One thing that many devs, and IT Pros, have asked for is support for PowerShell and PowerShell projects inside Visual Studio. With the latest update of Visual Studio, this appears to be coming closer. If you are interested, why not look at Ravikanth's recent article over on PowerShell Magazine for more details.
The support may not be as much as one might like, but it's a step in the right direction.
Super star PowerShell MVP Keith Hill has made an interesting find in Visual Studio's 2008 recent release - it needs PowerShell. Keith describes his find over on his excellent PowerShell focused blog: Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit Requires PowerShell.
Thanks for the find Keith (and thanks for your great blog too!).
Technorati: Keith Hill, PowerShell, Visual Studio 20008
Yet more documentation from the OCS team. In this case, the Office Communications Server 2007 Security Guide which is a 42-page document describing the security aspects and features of OCS 2007. This is a must read for all OCS admins!
The first of "the big 3" to actually be released (along with SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008) - Redmond Mag reports that Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2008. I know what I'll be doing over the next couple of days!
Microsoft has released a new beta of the next revision of Visual Studio. Code-named Orcas, this release is a Community Technology Preview (CTP). A CTP is an updated beta release of a product, which aims to provide uses with more timely access to new and updated features, at the possible expense of the very long testing time required for major beta releases. Microsoft first used this approach with the SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 products (quite successfully IMHO!).
The interesting thing about this CTP is that MS are shipping it both as a normal product install (up to 4.3GB in total) and as a VPC Virtual Image. The VPC setup involves downloading 8 RAR files taking up 4.83 GB. Once these files are downloaded, you can extract the VHD image and create your VM - which means you need over 20GB of free space (for the download, for the temp file WinRAR creates, and for the actual VHD). Once the downloads are finished, I'll post another article with the actual size of the VHD.
The highlights of this CTP include:
CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. When I looked tonight there are 7 PowerShell projects up there!
I think this is pretty cool - a set of additional PowerShell projects including:
WOW!
One of the things that I have really enjoyed, as a PowerShell MVP, is the sheer creativity of the community. It never ceases to amaze me how creative folks can be when given such a fantastic tool!
I got some mail this morning that pointed to a page on The Code Project, a Visual Studio and .NET community site. The page is entitled Deployment made simple using PowerShell. You can download a huge PowerShell script which handles some of your deployment needs. The script uses the .NET System.IO and System.Net class libraries.
Cool Stuff - well done Omar Al Zabir.
Microsoft has now begun shipping .NET Framework 2.0 (and Visual Studio 2005), even though the formal launch is not till Monday Nov 7th. If you want to run the RTM version of the .NET Framework (e.g. to run Visual Studio 2005 RTM) and you want the latest version of Monad, you'll need an updated version of the latter which you can download from here (for X86). If you are using X64, you can get the X64 Monad drop here.
This drop of Monad is the nearly the same as released earlier (but targetted towards an earlier version of the CLR). The only change is that the "Restricted" ExecutionPolicy is the default, which is discussed in the release notes.
You can download Beta 2 of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile Software Development.
MSF is going to change quite radically in the coming months. There will be two versions, MSF Agile, and MSF "Formal", otherwise known as MSF For CMMI Process Improvement. It appears that the guys from the silly names department seem to have been at work again (but as I sometimes get paid by the word, I can't grumble too much)
Details of MSF Agile are up on the web site, and are being baked in to Visual Studio. Details of MSF Formal have not been disclosed yet, and neither have details on MSF Certficication (at both practitioner and MCT levels) and certification training. One MS spokesman suggested this information would be available at product launch in November. We'll see how long after launch is required to deliver the training, certification, etc.
Microsoft are in the process of updating Microsoft Solutions Framework, as part of the ongoing work on Whidbey, and Visual Studio. Details have been sketchy, but we're beginning to see some details. For reasons I can't quite totally work out, Microsoft has released part of MSF 4.0 via GotDotNet Workspaces. You can obtain the first deliverable, MSF Agile. This material is delivered as a sort of web site, with a root page (ProcessGuidance.html), which points to other documents.
MSF Agile is "a scenario-driven, context-based, agile software development process for building .NET and other object-oriented applications. MSF Agile directly incorporates practices for handling quality of service requirements such as performance and security. It is also context-based and uses a context-driven approach to determine how to operate the project. "
Three key changes from MSF 3.0 are:
1. The lifecycle for each iteration is slimmed down to just three phases: Plan, Develop, Test.
2. The roles change too, with only 5 roles: Architect, Business Analyst, Developer, Project Manager, and Tester.
3. Finally, the work products are different. New artifacts include: Threat Model Data Flow Diagram, and Quality of Services Requirements List. The Vision Statement is still included!
It looks an interesting approach. I'll have to read more about it to discern the deeper differences.
The thing I most like about this page is that none of the tools are MS tools, but external tools. I'm familiar with a couple of these tools, but the rest are new to me - looks like more hours downloading and playing!
As far as Longhorn is concerned, I've been using Google's news alerts to get information about the product. Microsoft MVP Jim Eshelman is also tracking the stories on his web site. The site is not up to date (last entry is late July) but it's probably worth bookmarking. Take a look!
