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What is new in Visual Studio 11 ALM Features? Part1

2011-09-18T13:27:00.000+02:00

Well, VS11 Comes with new great features that I was starving to see. Thank you for Brian Harry, and his team for the outstanding effort in this release. I expect that this version will rock up, and put itself at the Top of ALM solution products.

Code Review Workflow with Team Explorer

Visual Studio 11 Preview works hand in hand with Team Foundation Server 11 to provide best in class application lifecycle management. Visual Studio 11 facilities collaboration is by enabling developers to request and perform code reviews through using Team Explorer. This feature defines a workflow in Team Foundation Server that saves project state and routes review requests as work items to team members. These workflows are independent of any specific process or methodology, so you can incorporate code reviews at any convenient point in the project lifecycle.

The Request Review link in the My Work pane enables you to create a new code review task and assign it to one or more other developers.

The reviewer can accept or decline the review, and respond to any messages or queries associated with the code review, add annotations and more. Visual Studio 11 displays the code by using a “Diff” format, showing the original code and the changes made by the developer requesting the review. This feature enables the reviewer to quickly understand the scope of the changes and work more efficiently.

Announcing Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

2011-09-15T13:17:00.000+02:00

Today in the BUILD keynote Jason Zenders had shown some of the new functionality in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 11 Developer Preview and Microsoft® Team Foundation Server Preview. MSDN subscribers can download the previews today as well as the new release of .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview; general availability is on Friday, September 16.

The following is how Jason has concluded the announcement:

(Some exciting announcements are being made here at BUILD. Visual Studio 11 provides an integrated development experience that spans the entire lifecycle of software creation from architecture to code creation, testing and beyond. This release adds support for Windows 8 and HTML 5, enabling you to target platforms across devices, services and the cloud. Integration with Team Foundation Server enables the entire team to collaborate throughout the development cycle to create quality applications.

.NET 4.5 has focused on top developer requests across all our key technologies, and includes new features for Asynchronous programming in C# and Visual Basic, support for state machines in Windows Workflow, and increased investments in HTML5 and CSS3 in ASP.NET.)

Gartner: Microsoft Windows Phone market share to surpass Apple’s iOS in 2015

2011-04-11T12:56:00.000+02:00

It seems that the partnership Between Windows Phone 7 (WP7), and Nokia that has been establish began to deliver its fruits very early. Gartner group has released a new market study that declare their predictions of the Smartphone OS market till 2015.

Gartner has predicted that by 2015, WP7 will be the second most commonly used OS over Smartphone surpassing Apple’s IOS.

With a Market size that will exceed 1 Billion Device by 2015, Gartner predicts that Nokia will push Windows Phone well into the mid-tier of its portfolio by the end of 2012, driving the platform to be the third largest in the worldwide ranking by 2013. Gartner has revised its forecast of Windows Phone’s market share upward, solely by virtue of Microsoft’s alliance with Nokia. Although this is an honorable performance it is considerably less than what Symbian had achieve in the past underlying the upward battle that Nokia has to face.

Source: Gartner (April 2011)

From my point of view, this will not only affect WP7 as an Operating system, but also, it will pushes Visual Studio as one of the most supported Developer’s platform for Smartphone Application development.

Gartner’s detailed forecast is available in the report “Forecast: Mobile Communications Devices by Open Operating System, Worldwide, 2008-2015.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at www.gartner.com/resId=1619615.

Source: Gartner, Inc.

New Version of TFS Windows Shell Extension is about to get released

2011-02-26T13:13:00.000+02:00

A new version of TFS Windows Shell Extension is about to get released within the next couple of days. This version will come with support for new capabilities that could be done through the new version from Windows Explorer. Shelving will be one of the great features that will be included into the new release.

Windows shell extension has been first introduced as a part of the December 2008 Power Tools’ release. It allows you to do many of the version control operations directly inside the Windows Explorer without using the Team Explorer.

Visual Studio ALM Rangers Team Releases:Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010

2011-02-13T23:29:00.000+02:00

Couple of weeks ago, the VS ALM Rangers team has released a the Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide for 2010.

This guidance is created by the Rangers who have the mission to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. This content was created with support from Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from the field, where the technology has been tested and used.

Branching and merging of software is a very large topic. It is an area where there is a lot of maturity in the software industry. This Ranger solution focuses on applied and practical examples of branching that you can use right now. The 2010 release includes discussions around branching concepts and strategies but also focuses on practical hands-on labs.

Supported by 20K+ of downloads, I Advise everyone to download it, to read it, and to apply it.

Download it

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 RTM virtual machine for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is now available

2011-01-13T17:48:00.000+02:00

Team System Product Team has released a new virtual machine with latest updates for TFS as well as for Power Tools.

In addition, the operating system and programs installed were patched with all updates as of December 8, 2010. This virtual machine will stop working on June 1, 2011, when the trial software expires. A new version of this virtual machine will be made available before this one expires.

The Virtual machine could be used under Hyper-V on Windows 2008, and 2008 R2, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on Windows Vista, and Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7.

You can check more details about the virtual machine on Brian Keller Blog or got directly Here, Or go directly to download the Hyper-V version form Here.

Enjoy it :)

WP7 Reads (Right to Left) Languages

2010-11-10T12:23:00.002+02:00

Yesterday,
I got my HTC Mozart (WP7) Windows Phone 7 mobile. I Found it able to read Arabic Text which was perfect.

Silverlight Strategy Shift Clarification by Bob Muglia

2010-11-01T20:37:00.001+02:00

For People who attended the PDC in Redmond, or attended Local PDC as the one that has been held in Cairo, We all heard from BOB Muglia said that Silverlight strategy has been shifted. This doesn’t mean that Silverlight will die but, it will take a newer vision.

Couple of Minutes ago, Bob himslef has published a message for all PDC attendees clarifying this. The following words are an excerpt from Bob’s message.:

In the interview, I said several things that I want to emphasize:

Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft.
We’re working hard on the next release of Silverlight, and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac.
Silverlight is a core application development platform for Windows, and it’s the development platform for Windows Phone.

We haven’t yet publically announced a launch date for the next release of Silverlight, but we’ll talk more about it in the coming months.

Last week, we released some important updates to Silverlight 4, which shipped only six months ago and included major new features and tooling capabilities. Last week’s updates included improvements to WCF RIA Services, as well as the new Portable Library project –making it easier to share assemblies across SL Desktop, SL Phone, WPF and .NET on the server. John Papa delivered a PDC session on building business apps with Silverlight 4, and Shawn Burke delivered a PDC session on the portable library project. I recommend that you take a look at both of these.

Silverlight Strategy

I said, “Our Silverlight strategy and focus going forward has shifted.” This isn’t a negative statement, but rather, it’s a comment on how the industry has changed and how we’re adapting our Silverlight strategy to take advantage of that.

Below are some of the trends we’re tracking and optimizing around.

Customers are demanding the richest possible client experiences, and developers are increasingly looking to build premium, tailored experiences optimized for specific devices. Silverlight provides the richest way to build Web-delivered client apps. In particular, with Silverlight 4, we invested in enabling enterprise application development and now provide an outstanding platform to build rich business applications – both inside and outside the browser.

Customers want to be able to deliver client experiences that are optimized for specific form factors. Silverlight provides a rich UI framework that enables smooth animations and lends itself very well to touch input and embedded devices. At the PDC last week, we spent a lot of time talking about Windows Phone 7 and how Silverlight provides a great developer platform for creating apps for it. With the U.S. launch just days away, already we have more than 1,000 Silverlight apps built for Windows Phone, and consumers of the phone will be able to purchase these apps through an integrated marketplace built into each device. Recently, we’ve also demonstrated Silverlight apps running on Windows Embedded, and Silverlight is a critical component of our three-screen strategy.

Media delivery across the Internet continues to accelerate dramatically. Customers want HD, studio quality, premium media content. Silverlight has and will continue to be a pioneering technology that makes it possible to deliver the best media experiences anywhere. Whether it’s the Olympics, Netflix, or many other media experiences, we have and will continue to invest in it. Silverlight and IIS Media Services are the choice for premium media experiences with features like HTTP adaptive streaming, DECE-approved content protection, and offline media applications. In addition, IIS Smooth Streaming enables media delivery to a wide variety of devices, including devices where Silverlight isn’t supported.

Lastly, there has been massive growth in the breadth and diversity of devices made by a wide variety of vendors providing both open and closed systems. When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices. But the world has changed. As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible. We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices. At Microsoft, we’re committed to building the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows, and at the PDC, we showed the great progress we’re making on this with IE 9.

The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy for developers to use. Silverlight enables great client app and media experiences. It’s now installed on two-thirds of the world’s computers, and more than 600,000 developers currently build software using it. Make no mistake; we’ll continue to invest in Silverlight and enable developers to build great apps and experiences with it in the future.

End of Bob Clarification….

____________________________________

___________________________________

More and above Steve Ballmer:

has said the following that emphasizes that Silverlight will continue to be a very important product at Microsoft Products’ roadmap :

[We’ve seen the emergence of a wide variety of Internet connected devices – and as I said last week, HTML 5 will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across these devices, and Microsoft will build the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows. At the PDC we showed the great progress we are making on this with IE 9. We will also enable browser scenarios that provide additional capabilities, including Silverlight. Silverlight provides the richest media streaming capabilities on the web, and we will continue to deliver that on both Windows and Mac.

Client applications are important to take maximum advantage of devices, and we will deliver rich platforms and frameworks that enable developers to best take advantage of them. We’ve sold more than 240 million copies of Windows 7 in the last 12 months - an absolutely phenomenal number. Developers can build great applications for it using Win32, .NET, Silverlight and HTML5. ]

Finally, Team System on the Cloud

2010-10-28T20:58:00.000+02:00

A few Minutes ago, Brian Harry has just announced and demoed the Availability of the Team System as Service over Microsoft Cloud for renting. Think this will be of a great benefit for lots of small, and Medium ISVs that wont to invest in licensing, admin, and operations of a dedicated Team system installation.

SharePoint 2010 leads the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2010, Microsoftians now in an even stronger position than before

2010-10-03T12:36:00.000+02:00

Last September, 3, 2010 Gartner has released the new portals’ market report.

The great news was that SharePoint 2010 Leads the Magic Quadrant of Horizontal Portals; heading in this, IBM WebSphere portal, as well as Oracle Solutions. Microsoft SharePoint is a consideration in more Gartner portal inquiries — over 70% — than any other vendor.

According to Gartner: The portal market continues to consolidate, with most enterprises focusing on a core set of strategic providers. Yet, emerging demands and technology disruptions are raising the bar for value, as well as opening opportunities for new approaches and new entrants.

The Report Summary said:

The field of viable portal vendors has narrowed considerably, dropping from more than 50 vendors in 2003 to fewer than a dozen in 2010. However, the consolidation of traditional portal vendors doesn't necessarily mean the commoditization of the market. In light of pressing business needs to improve the user experience across channels, and amidst the innovations of Web 2.0 and the cloud, making the right portal choice is more important than ever.

The major technology shifts toward Web 2.0, the cloud and business versus the IT influence are galvanizing the portal market. Portals provide a single, personalized point of access to relevant information, processes and people. They appeal to business leaders as a means to improve employee productivity and collaboration, extend business processes and applications to broader audiences, improve business visibility and responsiveness, engage and serve customers, and improve relationships and efficiency among value chain partners. More importantly than ever, portals appeal to end users overwrought with too many systems to log into and too much information. Enterprise portals unify the user experience, and provide relevancy and context across disparate applications. They provide a unified user experience by spanning across on-premises and cloud boundaries, as well as business and social boundaries. IT organizations need them more than ever to pull together and aggregate disparate information, exert control and ensure compliance, and scale their ability to agilely deliver these applications to the business and users.

Looking forward, the horizontal portal market will serve as an important foundation for the emerging user experience platform (UXP). Organizations are focusing on business-level issues, requiring better engagement of users across a widening range of devices and channels, and new vendors are entering the market with alternative approaches to accomplishing the portal proposition. As portals, user interfaces, and user interaction technologies and practices have proliferated, they have evolved into disconnected stovepipes. Portal products, mashup tools, rich Internet application (RIA) tools, Ajax solutions, Web content management and mobile application development tools all target their respective platforms effectively, but they require enterprise developers to create separate user interaction models and code bases — with few, if any, cross-platform capabilities. Vendors have started to address enterprise concerns with the convergence of these related technologies. The UXP provides integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, RIAs, Ajax-enabled websites, Web content management and mobile applications. This integration can take the form of a set of separate, yet integrated, products (that may or may not be delivered as a suite) or a single product. Early examples of the UXP are largely derived from portal technology, and include Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter along with Universal Content Management (UCM), and IBM's broadening WebSphere Portal with its related collaboration and content management portfolio, which is developing toward a more cohesive user experience platform.

The importance of portals and the future of UXP are not lost on vendors; enterprise vendors are using portals to promote their most-sweeping and most-critical agendas. Many of the vendors are using the portal to promote a far broader and deeper agenda, whether it's their developer platforms and tools, content management capabilities, databases and middleware, or enterprise applications. As an inherently cloud-friendly aspect of middleware, portals are also a fundamental vehicle for transitioning customers to the cloud. The portal choice is, therefore, critical to ensure that organizations can accomplish their business goals, while ensuring vendor independence and agility.

Organizations tend to make portal decisions based on a wide range of factors, including functionality, familiarity, price, interoperability, usability, momentum among customers and the IT ecosystem at large. As portals have evolved, basic portal functions, such as user management, personalization, content management and integration, have been extended and enhanced, and new capabilities, such as social computing, analytics and business process management, have been added to respond to subsequent customer demands.

Click here to Read the full, report

Cairo PDC10: First time in Egypt Brought to you by MS3arab, Compu Pharaohs, and Microsoft

2010-10-01T13:21:00.000+02:00

As a Microsoft Regional Director – ME , and a co-founder of MS3arab community as well as a Principal Technical Consultant of Compu Pharaohs, have used all my communications along with the support of Compu Pharaohs, and the cooperation with the Rocking MS3arab new community in order to bring the PDC10 first time to Cairo. If you will attend , you will be able to watch the Keynote of Steve Ballmer live. Go and register. Registration is free but Tickets are about to finish up.

http://cairopdc10.eventbrite.com/

Great Moves in Visual Studio 2010 Team System Licensing, as usual….for the benefit of the customer 2/3

2010-09-09T17:38:00.000+02:00

2- TFS Inclusion in all MSDN Subscriptions

"We focus on one end of the spectrum on our large enterprise customers where we offer a rich set of features, integration with other source code integration, back-end management tools, portfolio [tools and more], but our biggest vision at Microsoft is to bring the benefits of ALM to all developers," says Sean McBreen, senior director for Visual Studio and MSDN product management at Microsoft. "In this release we did a lot of things to help bring ALM to the masses. We reduced the price, we included TFS in all of our MSDN subscriptions and we've really focused on simplifying the experience as well."

Early on, those moves seem to be paying off. "It used to be reasonably hard to get, very expensive and reasonably hard to deploy as well," says Ben Day, a Visual Studio ALM MVP and head of Benjamin Day Consulting Inc. "Now that they've made the deployment a lot easier, the licensing is $500 retail and TFS comes with just about every MSDN license that's out there. So Microsoft is trying to make it so that no one has an excuse to go to Subversion or Git or any of those other free open source version control systems.

Since that has changed, I personally see a lot more people who are interested in moving to TFS off of Visual SourceSafe."

"TFS is ultimately going to replace Visual SourceSafe," agrees Gousset. "The fact is, TFS can be used whether you've got one person or whether you've got a shop of 3,000 or 30,000 people."

To be Continued Later……

Great Moves in Visual Studio 2010 Team System Licensing, as usual….for the benefit of the customer 3/3

2010-09-08T16:49:00.001+02:00

3-Lab Management Inclusion into Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate

Lab Management enables organizations to use virtual labs to optimize the team development process. The goal is to help customers to manage their entire application lifecycle while achieving higher software quality and ROI. Lab Management is critical in realizing this vision. This change will dramatically reduce the adoption friction for Microsoft customers and increase the value of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN. Lab Management in Visual Stud in 2010 effectively democratizes virtual lab management.

Important Q&A about Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Lab Management 2/2

2010-09-07T12:33:00.000+02:00

Q: As a Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN subscriber, where
can I get the Release-to-Web (RTW) version of Lab Management and when can I start using this functionality?

Answer: Active Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN subscribers can
follow these simple steps to get the RTW version of Lab Management

1- Log into MSDN Subscriber Download.
2- Navigate to “Developer Tools” and then click on “Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management Deployment Guide” and
3-follow the instructions from the guidance document to set up Lab Management.

Q: In the SCVMM download details, why are there two hyperlinks? Which version of SCVMM should I download?

Answer: With this change in approach, Microsoft licensing documents are in the process of being updated to allow use of SCVMM
by Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscribers as part of the
Lab Management functionality. The licensing changes are expected to be in place at the start of October, at which time all
subscribers can download and install the full version of SCVMM available from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. In the interim,
you may choose to evaluate SCVMM using the trial download link provided, or using the full version from MSDN Subscriber
Downloads if your Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement provides evaluation use terms (such as through the Enterprise
Agreement or Select programs). Retail subscribers may have these rights earlier than October.

Q: Does my Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and/or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN subscription
include System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM)? What are the usage rights of SCVMM under this
release format?

Answer: SCVMM 2008 R2 will be included as part of your Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010
MSDN Subscription. You may use SCVMM 2008 R2 solely for development and testing use rights as described in your Visual
Studio Ultimate with MSDN or Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN Subscription EULAs. This allows you to use
SCVMM 2008 R2 for creating/configuring/removing virtual machines to use in development and testing scenarios allowed
by these licenses.

Q: What happens if my Ultimate or Test Professional with MSDN subscription lapses – do I lose access to Lab
Management or are the rights perpetual?

Answer: Since Lab Management is now effectively a benefit for Ultimate with MSDN and Test Professional with MSDN subscribers,
the “perpetual” use rights for it are the same as that of the respective MSDN subscription. However, the ability to download
new or updated software version and product keys ends when the MSDN Subscription expires. An expired subscriber can
only use software that was available during the subscription term for the subscription level purchased. See MSDN Licensing
for more details.

Q: Can I use my MSDN Subscription for the operating systems running on the Lab Management guest VM’s? Can I also use my MSDN Subscription for the operating systems hosting the Lab Management VM’s?

Answer: Yes, in both cases, as long as the usage is strictly for development and testing of your applications

Q: Does my SCVMM administrator need Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010
with MSDN in order to administer my SCVMM deployment for Lab Management?

A: Yes.

Q: How does Lab Management support VMware?

Answer: Today, you can already create environments on the VMware platform and do your testing on those environments using
Visual Studio 2010 testing tools, just like you can create environments that are based on physical machines. However, Lab
Management features such as snapshots and self-service creation of environments are currently only supported on Hyper-V
using SCVMM 2008 R2. We have not made plans to extend the support of these additional features to VMware at this point.

Q. What additional resources exist to help me educate my customers about Lab Management?

Answer: The following resources are available for you today to help customers understand Lab Management and deploy it.

Great Moves in Visual Studio 2010 Team System Licensing, as usual….for the benefit of the customer 1/3

2010-09-05T01:29:00.000+02:00

During the Last 6 Months, Microsoft has released great bulk of ALM Products. This is normal, expected and old news…

I know :)

But during these releases, one shared thing has to be noticed by the customers, which is, How do Microsoft tries to regroup products for the benefit of the customer with a target of less expensive offer with More productive solutions. We can see that at the following points:

1- Integrating DB Professional Features into the Developer Features:

- On Feb 2007 Microsoft has released the DB professional Edition. During this time there was a free Add-On for the Super Mega Suite of Team System which was Team Suite. Every other single user for VSTS had to pay for that as separate version.

-On November 2008, Microsoft has released the DB professional as part of the Team System 2008 Editions.

since this date, Lots of MVPs, Customers, and Partners called for availing these great tools with less expensive schema and easier licensing way.

on March 2010, Microsoft Launched VSTS 2010 and included the DB Professional features as part of the Dev Tools.

To be Continued….

Important Q&A about Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Lab Management 1/2

2010-09-01T03:12:00.000+02:00

These are some Common Q&As about Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management. Hope to be quiet helpful

Q: What is Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management?

Answer: Microsoft’s Visual Studio Lab Management solution extends the existing Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform to enable integrated Hyper-V based virtual machine management. Lab Management automates complex build-deploy-test workflows to optimize the build process, decrease risk and accelerate your time to market. Organizations can use it to reduce development and testing costs associated with setup, tear down and restoration of virtual environments to a known state. Lab Management helps to streamline the collaboration between development, Quality Assurance and operations to help organizations achieve higher ROI and realize the benefits of Microsoft’s entire ALM solution. Lab Management also enables testers to file rich bugs with links to environment snapshots which enable developers to quickly debug complex environments.

Q: Who is Lab Management intended for? How will it benefit me?

Answer:: Lab Management is intended for anyone involved in the application development and testing process. Lab Management helps to reduce costs associated with setup, tear down and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for build automation, test execution and build deployment. This eliminates waste across the entire application lifecycle by allowing development and QA to work together to effectively optimize the build process and minimize regression testing efforts. Lab Management also enables customers to easily file ‘rich actionable bugs’ with links to environment snapshots that developers can use to recreate the tester’s environments and identify issues. Lab Management enables the automation of build-deploy-test workflows to reduce overall risk and accelerate time to market.

Q: As an inclusion to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN subscriptions, is Microsoft divesting the Lab Management functionality going into the next release of Visual Studio?

Answer:: No, quite the opposite. This move represents a conscious decision to equip a much larger set of our customers with the ability to use virtual labs to optimize the team development process. Our goal is to help our customers better manage their application development and testing lifecycle while achieve higher software quality and ROI. Visual Studio Lab Management is critical to realizing this vision. Q: Which licenses are required to enable the Lab Management functionality? A: You must have at least one team member with one of the following licenses so that he or she can download required software from MSDN Subscriber Downloads to configure Lab Management: 1)Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN, or 2)Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN Once Lab Management is configured, any team member with an active MSDN subscription containing the software being used (for example, if the lab is running Windows Server and SQL Server then Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN would be sufficient, but the subscriber would need Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN if the lab uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or Microsoft Dynamics software) can leverage the Lab Management infrastructure. For example, team members can enable Build-Deploy-Test workflows through Team Explorer once Lab Management is configured. However, team members still need Microsoft Test Manager to file bugs and debug issues with environment snapshots.

Visual Studio Lab Management Trial Version is now available

2010-08-25T03:04:00.000+02:00

learn more about Visual Studio Lab Management and download a trial version of the product at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9739338

Lab Management Announcement

2010-08-17T02:44:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday, August 4th, as part of the VSLive! keynote at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time, Microsoft announced that

Lab Management will not be sold as a separate product, but instead will be available to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN subscribers. In addition, Microsoft will announce the general availability of Lab Management as “end of August.”

Why does this Change take place? Lab Management enables organizations to use virtual labs to optimize the team development process. The goal is to help customers to manage their entire application lifecycle while achieving higher software quality and ROI. Lab Management is critical in realizing this vision. This change will dramatically reduce the adoption friction for our customers and increase the value of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN. Lab Management in Visual Stud io 2010 effectively democratizes virtual lab management.

a New Great Day With Microsoft: Being a Microsoft RD

2010-01-13T15:07:00.002+02:00

Last Thursday I have been acknowledged that I was selected to be Microsoft Regional Director for Middle East and Africa. It was one of my most pleasant moments for me during my career life.

I am excited for this opportunity, and I think it will empower my passion to strengthen Microsoft Position into my Region’s Microsoft.

This year we have lots of things to succeed in together, It is not right to unveil it here but surely it will be reported to the Microsoft people :)

Thank you Microsoft.

I would Like to thank my Dear Friends; Goksin Bakir; at Microsoft MEA, and one of the most famous geeks at the region for more than a decade, for his nomination.

Ahmed Adel; Egypt’s DPE Lead as well his key team members, Mohamed Wahby, and Mohamed Nar.

TFS 2010 Power Tools Beta 2 is here 2/2

2010-01-03T16:50:00.000+02:00

As I have said couple of days ago at the first part of this article, Power tools for TFS 2010 is there now, you can check the first article for the downloading it.

If you are interested into more details after reading the following you can check Brian Harry Blog.

This release of the Power Tools will only run in a VS 2010 IDE. Most of the features will work against both a TFS 2010 and earlier servers. However a few features will only work against a 2010 server. More on this below when we talk about the individual features. The 2005/2008 Power Tools can still be used with the 2005/2008 VS installs while using a TFS 2010 server. So pick the version of the Power Tools that matches your client environment.

The first step to getting the Power Tools ready for 2010 was removing all of the features that are now built into the 2010 product (or in some way no longer relevant). If you still want to use some of these features against a TFS 2005/2008 server, you will need to use the TFS 2005/TFS2008 Power Tools. For example, the Rollback command has been added to TFS 2010 and removed from the Power Tools. However, the product feature requires new server side support in TFS 2010. If you want to continue to use Rollback against a TFS 2005/2008 server, you will need to use the TFS 2005/2008 Power Tools.

The list of things we’ve moved into the product includes:

Quick Label – Replaced by the new Team Explorer label dialog.
Rollback command – Replaced by the new TFS 2010 command line Rollback feature.
History command – tfpt history /followbranches replaced by new merge tracking features in both the command line and GUI.
Find Changeset menu – Replaced by built in “Find Changesets…” in 2010
Support for Client Certificates – Built in to TFS 2010
Build Notifications – An improved version is now included in Team Explorer 2010
TFSUsers – Not necessary because TFS 2010 now automatically reacts to Active Directory user name changes.
DestroyWI Command – Incorporated into witadmin.exe
DestroyWITD Command – Incorporated into witadmin.exe
TweakUI Command – Replaced by tf certificates and other 2010 features.
Destroygl – Incorporated into witadmin.exe
changedocUrl – Replaced by Configure menu in Office apps

they were able to incorporate so much of the Power Tools capability into the shipping product. The next step was getting the rest of the existing features working against VS/TFS 2010. Here’s the list of features supported in the upcoming Power Tools release and the changes we’ve made:

Process Template Editor – Our biggest investment has been in the Process Template Editor. Not only did it require a bunch of new features to support all of the new TFS 2010 work item tracking features but the team also invested quite a lot in clean up and bug fixing – we’ve received quite a few bug reports. In all, 80 bugs have been fixed in the Process Template Editor. The new Process Template Editor will not edit process templates associated with older TFS versions. If you need to edit a Process Template for TFS 2005 or TFS 2008, use the TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 Power Tools. The new features include.
- Support for out-of-the-box 2010 versions of MSF for Agile and MSF for CMMI process templates
- Creation and editing of query folders
- Creation and editing of custom link types
- Support for the new work item form controls: Label, enhanced links control, web page and link labels.
- Creation and editing of work item type categories.
Command Line Interface (tfpt) – No enhancements but other than the removed list above, everything should work.
Visual Studio Integration – There’s a bunch of miscellaneous IDE features that have been updated to work with VS/TFS 2010 but without feature enhancements. The most prominent are:
- Work Item templates
- Alerts Editor
- Find in Source Control
- …
Check in Policy Pack – Updated to work with VS 2010 while still allowing policies to be shared with older clients.
Best Practice Analyzer – Because the architecture of TFS has changed so substantially in this release (AT scale out, DT scale out, Team Project Collections, new “Job Service”, Lab Management, etc we need to completely overhaul the BPA tool. You can think of this release as the first step. The BPA tool now runs against a TFS 2010 server (however you’ll need to use the BPA tool from previous Power Tool releases against previous TFS versions because the new BPA tool won’t run against a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server). It now recognized all of the components of a TFS 2010 farm but has very few rules to validate it yet. Expect a big increment of new work on the BPA tool in the next Power Tools update.
Windows Shell Extension – Updated to work with TFS 2010 but no new features.
PowerShell Cmdlets – Updated to work with TFS 2010 but no new features.
MSSCCI Provider – Updated to work with TFS 2010 but no new features.

Truthfully, many of the Power Tools required no updates because the team has maintained pretty good compatibility between 2008 and 2010.

TFS 2010 Power Tools Beta 2 is here 1/2

2009-12-30T19:45:00.000+02:00

Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server (TFS) user experience. It is a genius idea for making TFS and the Team system as whole able to cope with the wonderful ideas that pop up to improve it usage experience as well as it is perfect idea to respond to the market needs in a faster way.

The Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 Power Tools have been released and are now available for download.

They Worked to get all of the existing Power Tools that they thought were critical to support Beta 2 adoption working against TFS/VS 2010 and updated to support new 2010 features. You will see that a few of the Power Tools are still not working in this build. We will release another Power Tool update around launch where all of the Power Tools will be working.

Team Foundation Power Tools

TFS MSSCCI Provider

Using Scrum for Team System Beta 2

2009-12-16T14:10:00.000+02:00

Brian harry has just announced that EMC (formerly from Conchango) has recently released a Beta of a new release of their popular SCRUM for Team System. This Beta is designed to work with TFS 2010 Beta 2. You can find download details here:

http://scrumforteamsystem.com/cs/forums/4554/ShowPost.aspx

for more info please check Crispin Parker's blog :

New Important Hot Fixes for Team System Web Access, and TFS Object Model

2009-12-10T08:09:00.001+02:00

Microsoft Has just released two updates (one a QFE for the TFS object model and the other a new version of the Team System Web Access Power Tool) that should significantly improve the scalability. Most of the issues fixed had to do with memory over allocation or leaking that resulted in memory exhaustion and process recycling.

You can get the updates here:

· KB974402 - QFE for TFS Object Model Assemblies

· TSWA 2008 – Updated TSWA 2008 SP1 Release (full install, you need to uninstall your existing TSWA 2008 instance first)

And you can read a bit more about it on Hakan's blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2009/12/07/team-system-web-access-2008-sp1-scalability-update.aspx

Installing TFS 2010 Beta2 on Win 2008 R2, a Problem, and The solution

2009-12-01T19:22:00.000+02:00

Microsoft Has just reported a known issue of installing TFS 2010 over Windows 2008 R2. For all people who are welling to install TFS 2010 Beta 2 over This version of windows, please read the following to know how to solve the problem with a recommended workaround from the Team System Product Team.

Scenario

After installing Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 on a Windows 2008 R2 server, when you navigate to Web Access site, you get the following error message:

Configuration Error
Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Problem

Windows 2008 R2 includes NET Framework 3.5 as a Windows feature, which means NET Framework cannot be installed on that system using the regular installer. It needs to be enabled as a feature instead. Since TFS setup tries to install NET Framework 3.5 using the installer, it fails for this reason.

Since NET 3.5 is not available after TFS installation, Web Access is broken.

Workaround

The workaround is to enable NET Framework 3.5 feature on Windows 2008 R2 using the Role Manager.

