Volume 2 Issue 4	June 2008
Team Edition for Testers MSDN Documentation Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers includes a suite of test tools that are integrated closely with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008; they work not only in their own testing framework, but also within a larger framework of software life cycle tools. Team Edition for Testers lets you create, manage, edit, and run tests, and also obtain and store test results. Several test types, including unit, Web, load, and manual tests, in addition to the measurement of code coverage, are integrated into Visual Studio. You run tests using the Visual Studio IDE. Additionally, you can run groups of tests or any single test other than the manual test type from a command line. Because the testing tools are integrated with the other parts of the Visual Studio Team System, you can publish results to a database, generate trend and historical reports, compare different kinds of data, and see how many and which bugs were found because of testing.	TFSTimes Futures Paul Hacker Those of you that have been following the TFSTimes newsletter on a regular basis undoubtedly noticed that we did not put out an edition last month. There were a few reasons for this, all of them personal. The main reason was just the number of days that I was on the road presenting at technology events along with attending the MVP Summit. With everything else that I do, a decision needed to be made to sacrifice something. Unfortunately that means the newsletter. Most folks are not aware of the amount of time that it takes to publish the newsletter. To add fuel to the fire, I was recently diagnosed with a tumor on my spine. Friday they went in and did a major operation to remove it. All went well, but it may mean that the newsletter may need to be put on hold for a bit as I recover. Hopefully I will have the newsletter back on track by the end of the summer. I appreciate your patience during this time. You will also notice that we are going back to the original decisions I made about the newsletter layout. In recent editions we have added in longer articles and more graphics. I have decided that I am going to go back to short “blurb” type articles that will most likely point back to some ones blog post. This is allow writers out there to get some recognition and will allow me to hopefully stuff more articles in each edition. I am really interested in your feedback on the direction I have chosen to go.
Inside This Issue 1 Visual Studio Team System 2008 goes RTM 1 Should I upgrade to 2008 4-5 TFS Personality Spotlight - Martin Woodward 6 Resources 7 Q and A 7 Calendar of Events
Load Test Report Generator on CodePlex Jeff Beehler The Team System Rangers have shipped again! Last Friday, we published our Ranger Load Test Report Generator to Codeplex. We decided to post this to the existing Load Test Reports Codplex site for customer convenience. The Load Test Report Generator contains a utility and a set of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports that allow users to generate Summary reports, counter comparison reports within and across test runs. The reports are simple but very flexible and can be used to generate & visualize various scenarios that a test team would like to create as a summary report for a set of load test runs. The tool allows users to author and generate reports in HTML/MHT and Doc formats. It applies a task based approach for creating reports and is based on the feedback received from consultants in professional test labs. Reports can also be generated using the concept of a template that makes it very easy to reuse predefined reports as templates for new ones. It is very simple to use custom build reports with the tool. All you need to do is publish your custom report in SSRS. Share Test Results   Sean Lumley This blog will just point out the ability to save out results of a set of tests. For example, you can run a web test or a set of unit tests and then share those results with another person on your team. Maybe you ran a web test and see a problem that you want to share with a developer. You can export the results of the web test and then send the results to someone else. This can be done for any of the test types.	There is one difference for sharing load test results. Most result types store all the information about the test result in the trx file. However, load tests do not store all the information about each of the counters in the trx. The trx stores some high level information and then a connection string to the database that contains the actual results. So if you share out the results of a load test, you need to make sure that the person you are sharing the results with has access to the load test database. Here is the MSDN link for exporting test results: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182499.aspx . HTML Agility Pack on CodePlex Josh Christie Let's face it; sometimes the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.HtmlDocument class just doesn't cut it when you're writing custom extraction and validation code. HtmlDocument was originally designed as an internal class to very efficiently parse URLs for dependent requests (such as images) out of HTML response bodies. Before VS 2005 RTM, we made HtmlDocument part of the public WebTestFramework API, but scheduling and resource constraints prevented us from adding more general purpose DOM features like InnerHtml, InnerText, and GetElementById. You could always parse the HTML string yourself, but fortunately there's a better option: HtmlAgilityPack. Read the complete post at http://blogs.msdn.com/joshch/archive/2006/12/10/better-html-parsing-and-validation-with-htmlagilitypack.aspx
New MSDN Test Center Jeff Beehler Testers play a critical role in the successful release of most software projects. However, to date, we haven't done a great job providing test specific information on MSDN. Today, with the introduction of the new Tester Center, that all changes. I encourage you to check it out today! Some of the features I'm most excited about include: Whiteboard videos - short focused conversations about typical topics that testers encounter on a daily basis. I appreciate the conversational tone and the fact that they're linked directly to forum posts for further discussion. Testing experts - looking at the list of testing experts the team has amassed to support this effort with new content is stunning. You can expect to see them blogging, writing articles, making videos and answering forum posts. Test column - ask your questions of the experts and get a detailed explanation from one of our experts. Forum - everywhere you see this icon , it'll take you to forum discussion specifically on that topic. In addition, you can post your own discussion topics for the community to contribute to. I'm looking forward to seeing this new Center come to life...with your help it can really turn into something great. What Happens During a Web Test Paul Hacker Ever want to know what happens when you run a web test in Team System? The main thing to understand about VSTS web tests is that they work at the HTTP layer. This blog post by Sean Lumley will explain how web tests work.	Team System Developer Centers Paul Hacker MSDN is a great resource for information on a wide variety of developer topics. The problem is that this information can be difficult to find. Recently there has been a shift in the way that the Team System information is being presented to end users. This happens by means of what they call Developer Centers. There are a variety of these centers based on the information you are looking for. For Team System there are Developer Centers that are role specific, Architect, Developer, Tester, Database, as well as Team Suite and Team Foundation Server. I personally am very excited about this endeavor. The information is easy to find and most of all quite relevant. The credit for this endeavor needs to go to Chuck Sterling. Chuck has recently taken over the content as well as the presentation. So a big thanks to Chuck and his team for what they have done so far. I would encourage anyone that is working with TFS/VSTS to check out these centers and please make sure to blog about the way you see it. Authoring and Debugging WebTests Techniques Ed Glas In Visual Studio 2008, many new features were implemented that eliminate the top issues found in the VS 2005 Web Test recorder, as covered in the white paper Web Test Authoring and Debugging Techniques. While many areas have been addressed, there will still be times when record/playback fails or does not give the desired result. I’ll be writing a series of blog articles on how the recorder works, “knobs” in the registry that will let you control what does and does not get recorded, and problems you may encounter. Finally, I’ll introduce new debugging techniques that will enable you to find and fix your tests. Read the post here
Dial your load – Load Test Plugin to Limit Users Paul Hacker Some time back Bill Barnett wrote a great blog post on how you could go about creating a custom load test plugin for your Team System Load Tests. The post provided two things, it showed users how easy it was to create a custom load test plugin for VSTS and two, it provided the user with a great sample that they could start using right away. I decided to take his advise and add a user interface to the plug-in so that users could truly “Dail-A-Load”. I presented this topic at a IndyTFS SIG meeting and it was a big hit. If you are interested in checking out the tool you can download it from the IndyTFS website. http://www.indytfs.org/sig/Downloads/tabid/55/Default.aspx and download the July 2007 Presentation materials. Moving VSTS 2005 Load Test Results Bill Barnett In VSTS 2008, it is now possible to easily export load test results from one test environment and import them into a load test results database on another machine using the Load Test Run as described in this blog post by Sean Lumley: http://blogs.msdn.com/slumley/pages/managing-load-test-results.aspx. For those still using VSTS 2005, this process is considerably more difficult, but can be done by following the steps outlined below.	What's New in Test Edition Paul Hacker /MSDN Documentation Visual Studio Team System Test Edition contains new features and improvements for the following areas in Visual Studio 2008: Use unit tests in Visual Studio Professional Edition. You can now create and run unit tests in the Visual Studio Professional Edition. Run unit tests more easily. You can now run unit tests from within your code. Use inheritance between test classes. Test classes have been improved to support an inheritance hierarchy. Run unit tests on devices. You can now use unit tests to test devices. Create host adapters. You can now create a new host adapter. A host adapter lets you run tests in an environment other than the default test environment. Improved unit test data binding. You can now easily bind a unit test to a data source, including CSV files and XML files, by using a wizard. For more information, see How to: Configure a Data-Driven Unit Test. Call a Web test from another Web test. You can insert a call to one Web test from a second Web test. For more information, see How to: Insert a Call to Another Web Test. Improved Web test data binding. You can now more easily and flexibly use data binding in Web tests and unit tests. Improved Web test features. You can now more flexibly apply validation rules and use their results to control Web test program flow. Control load modeling. You now have more flexible ways to control the load modeling in load tests that you run. And more
