow XNA game developers to upload and even make money selling their games via Xbox LIVE.

For more details check out:
http://creators.xna.com/en-us/XboxLIVECommunityGames

I'm especially excited about this announcement since in my part time I've been brushing up on my XNA skillz by reviewing this upcoming book on XNA. Now to just come up with the next big thing!

From time to time I routinely field questions from customers wanting to see the End-User Licensing Agreement for a particular product. Luckily I have access to the product "boneyard" (an internal Microsoft share) where legacy Microsoft products get put out to pasture, and from there I can pull up the EULA. But I always thought it would be nice if we had this information online.

As it turns out, it is. Maybe this is new, or maybe it's been there for a while and I didn't read the memo, but it's pretty nice. Check out:

http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx

While this certainly doesn't contain every piece of software that Microsoft has ever released, I'd be hard pressed to think of a release from the past few years that's not on that list. I planned on linking to the Microsoft Bob EULA, but upon inspecting the files at the boneyard share it appears that Bob didn't have a EULA.

Side note: Trying to install Microsoft Bob on my Vista x64 machine crashed during setup. I should probably file a bug about that... does anybody have any contacts on the Microsoft Bob team? :-)

Mickey Gousset and I were recently looking for some resources on getting started with Microsoft Project Server. So I emailed my friend Ameya Bhatawdekar on the Team Foundation Server program management team. Ameya is not only working on the out-of-the-box integration between Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" and Project Server, but he also used to work on the Project Server team. Here's what Ameya suggested to get started with Project Server:

Gary Chefetz’s books are a good read (book 1, book 2) as is the one from the one from Quantum PM to get a good overall understanding of the EPM solution. Have a go through the role guides to learn about the EPM system from a roles perspective.

Administrator role guide
Project manager role guide
Executive role guide
Resource manager role guide
Team member role guide

Ameya

Thanks, Ameya! I'll have to add this to my ever-growing tech reading list.

Dan and I delivered a special edition of This Week on Channel 9 to help celebrate America's Independence Day. As my blog title suggests, things didn't quite go as planned during one of the test runs.

Oh, and there's some great software development-related content in this episode as well, not just fun & games. :-)

This Week on C9: Fireworks, Powerset, Equipt, Pex, and cool downloads

I recently visited Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux on the Pex team to talk about how Pex can really bolster the effectiveness of unit testing. I've got to say that out of all of the Channel 9 videos I've filmed this was one of my favorites. I stuck around for another 30 minutes after the interview talking to Nikolai and Peli about some of their plans for the future of Pex. But I'll have to save those details for another interview... :-) I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

If you're headed to PDC2008 in October (and I hope you are!) you should consider registering for one of the pre-conferences. The pre-conferences are focused on helping you get the most out of Microsoft technologies which are available today, so that you bring home knowledge that you can apply immediately. The pre-conferences happen the day before PDC2008 officially starts (October 26). By attending a pre-conference you can get up to speed on all of the latest technologies so you are best prepared to hear about all of the the future technologies being discussed during the rest of the week at PDC.

There are many great pre-conferences to choose from. I wanted to highlight one that I am particularly excited about: Getting More Out Of Visual Studio Team System 2008. This all-day pre-conference is being presented by one of the Team System MVP's, Brian Randell. If you've seen Brian present then you know that he's a great instructor with a lot of passion for teaching people about developer technologies.

The full pre-conference description is below. I hope you can make it!

Get More Out of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Presenter(s): Brian Randell

This pre-conference will focus both on implementing best practices and avoiding worst practices when working with Team Foundation Server and the suite of client tools. Throughout the day you will cover end-to-end life cycle management. Begin with guidance on defining your team project, source code control, and project classifications system, tips for customizing your process templates and using work items to drive your teams progress. From there you will learn effective techniques for getting your builds set up and running, using quality practices and tools including unit testing, web testing, test publication, profiling and load testing. We close by covering how to move forward once a major milestone is complete. This session assumes familiarity with Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Client Tools; each section of the session will provide practical guidance so that you are getting the most of VSTS and you leave prepared for changes coming in future releases of Team System.

I have made a long overdue update to my earlier post, A More Reliable and Faster Download Experience for Rosario / VS08 VPC's. These files were updated on March 31, 2008. The new VPC images have an expiration date of December 31, 2008. There are also some great hands-on labs available for use with the Team Suite + TFS images.