Open Server Manager
Click the Features node
Click Add Features
Check “.NET Framework 3.5.1 Features” (including all sub nodes)
Click Next, and click Install to finish the installation

Brian Harry Sources Safe , and TFS 2010 Part 2/2

2009-11-16T12:52:00.000+02:00

TFS 2010 represents a huge step forward in making TFS more approachable by smaller teams. With software development technology continuing to advance and SourceSafe slowly looking older, TFS 2010 is a great opportunity for SourceSafe users to look at updating their toolset.

So what’s different about TFS 2010?

There are 3 main areas that we’ve focused on in 2010 to make TFS attractive to smaller teams:

Price – We’re not quite ready to announce the pricing and licensing for 2010 yet but I can tell you that it will be at least as easy and cost effective to get as SourceSafe has been. Stay tuned for more info on this.
Pre-reqs – We’ve eliminated the vast majority of the restrictions TFS has historically had:
- TFS 2010 can be installed on a domain controller – We understand that many small organizations don’t have spare servers lying around and they need to be able to consolidate their servers. Now if you just have one server and it’s your domain controller, email server and whatever else you need it for, you can use it for TFS too!
- TFS 2010 can be installed on client OSes – The TFS server can be installed on Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium and above. Of course it can also be installed on server OSes (Windows 2K3, Windows 2K8 and Windows 2K8 R2). If you want to run version control locally on your laptop – you can do that. In fact, just to prove it out, I bought a Samsung N110 Netbook and installed VS 2010, TFS 2010 and a build server all on the Netbook, running Windows 7 and it works!
- TFS 2010 supports both 32 & 64 bit – No matter whether you’re running a newer 64-bit OS or an older 32-bit OS, TFS will work on your system.
Installation – Installing TFS has been a pain point for years. Although it’s gotten better, 2010 represents a quantum leap. The TFS installer now has 3 wizards: Basic, Standard and Advanced. The big innovation is the new “Basic” install wizard. It is a Next, Next, Next install experience that allows you to install and configure TFS in about 20 minutes or less (assuming .NET and SQL Express are already on your computer – a little longer if TFS has to install them for you). Both will already be there if you’ve installed VS 2010. The Basic wizard will install and configure IIS (if it’s not already there), install and configure SQL Express (if it’s not already there), and install and configure TFS. The only thing that really pains me is installing .NET 4.0 requires a reboot :(. Here are screenshots of the entire installation experience:

And that’s it – TFS is installed and ready to use. There’s a similarly (but not quite as) easy wizard for configuring a build server on the same machine…

All of this gives you a development system with Version Control, Bug tracking and build automation (making continuous integration a snap!). What it lacks from Standard TFS is Sharepoint and Reporting capabilities. The great thing though is that TFS "Basic” IS TFS so as your needs grow you can reconfigure it to add more capabilities.

It’s a really exciting development and I hope you really like it. I encourage you to get TFS 2010 Beta 2 when it is available later this fall and give it a try.

Being Part of Team System 2010 Feature History

2009-11-11T22:54:00.000+02:00

Today, is my first day at TechEd Berlin, 2009. despite of starting two days ago, i couldn’t come earlier due to some work commitments. Actually I decided to come to TechEd this year even if I am late due to My Commitment to the Team System Ask The Expert Booth, and I got my Prize for that once i got in :)

Once I got to the Booth which was the first thing to do once i got to the Event, I met The great Brian Harry again along With Stefanie Saad the TFS Group Program Manager. Stefanie told me that they Kept the MSF Agile Template with a new version (5.0) into the 2010 release of the TFS. She told me that one of the major drivers for this was my continuous efforts of convincing the product team that MSF agile Template is a crucial part for lots of companies.

This means that my efforts has succeeded to keep MSF Agile Template, and now i am part of the history of this release Which is really something i will be proud of always.

Actually, 12 months ago, the product team was thinking of removing this template from the TFS but, I tried to work hard and keep the communication always opened trying to convince them that this is a very harmful action to the Team System.

Because of the fact that Microsoft is a customer Oriented SW producer, they heard my concern with passion finally, decided to keep it based on lengthy exercise that made them sure of my Opinion. Everyday i work with Microsoft people I became more sure that the voice of customer and the benefit of customer is the major concern at all Microsoft Decision that always driven by voices of the Market. Thank you Brian, thank you Stefanie, Thank you Team System, and Thank you Microsoft :)

Brain Harry, Source Safe, and TFS; an impressive story of success – Part 1/2

2009-10-30T10:53:00.000+02:00

The story of success of the Great Brian Harry is an inspiring story for me, surely, the story of success of the miracle that is called Bill Gates is the most inspiring one at my career.

What Makes Brian’s story is more compelling now is the fact that it is more recent. The two stories have 20 years gap between them. this like a full edge into the Geology science. This means that Brian’s story seems closer and more applicable now because it depends on regular Idea and a doable application Which is Sources Safe(which was the first GUI source control tool for Microsoft development to be used), while Bill’s story was depending on a full new technology (applications over Microprocessors). I invite you the here a fast track of this story as has been narrated by Brian himself. This is the First part , I will write the second part to concentrate on the Technical Part of TFS 2010 vs.. Source safe.

I hope to enjoy both parts :)

We started building SourceSafe in January 1992 in the vacated dining room of the house belonging to one of my partners. Within a couple of short years SourceSafe went from concept to major success and was acquired by Microsoft in 1994, soon after which it became the most widely used version control system in the world. The thing that was truly novel about SourceSafe in the early 1990s was that it was really easy to learn and use. People tried it and just liked it. It wasn’t the most powerful system around but it had what people needed and was a refreshing break from complicated command line oriented interfaces.

However SourceSafe was designed and built in the early 90’s and a lot has changed since then. Technologies are different – the internet really didn’t exist in a meaningful way (web browsers were in early experimentation), databases were still complicated products primarily used for enterprise mission critical data, etc; and development is a lot different – projects were much smaller and less sophisticated then. The emergence of Visual Basic in the early 90’s really changed the landscape of development and brought a lot of people into the field who would have never previously considered it and made custom software a much bigger part of people’s lives.

Other trends have developed and gained a great deal of momentum. Frustration with traditional ways of executing software projects, the Agile set of development methodologies have become VERY popular, bringing with them a new set of practices - unit testing, continuous integration, TDD, and more.

Right around the beginning of 2003 – almost 11 years after beginning the SourceSafe journey, I and a few other people embarked to create Team Foundation Server. The goal was to create a development team collaboration product that would meet the needs of virtually any development team for the next couple of decades. It is based on modern technologies – SQL Server, ASP.NET, Web Services, .NET, etc. And it takes a comprehensive view of the software development lifecycle, with the intent of ultimately addressing all phases and all participants.

To make sure we could handle the broadest range, we started by targeting enterprise customers and development teams with more involved development processes. The pinnacle of that has been the Microsoft Developer Division experience that I’ve talked so much about where we have over 3,500 regular users and Terra bytes upon Terrabytes of data. However, it has been our intention from the beginning to build a toolset that is attractive to teams of all sizes and all levels of process.

For smaller teams, the most common complaints about TFS 2005 were that it was expensive, difficult to install, difficult to manage and required onerous pre-reqs. We made good progress on the setup experience in TFS 2008, although most of that was oriented towards enterprise customers who needed more installation flexibility.

TFS 2010 Beta2 Available now

2009-10-23T20:14:00.002+02:00

Microsoft has just announced the availability of Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 along with the Ultimate, Premium and Professional editions of Visual Studio 2010.

Download Links:

Related Resources

These are some fast questions that have been answered by Hakan Eskici about the new release:

Where is Web Access?

Web Access is integrated into Team Foundation Server and gets installed by default when you install Team Foundation Server.

On a default configuration, Web Access is available at:

http://server:8080/tfs/web

Where is Work Item Only View (previously known as WIWA)?

WIOV now shares the same URL with full Web Access:

http://server:8080/tfs/web

There is a new permission to control access to full Web Access features. Anyone in the “Work Item Only View Users” group will have that permission denied, therefore they will see the Work Item Only View. Others will see full Web Access.

How can I install Web Access separately on its own server?

The recommended way is to install a “Application Tier Only” instance of TFS by pointing it to the same TFS database and using that instance just for Web Access. For example:

Server1: End users connect to this server from Team Explorer (Web Access is available but not used)
Server2: Web Access users connect to this server from a Web browser (TFS Application Tier is available but not used)

Some Extra Dogfooding Stats from Brian's Blog

2009-07-20T22:01:00.000+02:00

These are most recent statisitcs of the dogfooding (the team system's team TFS) Servers. These are just published this week. They can show how much scalable is the Team system to run and work in huge environments like Micrsoft. This is a message for all attackers from the Scalability point of view.

Users

Recent users: 3,177 (up 12)
Users with assigned work items: 4,989 (up 227)
Version control users: 7,911 (up 2,353)

Work Items

Work Items: 710,680 (up 148,412)
Areas & Iterations: 12,383 (up 575)
Work item versions: 6,358,545 (up 1,478,148)
Attached files: 382,464 (up 54,459)
Queries: 52,060 (up 12,947)

Version control

Files/Folders: 686,121,239 (up 170,909,714)
Total compressed file size: 5,290,319 MB (up 1,366,710 MB)
Checkins: 992,015 (up 290,114)
Shelvesets: 149,293 (up 62,974)
Merge history: 1,640,660,707 (up 433,097,493)
Pending changes: 49,692,927 (up 11,520,012)
Workspaces: 28,678 (up 10,924)
Local copies: 4,255,597,662 (was 4,040,396,778)

Commands (last 7 days)

Work Item queries: 1,562,228 (up 606,998)
Work Item updates: 59,412 (up 10,168)
Work Item opens: 1,311,384 (up 759,119)
Gets: 687,643 (up 112,917)
Downloads: 23,370,988 (down 6,977,693)
Checkins: 17,576 (up 9,061)
Uploads: 341,514 (up 174,148)
Shelves: 8,634 (up 996)

Team System dogfooding Milestone

2009-07-19T21:49:00.000+02:00

Brian Harry has just announced yesterday that their Team's TFS has reached the 1,000,000 check-in milestone.

This shows really that Microsoft always Use what do they build, and build what do they use.

the below graph shows the development of the check-ins curve

.NET Framework, VSTS Important downloads Official Page (Hotfixes, CTPs,..)

