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SharePoint educator, and Accentient Partner, Mindsharp, launches their first Customer Appreciation event. This event will run through the month of March, thanking customers for their continued support. The event will extend customers special package pricing on Mindsharp’s UserVersity computer based training products as well as Mindsharp public and private training classes. According to Bill English, Author and CEO of Mindsharp, "To put it simply, we just wanted to say Thank You to our customers and give something back in appreciation of their support." Customers will receive an average of $26,795 value for $995. It will include the 2007 UserVersity computer based training lessons, 20% off the just released 2010 lessons, one online or live seat at any Mindsharp public training class, 20% off a private class, and 20% off all Mindsharp public classes taken through December 31, 2011.

Microsoft just launched the "Test Professional Product Tour". Whether you are new to Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional or have some experience using it, this tour provides customers with a 200-level experience that can be followed-up with the downloading of the trial edition.



First, visit this site for the tour and then when you are reading to download and go hands-on, visit this site.

Here is a quick post with the materials and links from last weekend at the Boise Code Camp.

Scrum Workshop (with Adam Cogan)

• Official Scrum Guide
• Mike Cohn’s articles on User Stories | Planning Poker
• Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 template
• Professional Scrum Developer program

Also, check out the photos from ‘camp on Flickr. In the meantime, you can enjoy Adam and his blue screen right before our talk.

I’d like to say thank you to the community and the coordinators of the Montreal .NET Community for hosting the event last night. I enjoyed talking about my two favorite subjects: Visual Studio 2010 and Scrum. We also talked about the Professional Scrum Developer program.

Presentation (PDF) | Bookmarks (ZIP)

I actually had a need to do this today, so I did some browsing of the Team Foundation Server – Setup forums and found these steps:

1. Execute tfsconfig setup /uninstall:all.

   This should be done from the Program FilesMicrosoft Team Foundation Server 2010Tools directory.
   

2. Drop the Tfs_Configuration, Tfs_Warehouse, and (optionally) any team project collection relational databases.
3. Drop the Tfs_Analysis Analysis Services database.
4. Optionally, delete any SharePoint site collections that were created.
5. Optionally, delete any SQL Reporting Services folders that were created.

Unconfigured! (is that a word?)

ScrumButs are reasons why teams can’t take full advantage of Scrum to solve the problems and realize the benefits. Every Scrum role, rule, and timebox is designed to provide the desired benefits and address the problems. ScrumButs mean that Scrum has exposed a dysfunction that is contributing to the problem, but is too hard to fix. A ScrumBut retains the problem while modifying Scrum to make it invisible so that the dysfunction is no longer a thorn in the side of the team.

A ScrumBut has a particular syntax: (ScrumBut)(Reason)(Workaround)

Read more at Scrum.org.

Thank you for attending our recent Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional Webcast. I hope you enjoyed seeing an end-to-end simulation as a user story emerged into a testable requirement and how to implement Acceptance Test-Driven Development using Visual Studio 2010.

Note: During the Webcast I think I incorrectly stated that the Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 was a free download. In fact, you must be an MSDN subscriber to download it. Also, a question was asked about Coded UI (and fast-forward) support for Infragistics controls. I did some research and the support is not there yet, although Microsoft and Infragistics are both working on it. Please keep your eye on this blog post to be updated as new information becomes available.

There is a traditional resistance to using database projects – the production system is the reference point, and I have a backup, so what is the problem, right?

Since the GDR2 was released, this traditional logic was rendered obsolete, and the database developers can come in from the cold. Given that most apps eventually store the data, it is important to make sure that the database is robust, well-written, performant, and does integrate with the rest of the application. In the spirit of Nick Hornby, I offer my top 5 reasons to use database projects in Visual Studio.

On the Tech Ed Berlin VS2010 Ultimate booth, we fielded a wide range of questions about Visual Studio and TFS. We used a few web pages to help with the discussions, and the most visited ones are below: