New Prescriptive Guidance for Visual Studio Team System

Our patterns and practices team has just released new prescriptive guidance for Visual Studio Team System!

Since my previous post we've made significant updates with the addition of the following content:

• Explained: Branching in Team Foundation Server
• Explained - Structuring Your Solutions and Projects in Source Control with Team Foundation Server 
• How To: Perform a Baseless Merge in Team Foundation Server
• How To: Step Through Creating a Custom Check-in Policy for Team Foundation Server 2005 
• How To: Step Through Creating Your Source Tree in Team Foundation Server 2005
• How To: Structure Your ASP.NET Applications for Team Foundation Server
• How To: Structure Your Source Control Folders in Team Foundation Server
• How To: Structure Your Windows Applications for Team Foundation Server
• Source Control Practices at a Glance (updated)
• Source Control Questions and Answers  (updated)
• Video: How To - Migrate from VSS to Team Foundation Source Control
• Video: How To - Setup Your Source Tree in Team Foundation Server
• Video: How To - Structure Your ASP.NET Projects for TFS

This puts us on course to deliver on these main outcomes we have in mind for our Visual Studio Team System Guidance Project

• The single best repository of Visual Studio Team System guidance
• Practical and insightful scenario-based guidance for roles (PMs, developers, architects, testers ... etc.)
• Thoroughly engineered and tested set of recommendations
• Great entry point through videos, roadmaps, and task-based How Tos
• Breadth and depth coverage

Project Overview
While Visual Studio Team System provides powerful new tools, customers are asking "where's the guidance?" ... "where do I start?" ... "how do I make the most of the tools?"  In response, our team is building a definitive Body of Guidance (BOG) for Team System. This includes How Tos, Guidelines, Practices, Q&A, video-based guidance, and more.

We’re helping customers walk before they run, so we’re starting with the foundation.  On the code side (for developers) – this includes source control, building your dev and test environments and setting up a build process.  On the project side (for PMs) – this includes work items and reporting.  Once we have the foundation in place, we can move up the stack to making the most out of Team System for the various roles (tester, architect, developer … etc.)
 
We're framing out the tough problems using Scenario Frames (for an example see Source Control Scenario Frame).  We then identify where we need guidance and perform solution engineering.  This involves building out reproducible customer scenarios, vetting potential solutions, and sharing the ones we can generalize enough to be broadly useful, yet still specific enough to be actionable.
 
We're partnering with customers, product teams, support, field, MVPs, and subject matter experts.  We’re working closely with Jeff Beehler to synchronize efforts with the VSTS Rangers, such as the Branching Guidance.

Related Posts

• patterns and practices Visual Studio Team System Guidance Now Available
• Video-Based Guidance for Visual Studio Team System Now Available
• Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance Now Available

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2007
  Please be sure to check out this blog post by J.D. Meier over in the Patterns & Practises team. A

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2007
  J.D. Meier of patterns & practices fame blogged about New Prescriptive Guidance for Visual Studio

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2007
  Check out the newly released guidance that the Patterns and Practices team has been working on for TFS:

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2007
  I strongly encourage everyone to take a look at the VSTS Guidance project update recently posted by JD

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2007
  Be sure to check out this post from J.D. Meier . It contains a LOT of new information and recommendations

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2007
  The Patterns & Practices team has just released an excellent set of prescriptive guides for Visual

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2007
  J.D Meier has just blogged on the release of new prescriptive guidance for Visual Studio Team System

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  Buck Hodges on Vista sidebar build monitor and Powershell scripts for Team Build Orcas. J.D.Meier...

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  Wow, it's been an exciting couple of weeks for Visual Studio Team System users. Generally I don’t like

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2007
  Il y a quelques jours, je bloguai au sujet d'un site codeplex sur les stratégies de branches dans Team

• Anonymous
  March 28, 2007
  Recentemente falei sobre o conteúdo ensinando como fazer algumas coisas interessantes com ASP.NET, ASP.NET

• Anonymous
  March 28, 2007
  After hearing from our customers that one of their top needs was more guidance on how best to use our

• Anonymous
  March 28, 2007
  Für die Visual Studio Team Suite wurde kürzlich ein Guidance Project vorgestellt: Guidances (die z.B.

• Anonymous
  April 02, 2007
  hmm, is this up? when I go to http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSGuidance, I get a gnarly error page: When I list all projects on CodePlex, there's no listing for VSTSGuidance. What gives?

• Anonymous
  April 02, 2007
  Never mind.. works now. I tried to hit these links all morning and got errors, the site must have been waiting for me to report a propblem ;-)

• Anonymous
  April 10, 2007
  In my life, I don't have too much trouble remembering experiences. It's all those past lives I always

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2007
  I'm catching up on my Inbox after my vacation from a couple of weeks ago and I ran across an email from

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2007
  Via Dave Bost , via J.D. Meier ... It's been about a year and a half now since Microsoft released Visual

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2007
  This is all from last month, but I’ve been busy so it’s been in my queue. Sorry for the late

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2007
  Many customers must be looking for more guidance on how best to use our VSTS in the real world, the VSTS