2009-01-12T06:26:00.003+02:00

Here is an Important Page that is very important for everyone who used to use .NET Framework, VS.NET, and VSTS. It is very famous place that we all have to know about

Downloads Page

New Troubleshooting Installation of Team Foundation

2009-01-08T07:08:00.001+02:00

Brian Harry has declared the release of a new Guide for preventing/eliminating the TFS configuration and Installation problems. This is not a replacement of the TFS Best Practices Analyzer but, it is something that helps in addition to it.

As far as I know there is no downloadable offline version, only htm based version till now, which is still good.

Parallel Development using VS.NET 2010, Why, and How?

2008-12-04T06:23:00.000+02:00

Why?

As demands for application performance increased, customers have traditionally solved the problem by simply increasing the underlying power of the hardware that the application is running on. Over the last several years developers have seen the CPUs that their applications run on start to include 2, 4 or more cores. While the power of the hardware has increased, the transition to a multi-core environment has impacted the applications that developers write. The majority of applications will not be able to automatically take advantage of this multi-core hardware change. Developers will need to modify the way they write applications and the architectures they use for these applications. Creating parallel capable code using current technologies is unfortunately not trivial. Multi-thread programming introduces not only application architecture challenges to complexity and robustness but also exposes the tooling developers use as being optimized for single-threaded development.

How?

Microsoft is making a major commitment to make parallel development accessible to a wide range of developers, whether they are using native code or the .NET Framework. With Visual Studio 2010 we are delivering:
• Visual Studio IDE support for Parallel development
• Native C++ libraries and compiler support
for Parallel applications
The .NET Framework 4.0 also provides the core framework support to build parallel applications through technologies such as P-LIINQ and parallel language semantics and framework components. Visual Studio 2010 provides integrated parallel development support. In Visual Studio 2010 the debugger is aware of the parallel nature of code and can present the state of the application execution during debugging across the different parallel execution units. The debugger also has custom displays for parallel code such as task & thread windows and a “multi” or “cactus” stack view window that graphically shows the execution path of the individual tasks.

Being able to develop and debug your application doesn’t mean that it takes advantage of all the available power. To help developers do this, Visual Studio 2010 also includes a parallel capable performance analyzer that enables you to extensively instrument you code to visually see the
concurrency issues that are in your applications. Combine this with the features of the Visual Studio IDE, and developers have a highly productive, visual environment for building the
best parallel capable applications available.

Microsoft’s goal is to simplify parallel programming by taking a holistic approach and providing solutions which span from local to distributed computing and from task concurrency to data parallelism. Microsoft plans to deliver a solution-stack consisting of OS resource management, a concurrency runtime, programming models, language extensions, libraries, and tools, which will make it simpler for both native and managed code developers to safely and productively build robust, scalable and responsive applications. This will also enable industry partners to complement Microsoft’s technologies in order to solve the complex problems associated with developing high-quality parallel software.
Microsoft’s goal is to increase productivity by encapsulating complexity, so developers can focus on solving business problems.

The CTP includes .NET Framework libraries such as the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), as well as the Parallel Pattern Library (PPL) and Concurrency Runtime for developing native applications with C++, and parallel profiling and debugging tools.
This CTP is available for download as a Virtual PC image. Virtual PC supports only one core; a user will likely not see significant parallel performance benefits on manycore machines.

Finally VSTS product Team did it; Dynamically analyzing your Applications using Visual Studio.Net 2010Using the Threads Profiler

2008-11-12T20:14:00.000+02:00

Actually this is a feature that I have waited two years, Since two years ago, I began to work with Intel people over the Intel Thread Checker, and Intel Thread profiler tools. I even have delivered the first course all over the world about how to use Thread Checker, and Thread Profiler. At those days, we in Compu Pharaohs (The company that I work for) has initiated an awareness campaign in cooperation with people at Microsoft Egypt in Order to evangelism for the VSTS 2005. I wished at these days to see some of those tools capabilities to get availed at the VSTS. Actually Intel People told me that there are working with the Microsoft VSTS team in order to include the thread profiler capabilities into the VSTS. Afterwards, I received lots of customers requests for availing the multi-threading profiler inside the VSTS. Sometimes, I replied to those people\s request by what Intel people told me, but inside myself, and as a developer for more than 15 years, I was looking to include the support of dynamic analysis for the multi-threaded applications inside VSTS, not to use the thread profiler. Why?
Because when this is getting included inside the VSTS, it will leverage the power of test case management, work item tracking, and bug tracking.

Today, What I always dreamed off has come true. VSTS 2010 is coming with Multi-Threaded Applications Dynamic Analysis. This means that you will be able to profile your threads, check whether your application is utilizing the parallel resources correctly, or not. If not, how is the workload is distributed over the different threads. How does each thread perform? What is the running code inside each thread…etc?

The above figure shows one of the thread dynamic analysis for a given application.

This actually, can help developers parallel applications developers to develop, and test their applications by an easier year. As many of you know that the parallel processing is nowadays a key factor in the success of many enterprise, as well as critical mission applications. The processors industry nowadays is scaling out by means of adding multiple core processors inside one box. This is due the physics of the processor bus clock speed capacity. Up till the Nano technology could be used into the processors production, the processing clock speed will not increase massively, instead Intel will increase the number of core inside the single-box processor (from 2, to 4, to 8 now,…etc). Developers need to understand this correctly, and design their applications in a multi-threading mode which is currently the only way that can utilize the real power of the multi-core processors. Microsoft he seized this opportunity and introduced at the VS.NET 2010 CTP a Thread profiler that can dynamically analyze the different running threads of the system during running the applications.

Tech ED Developer 2008 Keynote Speech VSTS briefing

2008-11-11T06:07:00.002+02:00

Jason Zender Announcing the VSTS 2010 Lab Management

Jason Zander kick start Tech·Ed EMEA Developers with his keynote presentation. Jason discusses what the team is doing as the leader of the Visual Studio division at Microsoft to make a developer's job easier with Visual Studio 2010, the next release of the market leading Visual Studio toolkit, and provides extensive examples with Visual Studio 2010 demonstrations.
He has announced again the release of the first available CTP for VS.NET 2010. It is important here to highlight the new features that he has already talked about

What Happens in Tech Ed Developers 2008 This Year:

2008-11-10T15:25:00.001+02:00

Welcome from Barcelona, Spain, one of the most attractive cities all over the world, at least for me :)
But what really makes it more attractive these days, is being the incubator for the most important technical event for all developers across EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) which is Tech Ed Developers 2008. This year, the event seems more blurring, lots of sessions, with higher level than last year (at my opinion). For the second year in row, I contribute at the event as an Expert which really pleased me.

It was nice chance to meet Brian Harry: the Team System GPM (Group Program Manager), Stephanie Saad; the TFS GPM, Mario Rodreguiz; the TFS Architect, and Work Item Tracking Program Manager, and Peter Prosovt; the Architect Edition Program Manager. We discussed many points regarding the coming VSTS 2010 version. And through discussions, as well as through attending there session and knew many important new things that are already have been released into the available CTP, or will be available at the final release but didn't finished yet. For people who didn't love VSTS yet, I promise you to fall in love this time with the release of the 2010 version. I can assure you that :)

VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR RC Has Been Released

2008-10-24T01:37:00.002+02:00

Wonderful News, VSTS 2008 DB Professional, commonly called Data Dude, has been Released today. The Father of this wonderful product (Gert Drapers) has just announced couple of hours ago in his PDC session that his Team has released the DB pro GDR (General re-Distribution Release).

One of the Most Wonderful features that is coming with this GDR is the SQL Server 2008 support through the usage of the provider Model. Actually this support has begun to be a hot question for many of the SQL Server 2008 early adaptors enterprise customers who uses VSTS as well inside their development Departments
you can download it from the following Link:

It is currently apparent that this release will have a massive changes of the initial DB pro 2008 release. Anyways this is not the GDR Final Release version. The Final Release is Expected to Get release before end of this year (2008).
Download Setup

Announcement of Visual Studio.NET 2010, and .NET framework 4.0

2008-10-03T05:11:00.000+02:00

On 29th of September Microsoft has announced the first CTP of VS.NET code name Rosario under the commercial name of Visual Studio.NET 2010. This version will come along with .NET framework that gives major attention for many new aspects. This includes; Cloud computing which is the real implementation of the S+S (Software + Services), and parallel computing, and multi-touch applications, and Lab Management.

Moreover, it tries to enhance web development experience, code writing, AJAX based applications, and office, and SharePoint Integration, and surely my beloved VS.net part; the Team System (I will talk about this in more details at my next coming blogs).

I Invite you to download the CTP and get Impressed as a Coder, Tester, Architect, DB Professional

Download the Factsheet (pdf)

Download the Factsheet (XPS)

New Release (3.1) of Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse

2008-06-12T13:22:00.000+02:00

This is a maintenance release free to everyone with a valid Teamprise 3.0 license and includes several bug fixes along with a few new features. For the proper release notes, take a look here. However I just wanted to point out a few highlights.

Improved Offline Support
With-out doubt, the biggest new feature in Teamprise 3.1 for most people will be the improved offline support. If you right click on a project in the Eclipse IDE, you are now presented with a "Go Offline" option which allows you to tell Teamprise not to bother trying to talk to TFS for a while (previously you had to restart Eclipse for Teamprise to ask you if you wanted to go offline, and only then after it had tried *really* hard to connect).
While offline, you can still perform all the file operations like you expect -- you can add, edit, move and delete files just like if you were online.
When you want to come back online (say when you have stepped back out of the plane, bus, meeting room), you can right click on the project and say "Return Online" and Teamprise will do it's best to detect what changes have happened while you were away, giving you the option to pend those changes.
There is even "return online" capability in the stand-alone client Teamprise Explorer which is very neat and makes working with tools that are not TFS aware a little easier too. The actual algorithm used by the return online feature is more sophisticated than just checking for read/write status in your local workspace, we also do some magic and compare checksums of the file contents etc. Fellow Teamprise blogger Ed Thomson was the lead developer for the offline work and he has some more details on his blog.

For detailed release features please check it on Martin Woodward Blog address below

http://www.woodwardweb.com/teamprise/000440.html

VSTS and Other Technologies: great future is waiting them together

2008-05-25T16:52:00.003+02:00

During the Last Weeks I have spent notable time in studying the booming REST Architecture. Actually I think that there is increasingly booming interest about this architecture that has been first proposed in 2001.

What made me interested to deep dive into was the new support that has been introduced inside the WCF 3.5 for it.