If you were at PDC05 or MIX08 then you already know about the now-popular Show Off event which features fun, innovative, and inspirational projects developed by you and your peers. Today we announced that Show Off will be returning to PDC2008 - so now you can take credit (and maybe even win some cash!) for all those late-night coding projects you've been working on. Dan Fernandez and I will be your hosts for PDC2008 Show Off, so we hope to see you there!

Check out the PDC2008 Show Off Details and Rules. Note that you do NOT have to attend PDC2008 in order to submit an entry.

If you're planning on submitting a Show Off entry or just showing up and supporting your fellow PDC attendees, here's some blog bling:

(This year's creative was inspired by Mystery Science Theater, one of my personal favorite shows of all time!)

To get some inspiration for your project, check out the top 5 audience favorites from MIX08. (courtesy of Mike Swanson's blog):

1. Crayon Physics Deluxe - like many of the comments on the voting forms, I want this game now!
2. Real Time Physics in Silverlight - a very cool open source physics library for Silverlight hosted on CodePlex
3. Wii Data Visualization and Multipoint Nonsense - using the Wii for some Minority Report fun
4. 40 - My Life in Silverlight 2 - probably the only computer application that's ever caused me to have this kind of emotional reaction
5. Social Retailing - how we'll shop for clothes in the future

Last week Dan and I headed down to TechEd Developers 2008 and while we were down there we filmed an episode of This Week on Channel 9. As you'll see from the preview image below, we had a bit of fun while we were filming.

By the way - congrats to the Channel 9 for rolling out v4 of the site! Now you can subscribe to an RSS feed of This Week on Channel 9 with attachments for your favorite media format.

RSS | iPod/MP4 | Zune

This Week on Channel9: TechEd, Bill Gates, Data Mining, IronRuby and more

What's especially cool about this is that Martin named Brian the Build Bunny after me. (Or maybe it was named after other Brian. Or the other Brian. But definitely not Bryan since he spells his name wrong. <g>)

The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing Whitepaper is now published. This paper is in the same format of the very popular 2005 licensing whitepaper but now reflects the licensing changes which have been made for 2008. The spirit of these documents is to answer common licensing questions about Visual Studio Team System, and most of the verbiage centers around Team Foundation Server.

Overall the licensing for 2005 and 2008 is very similar, with a few exceptions. These exceptions are generally less restrictive than in 2005 and should come as a welcome surprise to those who have faced these challenges in the past. I encourage you to read the licensing whitepaper to read more, but here is a summary of the biggest change:

"File-a-bug scenario" - Many customers would like to allow end-users of an internal application to file bugs or enhancement requests directly against Team Foundation Server to be addressed by the development team. But in the 2005 licensing, this scenario would have required every user to be properly licensed with a CAL for Team Foundation Server. If your application was consumed by many users this could become quite expensive. But now with Team Foundation Server 2008 we allow a user to achieve this scenario without requiring a CAL. There are still restrictions on what a user can and can't do, but generally speaking the "file-a-bug scenario" which many customers have asked for can now be achieved without a CAL. See the licensing whitepaper for more details. In addition, the new "Work Item Web Access" feature of Team Foundation Server will make it easy to extend a Web client to those users for the purpose of achieving this scenario. Work Item Web Access is essentially a stripped down version of Team System Web Access which only provides the capabilities enabled by the new "File-a-bug scenario." Hence you can grant your end-users access to this interface without needing to closely monitor how they use the system.

I hope that the licensing whitepaper is useful and helps to dispel many of the questions surrounding Visual Studio Team System licensing. As always, we welcome your feedback on how we can continue to make it better.

A new Community Technology Preview was just released for Team System Web Access 2008 SP1. Hakan Eskici has all of the details:

I just got done installing this release - it was a 5 minute project, very easy! Even though Windows Server 2008 isn't listed in the system requirements as a supported operating system, I went ahead and installed both releases (TSWA + WIWA) on Windows Server 2008 and it's working like a champ. Update: Buck Hodges just posted a comment to indicate that Windows Server 2008 is in fact a supported platform. This will be updated in the docs.

One tip, once you get everything deployed if you want to edit configuration settings just open up the web.config file in the respective \program files\<app>\web folder. Be sure to open the file with elevated permissions (e.g. "Run as Administrator" either Notepad or Visual Studio) or else you'll get a permissions error when you try to save the file. One thing I did was change the default Team Foundation Server to the one I use most often. See the <tfServers> tag.