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At TechEd Europe 2010, I had the privilege to work on the VS2010 Ultimate booth. It was great to meet so many folk, and find out how different people were using TFS and VS2010.

One recurring question was about upgrading, and the ways to do it.

Neno Loje delivered a great talk about administration of TFS, in which he covered a range of topics, including upgrading. I recommend watching the recording to check how you are doing. The recording is at  http://www.msteched.com/2009/Europe/DEV311.

He recommended an approach that will import the previous version in to a new instance of TFS. The advantages of this is that you can move to a 64 bit application tier, and have the certainty that the new instance is up and running before importing the existing data.

Recommended Reading

The devil is in the detail, and it is well worth reading up on the upgrade process:

I thought this post by Willy was interesting. It seems that the Visual Studio ALM Rangers are using a variation of Scrum that they are calling Ruck.

In the game of rugby, Ruck is a loose Scrum. The Rangers have adopted it as a term to define their unique and flexible process in order to handle distributed teams, part-time team members, and different time-zones.

For those of you who don’t know, the Rangers are a group of Microsoft internal and external folks (including MVPs) who build and deliver out-of-band solutions for missing features or guidance in Visual Studio.

I love this new letter to HR Managers (or anyone who wants to hire a ScrumMaster). It’s short and sweet.

Here’s the link so you can use it yourself.

I see that Microsoft has updated their PSD page to include the latest batch of new trainers. There are almost 40 trainers listed, from all over the world. Nice work everybody.

If you’d like to become a PSD trainer, follow this link.

For those of you who were planning on attending the Palouse Code Camp at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington this weekend, the date has changed!

According to their website, the new date is Saturday, October 30, 2010. This is the Saturday directly following Microsoft’s PDC conference in Redmond, so it is only a short drive or flight to Pullman for the dedicated ‘camper.

Today the Visual Studio ALM Rangers published more solid guidance. This time it was around a favorite topic of mine – Visual Studio database projects.

This guidance focuses on 5 areas:

• Solution and Project Management
• Source Code Control and Configuration Management
• Integrating External Changes with the Project System
• Build and Deployment Automation with Visual Studio Database Projects
• Database Testing and Deployment Verification

This release includes common guidance, usage scenarios, hands on labs, and lessons learned from real world engagements and the community discussions.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management is now available. This is great news. Also, Microsoft is including it at no additional charge to customers who have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN. This is awesome news because they were going to price it per CPU.

Here are some useful links:

· Visual Studio Lab Management Information
· Visual Studio Lab Management Trial and Instructions
· Visual Studio Lab Management Setup Videos
· Microsoft Virtualization VHD Test Drive Program and VHD Download
· Visual Studio Lab Management’s Team Blog and Getting Started Guide
· System Center Virtual Machine Manager Blog and Installation Guide

Rich has been busy this week, and was on Dot Net Rocks (for the first time !).

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=585

A great discussion of Scrum, Agile and VS2010, and how it plugs in to professional Scrum developer program.

It all started with Martin Fowler’s comment about flaccid scrum (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html), the PSD program helps folk sharpen up their scrum game to combat this.

UPDATE: The LiveMeeting recording has been posted on Channel 9.

Thank you for attending part 2 of our Managing Projects using Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 webcast today. Here are some links and resources that I promised.

Presentation

• Managing projects using Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 (part 2)

Bookmarks

• Urban Turtle Software

Demo Files

• Sample product backlog and shortcut batch file

Be sure to check back in a few days for the LiveMeeting recording. We’ll post it on our blog.