Before that, I have spent another notable time in studying the Open XML standard during the fierce battle of ISO voting.

Today, I have a belief that combining them together can help VSTS to have new day over other platforms specially Linux (when using something like the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse).

1- If the MSF template documents could be availed in Open XML format, this will help in using it on Linux using one of the Open Source Linux based OXML editors.
2- Availing the TFS interface through RESTful web service may simplify the process of extending the VSTS especially for clients that works over Linux and non-windows platforms.
I think that I will try to explain the RESTful architecture at the next coming weeks.

Open XML Approved ISO Standard

2008-04-02T12:15:00.006+02:00

As I have promised yesterday, here are the details of the Approval of Open XML ISO standard document format that has been published yesterday:

Open XML ISO Voting Result

2008-04-01T19:39:00.004+02:00

Few hours ago, Open XML (OOXML) has been approved as an ISO standard. Today the results have been published by ISO at 14:00 Geneva local time. The approval came with a missive number of P as well as O members that votes yes.

The Open XML has been Approved by the majority of 75% of the P-members and refusal of only 14% of the overall voting countries (10 Countries)
As a member into the Egyptian ISO national body, I had the honor to vote by YES for this distinguished standard. As an Arabic guy I am really happy that today, Arabic normal users are able to write their own Arabic documents using an ISO standard document format. The Arabic governments can exchange their own documents using a standard document format. Moreover, the Arabic scientific conferences will be able to accept Word Arabic documents as a standard document format.
At my subsequent Article, I will begin to talk about how can Open XML ISO standard can affect the VSTS users. As VSTS MVP, During my support for the VSTS users across Middle East Countries, i have faced some challenges that Open XML can solve it now.
I will publish the detailed result tomorrow.
Congratulations for all Arabs, as well as Microsoft People.

What is new in TFS 2008: More Details - Part2

2008-01-15T16:57:00.000+02:00

2.Build

Continuous Integration builds –Supports the creation of build triggers that allows you to configure exactly when Continuous Integration builds should be started. For example, you can set a trigger so that every check-in starts a build, or you can set up a rolling build so that builds will start no more often than every X minutes.
Support for build queuing –Supports build queuing and queue management. This is especially useful for Continuous Integration as multiple check-ins may queue up multiple builds.
Scheduled builds –Supports scheduled builds, which can be configured to start at specified times based on your organization’s requirements.
Drop management –Supports drop management, which gives you the ability to set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted.
Specify build properties - Allows you to specify what source and versions of source should be built along with other build properties for a build type. There are many more exposed properties for customizing a build. Additionally, MSBuild command-line parameters can be passed when queuing builds.
Extensibility of build targets –Improves extensibility of the build targets. For example, you now have the ability to easily execute targets before and after each Visual Studio solution or project is built.
Build management –Allows you to stop and delete builds from within Visual Studio.
Build configuration –Simplifies the ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build.
Build project file location flexibility –Provides the ability to store the MSBuild project file (and its associated rsp file) anywhere in the version control hierarchy instead of forcing the use of the TeamBuildTypes folder.
Support for GUI tests – Allows running graphical user interface (GUI) tests as part of the build.
Check-in Policy – Supports a new check-in policy, which prevents users from checking-in code when a Continuous Integration build is broken.
Managing build server – Improves ability to manage multiple build machines.
Workspace mapping – Build definition can be associated with a "real" workspace, meaning code from multiple team projects can be retrieved, client mappings can be specified, etc. Working folder mappings will be managed in the GUI instead of in workspacemapping.xml

What is new in TFS 2008: More Details - Part1

2008-01-10T17:12:00.000+02:00

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server(TFS 2008) introduces a number of new features and capabilities. The primary changes have been:

•Administration, Operations & Setup. Installation has been simplified to reduce setup time and improved to support more deployment scenarios.

•Build. Build includes Continuous Integration, scheduled builds, and build queuing solutions out of the box. Build management and extensibility has been simplified with more functionality available from the UI.

•Version Control. Version control includes much better support for offline work and has improved performance.

•Work Item Tracking. Work item tracking includes an improved query builder and improved support for work item attachments.
These product changes are listed and briefly described below, followed by a table explaining how the changes will impact the guidance in this guide. Use this chapter to aid in your Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server upgrade planning.

1-Administration, Operations & Setup

•Simplified installation –Installation is made easier and quicker compared to Visual Studio 2005 TFS. Improvements include the elimination of the separate data-tier installation as well as the elimination of the domain account requirement. Team Foundation Server 2008 supports built-in machine accounts (such as Network Service) wherever possible.

•Support for SharePoint 2007 –Adds support for SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Team Foundation Server 2008 will support SharePoint on a separate server from the Team Foundation Application Tier Server.

•Support for Windows Server 2008 – Supports the next version of Microsoft Windows Server™; for example Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0.

•Support for X.509 Client Certificates – Supports the use of X.509 client certificates to improve authentication security.

•Large group synchronization –Improves performance and robustness and will be able to support large numbers of users — approximately 30,000 or more users in a single instance of TFS.

•Support for SQL named instances –Allows sharing of a SQL Server between multiple TFS instances, or with other applications. This allows different instances of TFS to use the same installation of SQL Server 2005.

•Support for non-default ports – Improves configurability to support alternate Web sites and ports

Changing the Team Foundation Server Services Accounts Users and Users’ Credentials

2007-12-05T17:52:00.000+02:00

Important Note:

To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Administrators group on the Team Foundation application-tier server, a member of the SQL Server Administrator group on the Team Foundation data-tier server, and a member of the Domain Administrators group in Active Directory (if you are running Team Foundation Server in an Active Directory domain). For more information about permissions

While you installing your team foundation server, there are couple of users that you need to tell the installer about; The Team foundation server services account which usually referred to at Microsoft officials as TFSService account, and the Reporting Services Service Account. These account are used by the main nine services of the TFS AT (Application Tier) as well as the TFS DT (Data Tier) in order to perform all TFS activities.

Sometimes, you need to update these services account passwords, or change them for any operational needs. This article will guide you in how to do that.

You can replace the Team Foundation Server service account that you specified when you installed Team Foundation Server (referred to as the TFSService account) with another account, such as domain\TFSSVC. To make this change, use the TFSAdminUtil utility with the ChangeAccount argument. This tool updates Team Foundation servers by replacing the old service account information with the new information. You must also make sure that the new service account has the Log on as a service permission. If you change the Reporting Services service account, you must also update the credentials for the Reporting Service data sources after you run TfsAdminUtil ChangeAccount. Finally, you must change the msiproperty.ini file to reflect the new service account name for the Team Foundation Server service account and the Reporting Services service account.

What is TFSAdminUtil?

TFSAdminUtil is one of the command-line tools that comes with TFS in order to register new services accounts or change the services account’s password. Usually you will find it under the following relative Path:

%programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools

If accepted the default path while installing the TFS you will find it at the following Exact Path:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools

What is important to be noted here is that this tool helps only in making the TFS feels of the new services account credentials (completely new account, or change in password) but, it can’t change the password of the current account or even create new account by itself. You have to do that from the regular windows tools and then use the TFSAdminUtil tool to make the TFS feels of the updates.

TFSADminUtil can be scripted to allow for automated updates.
How does it work?
In genral, whenyou update the account credentials, you have to update this in TFS, as well as The reporting services at the Application Tier. Updating the credentials in TFS will be done using the TFSAdminUtil, while updating the credentials SQL Server Reporting Services same account credentials should be done by the reporting services interface itself.
a- Create your new account
b- Grant this account has Log On as a Service permission
c- Use the TFSAdminUtil command-line tool in order to update the TFS with the new account credentials

d- If you have configured e-mail alerts, you must manually change the web.config file and change the value of emailNotificationFromAddress from the old service account's e-mail address to the new service account's e-mail address. For more information,
e- Go and Update the service account credentials into the Reporting Services account then you must update the account credentials of reporting services data sources(both the TFSReportDS, and TFS OlapReportDS). For more details please read my related article :Changing the Team Foundation Server Report Service Account

f- At all cases you need to update the configuration file of the installer which is the msiProperty.ini this will help the installer to keep track of the udates of the services account if it requires to install extra features later that is not installed currently

To change the msiproperty.ini file
Open a text-based editor, such as Notepad. Start Notepad, click Start, click Run, type Notepad, and then click OK.

Open the msiproperty.ini file in the text-based editor. The default path for the msiproperty.ini file is %programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (databases).

In the msiproperty.ini file, make the following changes:

If you have changed the TFSService account, change the value of the following property to the new name of the account:

VSTF_USERID= TFSService

If you have changed the TFSReports account, change the value of the following property to the new name of the account:

VSTF_RS_USERID= TFSReports

Save the file and close the text-based editor.

What is new in TFS 2008: Fast Facts out of Kevin Killy's TechED Developer 2007 Session

2007-12-02T16:02:00.000+02:00

During attending TechEd Developer 2007 as an Expert, I have attended one of Kevin Killy's great sessions (Kevin is the Principle Product Manager for TFS) in which he has talked about the new enhancements that has been taken place inside TFS 2008. I have taken some notes out of his speach as well as his slides that I would like to share it with you about the new Enhancements:

1-TFS 2008 is an evolution on TFS 2005:

-Rebuilt Team Build subsystem.
-Acquired Web Access (TWA).
-Usability improvements in Version Control and WIT(Work Item Tracking).
-More configuration options for SQL and Sharepoint.
-Performance and scalability improvements.
-2008 clients work with 2005 servers and vice versa .
-Customer driven license changes:
anyone in the organization may open and track their own work items
-A new Internal Connector License enables IT orgs to integrate current systems with TFS.

2- Team Build Enhancements

-Retooled for 2008
-Build definition UI integrated into VS
-Mappings
-Triggers
-Retention Policy
-Target build agents
-Manageable build queues

3-Version Control
-Annotate
-Folder Diff
-Destroy
-Get Latest On Checkout
-Workspace improvements
-Offline improvements
-Extranet support for the TFS Proxy
-Command line help

4- Better Performance and Scalability:

-2008 is 2x faster than 2005
-Any size team, any size project
-Deploying broadly across Microsoft :7k active users, 1,000 projects, 25 TFS instances

5- Roadmap

Breaking News:Congratulations, VSTS, and VS.NET 2008 RTM is now Available

2007-11-20T20:57:00.000+02:00

Finally, VSTS as VS.NET 2008 RTM is available starting from 19th November 2007 for Download at the Microsoft Partners Download site.
Let us download it and celebrate.

