But it works on my PC!

At the end of the month I will be speaking at a series of free Microsoft events in Belfast and Dublin. There going to be two session at each location

Managing application lifecycle “From requirements to retirement” with Team Foundation Server 2010

• Dublin - 31/03/2011 (AM): https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480694&Culture=en-IE
• Belfast – 01/04/2011 (AM): https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480760&Culture=en-IE

Better testing with lower costs - Saving your teams time and resources using Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Test Manager

• Dublin – 31/03/2011 (PM): https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480704&Culture=en-IE
• Belfast – 01/04/2011 (PM): https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480761&Culture=en-IE

So if you are in the area why not pop by?

I have spent today preparing my presentation and demos for the Black Marble event next week Enabling Agile Development with Cool Tools. I will be presenting with Gary Short of DevExpress. He is going to be talking about refactoring under the intriguing title ‘How to Eat an Elephant’.

My session will be on the tools to aid the project management side of the ALM process. Specifically the tools available for TFS 2010 both those ‘out the box’ and from third party vendors. I only have a hour slot, so I have had to be selective as there are may ‘cool tools’ to choose from. So after some thought I have chosen

Urban Turtle 
Telerik Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard
Ekobit TeamCompanion
EMC TFS Work Bench

Should be a good session, there are certainly some great tools in this list.

Want to monitor the health of your TFS system? Then wait no longer, the ALM Rangers have just shipped a SCOM Management pack for Visual Studio 2010.

The management pack provides availability and configuration monitoring, performance data collection, and default thresholds.  So if you use any SKU of SCOM 2007 and TFS 2010 why not download it and have a look.

Now that VS2010 has launched the branding of ‘Team System’ has gone; so I am no longer a MVP (Team System) but a MVP (Visual Studio ALM).

Hope everyone enjoyed my session VS2010 at NEBytes last night. I don't now about you but I think that quick end to end demo of build, manual test and Intellitrace debug work very nicely. That was the first time I have done it as a single demo and I think it works better than three smaller ones. Truely shows the intergrated team store for VS2010

Anyway as the session was demo lead there are no slides to download, but if you have follow up questions post a comment on this post or email me 

As I am sure you remember a few months ago Microsoft bought Teamprise and their Java clients for TFS. Well the team has got out their first Microsoft branded release, details can be found on Martin Woodward’s and Brian Harry’s blogs. This beta provides the first support for TFS2010

This release is very timely as I will be talking on the Java integration via the Eclipse plug-in at QCON next week and at the Architect Insight Conference at the end of the month. This  “Eaglestone” release means I can hopefully do my demos against TFS2010.

Week after next I will be speaking at QCon London with Simon Thurman of Microsoft on “The Interoperable Platform”.

So what does that title mean? Well for me, for this session, it will be about how you can use the ALM features of TFS even when using Eclipse for Java development. So it will be a demo led session on the Teamprise tools for Eclipse and how they can allow you to build a unified development team that works in both .NET and Java.

Should be an interesting event, the list of speaker looks great. Shame I will only be there for a day

Stuart Preston has just started an new UK ALM User Group, to quotes its blurb…

The UK ALM User Group is for practitioners of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) in the UK to get together and discuss and share ideas tools and techniques, as well as to socialise somewhere other than Agile and Software Development conferences!

Practitioners and enthusiasts from all disciplines are welcome. Membership is free. Please feel free to invite your UK based ALM network.

Looks very interesting, I hope there is enough critical mass of attendees to make it thrive. Why not join up and have your say?