TFS PERSONALITY SPOTLIGHT ON MR JEFF LEVINSON Q. WHAT STARTED YOU ON VSTS? Well, I was working as an Enterprise Architect at Boeing and realized the potential of VSTS to bring Boeing's common processes and methodologies down to the developer level. One of the major issues in most organizations is that they have a process but people either don't know the process or don't follow it (because it's too difficult or not well understood). I saw VSTS as a way to help organizations institutionalize the process in a fairly painless way. In addition, the ability to gather consistent metrics on individual projects was lacking and I felt VSTS was the way to get this information without bogging down development teams in more paperwork. Q. WHAT KEEPS YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT THE PRODUCT? Being able to apply VSTS to various companies development teams and seeing those teams get actual benefit from it in a short period of time keeps me going. I started off my career as a developer and I've experienced the pain of disorganized teams where everyone does their own thing and doesn't work as a team. VSTS helps bring teams together, open up the lines of communication and can really help foster innovation in an organization. Seeing all of these things come together keeps me passionate about Team System. Q. WHAT EXCITES YOU MOST ABOUT THE VSTS/TFS 2008? Well, Team System 2008 really was a point release in my opinion. The most exciting thing about the 2008 release is Team Build. Microsoft listened to all of the issues surrounding the build process and took the feedback from customers and MVP's alike and made drastic changes. The number one reason we try to convince customers to move to 2008 is Team Build. It provides a more controlled, robust and stable environment for automated builds on a large scale. In addition, the retention policies help people avoid the dreaded "out of disk space" errors that teams got with Team System 2005. And finally, adding in a scheduler to Team System so you don't have to use the Windows Scheduler anymore helps round out the experience. Now you can set your builds for Continuous Integration without using the clunky workarounds people devised for 2005! Q. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A MICROSOFT MVP? Being a Microsoft MVP is just the coolest thing ever (okay, I'm a geek and I admit it)! I started off as an Architect MVP but I wasn't able to talk about my work so when I started working full time in the Team System space I transitioned. MVP's have the ability to communicate directly with the Microsoft product teams and get insights into upcoming releases. In addition, we have the ability to influence product development on behalf of the community and our customers which makes us more valuable in the field. I like to think that we help Microsoft make better products by being their eyes and ears out in the "real world".Being a Team System MVP has its' own meaning to me as well. We are one of the smaller MVP groups and all of us have areas of expertise in multiple areas of technology because Team System serves as a hub for a confluence of these technologies. Also, (as we just found out at the MVP Summit last week) the Team System MVP's have the highest satisfaction of any of the MVP groups because of our close working relationship with the product teams. For me personally, I haven't met a Team System MVP that I haven't liked and everyone is just so knowledgeable that it makes me proud to be a member of this group. Q. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE TESTING SKU? I think that the current testing tools in Team System 2008 need some additional work. They are a great feature of Team System in that they start to bring testing to the masses (let's face it, quality could be improved on almost every development team) for a relatively low cost (when compared with other test suites. I'm extremely excited about the upcoming testing features of Rosario and Camano in particular. I think Microsoft is moving in the direction of making the Testing SKU a first class test tool which will eventually be able to compete with any tool on the market today.
Resources Here is a list of some very valuable resources that will benefit anyone using, or thinking of using Team System or Team Foundation Server. Frequently Unanswered Questions - Just as it sounds. Questions that usually go unanswered TeamSystemRocks - All sorts of useful links sorted by date TeamSystem Developers Center -  A great all around developers resource Third Party Widgets - The most complete list of third party widgets for VSTS and TFS Visual Studio Team System Blogs – An extensive list of blogs for both Microsoft and the VSTS MVPs
Questions and Answers Q: Do I need a license to run the tester edition on our build server? A: The best resource available for these sorts of questions is the VSTS Licensing Whitepaper which goes into numerous licensing scenarios in depth. Q: Can I revert a coded web test back to a Gui Based test? A: No. Once converted to a coded web test you will not be able to convert it back to a GUI based web test. Q: Can I run web tests as part of a check in policy? A: Yes, There is a check in policy that allows you to select the types of tests that you want to run during a check in. Q: What is the cost of the Load Test Agent? A: The Load Test Agent runs around $5000.00 USD per processor. Q: Can I submit articles or suggestions to this newsletter? A: : Yes, In fact we encourage you to get involved at all levels. We really want to hear from our readers to help us forge the newsletter in the right direction.Please send any suggestions, feedback, or articles to TFSTimes	VSTS Calendar of Events Each month we will list upcoming UserGroup meetings and events. If you would like to see yours listed here, please contact us and we will be sure to include it in the next issue. IndyTFS - Kanban Meets TFS Place: The Gene B. Glick Education Center 7435 North Keystone Ave Indianapolis, IN 46240 Dates: Thursday June 12th 2008 VSTSMN - TBD Place: Microsoft 8300 Norman Center Dr., Suite 950 Bloomington, MN 55437 Dates: Wednesday, June 18th 2008 Dallas VSTS - TBD Place: 6230 N. Beltline Rd. Suite 301 Irving, TX. 75063 Dates: TBD Chicago VSTS - TBD Place: Microsoft Office 3025 Highland Pkwy # 300 Downers Grove, IL 60515 Dates: TBD Seattle VSTS- Migrate from 2005 to 2008 - Register Place: Microsoft Campus in Redmond - Building 118 - Mt. Sai. Room Dates: June 25th 2008