Breaking New: The Introduction of Rosario, The next version of VSTS after VSTS 2008

2007-11-01T19:43:00.000+02:00

During the VS.NET 2008 T-Prep Metro Program (The Early Adaptors Program) that has been held during last October in Amsterdam, I have met Brian Killer who is the VSTS Internal Evangalist for VSTS in Microsoft Redmond. He delivered a wonderful session about the VSTS 2008 new capabilities and he announced that Microsoft will is planning to introduce Rosario which is code name for the next version of VSTS that will follow VSTS 2008. I asked Him when does he expect that this version to be released he said expect it to be released after a period that ranges between 12 and 18 months.

He said that as far as he knows this version of VSTS will not come accompanied with another Version of VS.NET (e.g. VS.NET 2009).

According to what he said, this version will be very promising and I will wait it starting from now.

Using TFSAdminUtil Command-line Tool to assign a new TFS Service Account

2007-10-12T13:42:00.000+02:00

Team Foundation Server includes several services and service accounts that run on either the data-tier server, or the application-tier server, or both. Your actual services will vary, based on which features of Team Foundation you have installed on your data tier and application-tier servers. For example, if youusesfor a single-server setup, you will have both data-tier and application-tier services that run on the same server.

If you must reset the service account password for the Team Foundation Server, you must change the password for several services on the Team Foundation Server application-tier servers by using the TFSAdminUtil command-line utility. You can also use the TFSAdminUtil command-line utility to determine which services are running under a named account. The following table lists the service names, what service account they use, and what tier these services run on.

To assign a new service account to all Team Foundation Server services :
1-From the command line, locate the TFSAdminUtil utility.
By default, it is located in :\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools.

Generally: you will find it under the following relative Path:

%programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools

At the command line, type
TFSAdminUtil ChangeAccount [oldAccount] [newAccount] [newPassword]

and then press ENTER.

You must enter the user name for the old Team Foundation Server service account (oldAccount), in addition to the user name and password for the new account (newAccount and newPassword).
The TFSAdminUtil utility iterates through the services and only changes those that run under the old account.

Important Note:

Before you assign the new account by using TFSAdminUtil Changeaccount command, the account must have the Log on as a service permission on the application-tier server. For more information please read the related article.

If you need to know the full view of Changing TFS Accounts please read my related article

Breaking News: Somasegar Announces the VSTS as well as VS.net 2008 RTM availability during this month

2007-10-04T21:44:00.000+02:00

Today, During his key note speech of the Tech Developer 2007, SomaSegar (Microsoft Vice President) Has announced that VSTS as well as VS.net 2008 will be available for download as an RTM during this month (November 2007).

He also announced that starting from now the Premier partners will have the availability to see the source code of the VS.net. Moreover, partners will be permitted to use VS.net over other platforms rather than Windows.

Actually, the announcement of open the source for the premier partners will give the opportunity for Microsoft to avail the source code of VS.NET for some governments (as I think) who refuse to invest into anything but the open source.

For the RTM Release, Let us wait to celebrate :)

New Power Tools release is now available

2007-10-01T13:43:00.000+02:00

A new version of the Power Tools is now available.

I would like to give in a nut shell fast steps of installing Power Tools along with its prerequisites:

1- Install Domain Specific Lanaguage Redistributable package.

2- Install the PowerShell 1.0 for windows 2003 (this is important because alot of the Power tools command lines
use PowerShell commands in order to get processed).To be more specific: One part of the Power Tools is:
The TFS Best Bractices Analyzer (TFS BPA) This PBA Needs Powershell to be initially installed

3-Install the TFS Service Pack 1 Hot Fix KB Article# KB919156

4-Install TFS Service 1

6- Install Power Tools

7- Install Web Access Power Tools(if you are interested)

8-In order to Install DB Pro Power Tools:
a- The DB Power Tools supports SQL Server 2005 SP2 Enhancements. In order to make the
Team Edition-DB Professional Support the SQL 2005 SP2 too you have to install Service Release 1 (SR1) update for Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals.
It fix some problems at the initial relaease of the DB Professional such as:
- The Decimal Problem in the Data Comparison.

How to use TFSAdminUtil in Order to Change TFS Service Credentials

2007-08-09T14:40:00.000+02:00

How to use TFSAdminUtil in Order to Change TFS Service Credentials

1- Open the Command Line:
a. Start/Run then type cmd
b. Navigate to the following path:

%programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools
c. At the command line, type TFSAdminUtil ChangeAccount oldAccount newAccount newPassword, and then press ENTER. You must enter the user name for the old Team Foundation Server service account (oldAccount), in addition to the user name and password for the new account (newAccount and newPassword).

For more details about TFSAdmin please read my article :
Changing the Team Foundation Server Services Accounts Users and Users’ Credentials

How to set (Log on as a Service Permission for TFS Accounts)

2007-07-21T19:19:00.000+02:00

All Accounts that acts as the Team foundation Service Account has to have the Log On as a Service permission to do this after creating your new account please follow the following steps:

Using workgroup

1- click start/Administrative tools/ Local Security policy as depicted in

Figure 1: Opening local security policy
2- Expand Local Policies in the Explorer pane of the Local Security Settings window.

Click User Rights Assignment as depicted in Figure 2

Figure 2: Browsing the User Rights Assignments

2- From the Right Pane chose the permission called Long as a service and double click it. This is depicted on Figure 3.

Figure 3: Choosing the Log on as a service

3. a windows contains all users with that permission will open. Press the button called Add User or Group and write down your account name (see Figure 3). then press oK. Make sure that your user has been shown now at the list. press another ok to close the users window.

Figure 4 Chosing your Service Account

Using Active Directory

On the Windows Taskbar, click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type mmc, and then click OK.
On File menu of the Console window, click Add/Remove Snap-in.
On the Add/Remove Snap-in dialog box, click Add.
On the Add Standalone Snap-in dialog box, double-click Group Policy Object Editor in the Available Standalone Snap-ins pane.
The Group Policy Wizard starts.
On the Select Group Policy Object page, click Browse.

On the Browse for a Group Policy Object dialog box, locate the policy object you want to modify, and then click OK.

Click Finish on the Select Group Policy Object page.

On the Windows taskbar, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Local Security Policy.

Expand Local Policies in the Explorer pane of the Local Security Settings window.

Click User Rights Assignment.

Double-click Log on as a service on the viewing pane.

Click Add User or Group on the Log on as a service Properties dialog box.

Type the name of the new service account in the Enter the object names to select box.

Click OK.

Note:
In order to perform what is shown below you have to be Administrator

TFS Active Directory Supported configurations

2007-07-11T17:06:00.000+02:00

I have been asked many times about the supported active directory configurations for TFS so, I decided to put it here in order to be more simple to get accessed:

Supported Gonfigurations(any other configurations are not supported):
-Windows 2000 AD in Native Mode
-Windows Server 2003 AD in Windows 2000 Native functional level
-Windows Server 2003 AD in Windows Server 2003 Functional level
-Trust configurations
-Single Domain
-Single domain where the application tier is also the DC
-Default transitive 2-way trust in same forest
-Cross-forest trusts are supports

Important
Setup will not allow you to install TeamFoundation Server on a Domain Controller

Changing the Team Foundation Server Report Service Account

2007-06-07T18:25:00.000+02:00

Note: This Article is important for VSTS administrators when the report service account that is used by VSTS is being changed.

When you change the reporting services service account (referred to by the placeholder account name TFSReports) for Team Foundation Server, you must also update credentials for the Reporting Service data sources after you run TfsAdminUtil ChangeAccount on the TFSService account.

To update credentials for the Reporting Service data sources:
1- Start Internet Explorer. Open http://[ApplicationTierServerName]/Reports. as it is shown in Figure1, in my case the AT server name is : http://tfsrtm/Reports
2 - On the Contents tab, select TfsReportDS

Figure1: the SQL Server Reporting Services Home

.

3- On the Properties tab, update the User name and Password for Credentials stored securely in the report server, and then click Apply. This is depiocted in Figure 2

Figure 2: Changing the Credential Stored in Report Server

Repeat the steps three (3) for TfsOlapReportDS. Its link is shown in Figure1 too.

My MDC 2007 Session: Optimizing Applications Development Process Using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)

2007-02-10T20:48:00.000+02:00

According the many mail requests that I have received from the attendees of my MDC 2007 (Please visit www.mdc2007.com ) VSTS session, I am posting the presentation that I made here. I hope this could be helpful for all.

One of the most important things in this session is that I have introduced the VS Team Edition for DB Professionals Final Release (released early of Jan 2007) for the first time in the Middle East.

I Always think that the nature of the MDC session should be completely distinctive to cope with the name and value of the MDC as the Middle East Developers conference.

I will try to talk about my session in more details in the next few posts.

For people who need to download the session presentation please do the following to download it as a 3.83 MB PDF files.

1-Copy and paste the following address at your address bar of your browser:

ftp://cpseg.com/cpseg.com/UploadedFiles

2- when prompt for username and password please type them as follows:
UserName : PdfDownloader
Password: Pdf@pdf@pdf

3 - Download the file named
Optimizing Applications Development Process Using Visual Studio Team System. PDF
You can freely download it

With complement of Ahmed Bahaa, and CompuPharaohs (CPS)

SQl Server 2005 vs. Oracle 10g White Paper

2006-12-19T00:01:00.000+02:00

As i have promised, At my company, CompuPharaohs (CPS), we have made up the two parts comparison into a PDF white paper.

To download it, please follow the following steps:

1-Copy and paste the following address at your address bar of your browser:

ftp://cpseg.com/cpseg.com/UploadedFiles

2- when prompt for username and password please type them as follows:
UserName : PdfDownloader
Password: Pdf@pdf@pdf

3 - Download the file named SQLvsOracle.pdf

You can freely download it

With complement of Ahmed Bahaa, and CompuPharaohs (CPS)

SQL Server 2005 vs. Oracle 10g -Part2

2006-12-02T14:52:00.000+02:00

5- Business Intelligence

5.1 Market shares and Rankings
In spite of the fact that SQL server 2005 has added many very powerful features to the its business intelligence feature group. SQL Server is considered the best integrated BI solution out of the box. The highly prestigious Intelligent Enterprises business magazine within its annual 2002 review, has ranked the MS SQL Server 2000 BI solution as the best BI solution allover the world. Actually, this shows that SQL Server has an old history in excelling the BI area.
According to a recent Paper published in Communications of ACM, (paper is available on the ACM digital library) SQL Server BI solution has been shown as the biggest market share for BI Market while Oracle has come in the Seventh place. The figure shown below shows the attitude of OLAP market share for both SQL Server and Oracle.

