VSTS and TFS from Solution Integrator’s perspective

As I’m from a Solution Integration and Services background, I always used to think what kind of solutions and services we can offer around VSTS. One option is to provide consulting, deployment and training services to the organizations that are planning to adopt VSTS. The other could be to provide a solution that is purely and completely based on VSTS and TFS such as APPRISE, an enterprise project and process management solution. But aren’t that too less options for a product that is extensible and customizable to such a great extent? 

TFS is such a feature rich product that it should be used in many more solutions than just in development related environments. Requirements Authoring Starter Kit is a perfect example of such a solution. The solution integrates and uses a number of Microsoft products including TFS:

• Microsoft Office Word 2003
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server

The article about RASK introduced it as:

“The Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (RASK) provides a customizable requirements-authoring solution for software development teams. RASK serves two purposes. It provides the basis of a Requirements Authoring solution and illustrates how to access Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server programmatically from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System (Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office). RASK has broad functionality that you can extend with minimal effort.” 

You may not use the solution for the functionalities it provides, but you may still like it to learn so many ideas like:

• How TFS can be integrated in a solution that comprises of so many products that are not related to development environments
• Get few more example on TFS extensibilty
• Another example of the capabilities of Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office
• …

Finally MSF Process Guidance in VSTS gets some attention!

MSF Process Guidance has been very useful, but one of the least talked about area in VSTS. Both out-of-the-box Process Templates: 

• MSF for Agile Software Development
• MSF for CMMI Process Improvement

in VSTS provide very informative, user friendly and intuitive way of learning the artifacts defined in a software development lifecycle methodology. A lifecycle methodology may define different types of artifacts such as processes, work streams, activities, roles, metrics, enforcement policies etc. Generally, all these artifacts are documented in large static documents. Practitioners need to learn about these processes and artifacts by reading these long boring documents. However, the Process Guidance makes the learning process efficient and interesting by providing all the information about the methodology in an inter-connected set of HTML pages. You can browse through these pages according to the role you are performing or according to the activity you are pursuing. You can also see different work items and their fields involved in different steps of the activities.  

Process Guidance is provided as a part of VSTS Process Templates and is processed by Windows SharePoint Services plug-in during project creation. Like most of the constituents of VSTS Process Templates, Process Guidance can also be customized according to the requirements of your methodologies. Many articles, blogs, documents have been written by a large number of authors on customizing Process Templates parts: Work Items, Classifications, Roles and Permissions, Source Control Policies etc. However, there was hardly any documentation available on how to customize the Process Guidance.  

The final Process Guidance is available in the form of simple HTML pages, however customizing the Process Guidance is not as simple as editing the HTML pages. The Process Guidance is based on XML files and you need to use different tools including InfoPath, XML and XSL editors, and MSFWinBuild to get those inter-connected intuitive HTML pages from the source XML files. Finally, some attention has been given to Process Guidance and a set of 6 articles have been published on how to customize the Process Guidance. The articles are:

• Customizing the MSF Process Guidance
• Customizing Activities, Workstreams, and WorkItemTypes in the MSF Process Guidance
• Customizing Roles, RoleGroups, HowTos, HowToProcedures, and WorkProducts in the MSF Process Guidance
• Customizing Reports, Queries, Views, and Overview Pages in the MSF Process Guidance
• Adding Cross Referencing and CMMI Adherence to the MSF Process Guidance
• Building the MSF Process Guidance HTML Content Pages with MSFWinBuild

Next Web Services Interoperability Plug-Fest Announced

Jorgen Thelin and Kirill Gavrylyuk from Microsoft announced the next Web Services Interoperability Plug-Fest : September 26-28, 2006

These are the snippets from their message:

The Interop Plug-fest is an ad-hoc, open forum for companies who have implementations of various Web Services protocols to meet with engineers from the Connected Systems Group and test against the upcoming version of Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (formerly known as codename Indigo) product. …

This plug-fest event is open to anyone who desires to participate and who can bring an implementation to test interoperability with Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation product in any or all of the following areas:

• Basic Messaging Scenarios using protocols: SOAP1.1, SOAP1.2, WS-Addressing 2004/08, MTOM
• Message Security Scenarios using WS-Security 1.0, WS-Security 1.1, WS Secure Conversation 2005/02, WS-Trust 2005/02, Username Token Profile (1.0, 1.1), X509 Token Profile (1.0, 1.1), SAML Token Profile (1.0, 1.1), Kerberos Token Profile 1.1.
• STS- Security Token Service scenarios
• Reliable Messaging using WS-RM 2005/02
• Transactions using WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-Coordination
• WS-Policy and WS-MetadataExchange are included in several scenarios

For partipating, you can have a look at their complete message:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WS-Builders/message/98