Now Available: Visual Studio 2015 ALM Virtual Machine and HOL's / Demo Scripts

TL;DR - the Visual Studio 2015 ALM VM and HOL's / demo scripts can be found here: https://aka.ms/ALMVMs.

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It's been almost a year since I transitioned away from my role as an evangelist for Microsoft's ALM/DevOps offerings into a role as a program manager on the Visual Studio Online / TFS team. It's been a fun ride and I learn something new every day from my outstanding co-workers.

But the #1 question I always get when people learn about my new role is "What about the ALM virtual machines you built? "

I'm pleased to say that the ALM VM has landed in good hands with my colleague Sachin Hridayraj. He has taken over this deliverable and has already started to make his own improvements to it. You can check out the brand new Visual Studio 2015 version, complete with a revised set of hands-on-labs and demo scripts, over at https://aka.ms/ALMVMs.

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2015
  Brian & Sachin: Thank you for keeping the ALM VM alive. Greatly appreciated.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2015
  Great news!

• Anonymous
  September 30, 2015
  Good to see that the ALM VM is still alive. Thumbs up, Brian and Sachin!

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2015
  Such a wonderful evangelism!

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2015
  Hi Brian, Good to see that VM is back and even VM provided on technet virual labs is also great. But  2015 VM on Hyper-V abruptly shutting down. Pls put some light on this. Thanks in Advance KN Srinidhi

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2017
  I downloaded and installed the TFS 2015 VSALM and it works great. I shapshotted it and then upgraded it to 2017. In our environment we only implemented TFS App Server, SQL Server for the DB,s and a Reporting Server. The initial roll out did not have SharePoint integration. During our TFS Administration training class we were tol to avoid storing attachments in the TFS database. The suggested storing documents and or screen shots in a file share and just put the links into TFS to the documents. This is proving to be tedious, and is eroding confidence in the system.We were told if we had the SharePoint integration we can store the documents in SharePoint and they would be linked. I'm wondering if I can demo SharePoint document storage capability with this VM.I don't know how to demo that functionality? Can someone give me some pointers on how to configure the VSALM vm do I can use SharePoint to store attachments and have them linked to Work items?Thanks

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2017
    Hi Patrick, there are a lot of factors to consider but generally speaking I would not be too worried about storing attachments in TFS. It's really just a function of the amount of disk space on your data tier, and disk space is cheap in 2017. :-)SharePoint integration with TFS isn't something we're actively investing in, and it was never really all that integrated to begin with, but if you need to provide docs on SharePoint (e.g. because of their support for versioning) you can use a work item Hyperlink link to point back to it. This is something we do pretty regularly here at Microsoft.