Figure 5: The market shares for different OLAP vendors till 2004

It is important here to mention that oracle always claims that they have the biggest market share in BI industry. Actually, this is inaccurate information because they use the revenue market share measure which is misleading for customer. If Oracle has the revenue leading market share then this is true because their solutions are very expensive not because they are the most widely used by enterprises.

5.2 Why SQL Server has the biggest Market Share?

Actually, this question could be answered in a book but the paper will try to answer this very quickly and shortly through representing the major reasons for that.

5.3 SQL Server 2005 BI Solution Advantages

The following is a depiction for the main advantages for SQL Server BI solution as an overall solution not for depicting the detailed features. This may need more detailed technical context that is out of the scope of this paper.

5.3.1 Data Warehouse and BI Phases coverage
SQL server delivers tool for every phase within the data warehouse building life cycle. In addition these tools could work independently and away of any data warehouse. For enterprises that don’t have real data warehouse but se OLAP for better decision support, Microsoft provide an easy to use solution with a broad range of tools. Figure 6 depicts those main tools for building a complete BI solution.

Figure 6:The SQL Server BI Tools

Figure 6 shows the set of services and tools that SQL Server provides out of the box. When the customer buy SQL Server 2005 he actually, buys all of these tools. For all other BI Tools vendors each of these tools is sold separately. Some very famous Data Warehouse and BI tools Vendors (e.g. Ardent Solutions) has built their business on selling just one of these products. At regular scenarios, any data warehouse needs to begin by Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) process. This process takes a place on what is called the staging area that maybe a relational DB. The Microsoft Integrations Services is responsible of accomplishing the ETL task. The Loading is done from the Staging area to the actual data warehouse where all historical resides. Actually the SQL Server Relational Engine is available to take the responsibility of holding huge data warehouses. Later in this paper, some references will be given for this context.. At most cases people needs to navigate through the data in a multidimensional fusion for better understanding about their own business data. That is why a multi dimensional database management system is needed in order to build and manage the data cubes. Actually, this is what Microsoft Analysis Services does. After building the required cubes and mining models, it is time to expose this for users. Microsoft provides the Reporting Service in order to achieve this by the users themselves without the need of bothering, or depending on the IT team all the time. Reporting Services integrates with the Visual Studio.net to build very complicated and powerful reports. Many Management tools are available for developing and customizing your BI tools and managing your Meta Data as well.

5.3.2 Cross integration out of the box

All the previously mentioned tools and servers are natively integrated together. No all only these tools are integrated together but also a broad range of Microsoft Tools and Servers. This includes; Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Map Point (for geo-spatial data), and many other servers.

5.3.3 Office integration

Actually the Microsoft Office integrates with the SQL BI solution by a unique way. This includes;
 Integration with Excel through, excel charts, pivot tables, and more.
 Integration with the Windows SharePoint Service for building a BI dashboard.
 Integration with Microsoft Office Business Score Cards for building score cards as well as balanced score cards for better KPI monitoring.

5.3.4 Broad Range of Data Mining Algorithms

Additionally, On Microsoft Analysis Service you can build whatever Data Mining models using the existing available seven algorithms in order to mine into broad range of problematic data. In addition to that, third party ISVs can develop algorithms that snap in seamlessly to the Analysis Services data mining framework. Depending on the data and the goals, different algorithms are preferred, and each algorithm can be used for multiple problems. In fact, this feature of developing new data mining algorithm is a very powerful feature that is not available at most of the data mining tools (Including Oracle tools).

5.4 BI Conclusion

The SQL Server BI solution is really far beyond Oracle BI solution

6. References and Case studies

The Following are some hints about some notable references for SQL Serve that should be highlighted here in order to show up its capacity:

6.1 Education and Research References

6.1.1 International References

 University of South Florida

The University of South Florida chose the Microsoft platform and SQL Server to build a complete Web-based student information system that extracts information from an IBM mainframe and other database systems throughout the 36,000-student campus, increasing scalability while also lowering total cost of ownership and development costs of the previous deployed solution. The Old available system was previously built on Oracle.

 The Henslow Research Group
Until recently, it has been believed that British naturalist Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution in isolation, basing it on observations he made during his five-year voyage on the research ship Beagle from 1831 to 1836. However, an international research team based at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, has used the analytical capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to prove that one of the central tenets of Darwin’s theory is actually based on work by his mentor, J. S. Henslow. The Henslow Group examined fragile paper-based data collected more than 160 years ago and used the business intelligence (BI) capabilities of SQL Server 2005 to prove the importance of Henslow's work.

6.1.2 Local References
 Ministry of Education
The Thanwaya Amma result web based exposure project is one of the hot references and examples that show how much SQL Server is scalable, reliable, and available. During the night of launching the Tnahwaya Amma result for education year, more than 4 million users has hit the website in one night. The Performance was outstanding. This could be validated easily through asking Ministry of Education people.

6.2 Applications Related to the Education Domain

6.2.1 International References
 Barnes & Noble Giant Bookstores chain (Migrator from Oracle)
Barnes & Noble is a giant bookstores chain with 40,000 employees, and 4.5 Billion gross in 2005. “We Are currently Processing anywhere between 1 million and 3 million sales transaction records daily, and it take no more than 10 minutes to get the records into the data warehouse. That rate was not possible before” Said Eliot Gardner, the Data Warehouse project manager in Barnes & Noble.
Barnes & and Noble has already a previously implemented OLTP on Oracle, but moved to build there BI solution on SQL Server.

6.2.2 Local References
 IDSC and Helwan University
The Information and Decision Support Cabinet for Prime Ministry in Egypt (IDSC) has their newest version of their Library Management system from scratch using SQL Server 2005, and Visual Studio.NET 2005. They faced some problems regarding huge amount of fields that should be added based on DIWI categorization Library standard. Using The available out of the box XML support feature, they designed the books table to have a an XML field that contain an xml document for saving the not commonly used DIWI categorization data. The system is deployed now on Helwan University Central Library which is one of the Largest (if not being the largest) central library available in Egyptian universities (public and private) today.
Personal Contacts:
-Engineer Medhat Eltokhy, EALIS team leader, IDSC
-Engineer Medhat ElBakry, Applications Development CEO, IDSC.

6.3 Other References
 Verizon Communications
Verizon is one of the biggest two mobile as well as ground carrier in North America. They are operating a SQL Server database with a size of 50.7 Billion rows and it is expanding.

 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
United States Department of agriculture is responsible of about $1.24 Trillion, or 12.3% of the overall American GDP. USDA is one of the most rigid agricultural ministries all over the world. They have very firm standards for everything. USDA is running a 25 Terabyte Data warehouse on and SQL Server platform.

6.4 Other Local References
 Engineer Taha Shindy, The Information Center Manager, MCIT. :
Information center Manager has built and currently host the Arab League website using Visual Studio.Net and SQL Server.

6.5 SQL Server 2005 Fast Facts

According to study held in 2006 by Winter’s Corporation, about the database systems all over the world, the following findings has been produced:
 One of the top three largest OLTP databases in the world, by rows is running on SQL Server.
 Three of the largest OLTP databases in the world by volume are Running on SQL Server
 One of the Top Ten largest data warehouses in the world is running on SQL Server.
 65 percent of all SQL Server entries are at 2 terabytes or larger

SQL Server 2005 vs. Oracle 10g -Part1

2006-11-18T22:07:00.000+02:00

1- Information sources Background

1.1 Performance Tuning Corporation Background
Before getting into more details into this point, it is important to highlight who this company is. Performance Tuning Corporation is one of the largest corporates allover the world, who are interested in tinning the performance of the IT system for the major IT systems products. Its customers list contains; Oracle, HP, Dell, US Navy, US Marines, US Air Force, Verizon, Microsoft, and more…

1.2 Computer World Magazine
Computer world magazine is one of the most prestigious IT Magazines allover the world. It is more than 35 years old, and its editorial board consists of many very prestigious, very famous IT consultants.
1.3 Intelligent Enterprises Magazine
It is one of the top two magazines all over the world talking in BI and data warehouses. Its editorial board includes Ralph Kimball (the father of Data Marts), and Barry Devlin the builder of the oldest data warehouse known all over the world.

2-VLDB Enterprise Features

The most important features that any decision maker is highly interested to look for when taking a decision of buying certain VLDB (Very Large DataBase) are; availability, reliability, scalability, security, and performance. For VLDBs any weakness found in other features may affect the day-to-day operation of the system administrators, DB specialist, developers, or even the application for a while but, the weaknesses that could be discovered in the major features listed above here could be fatal as whole for utilizing certain VLDB. In fact, availability, reliability, scalability, security, and performance are the major reasons for any decision maker to use VLDBMS (Very Large DataBase Management System) instead of SDBMS (Small DataBase Management System). Based on that, this paper will concentrate at the beginning on these features.

2.1 Oracle RAC Marketing Materials Claims
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) has been presented by Oracle as the one solution that addresses all scalability, performance, high availability requirements, at a lower cost than any other solution. Oracle claims that RAC running on a cluster provides the highest level of capability in terms of availability, scalability, and low-cost computing. According to Oracle claims, RAC is supposed to provide these benefits:

Availability: If a node in the cluster fails for any reason, Oracle RAC continues running on the remaining nodes. All the applications (users) connected to the failed node are transparently to be completed in 20 seconds.

Scalability: When more processing power is needed, new nodes can be easily added to the cluster, without having to modify the application or the database in any way. The load is redistributed so that it is balanced across all the nodes of the cluster. Oracle 10g R2 RAC supports up to 100 nodes in a cluster.

Cost Savings: : RAC reduces hardware cost by running applications just as efficiently on clusters of small (< 4 CPUs), standardized, low-cost commodity hardware as on the more expensive SMP systems. For example a 16 node cluster of 4 CPUs each costs significantly less than an equivalent 64 CPU SMP machine. There are a number of reasons for the price differential, including the fact that smaller boxes benefit from the economies of scale.2.2 RAC in a More Practical Look vs. SQL Server 2005

The following analysis is based on the Performance Tuning Corporation analytical comparison report:

There have been numerous heated technical debates about whether RAC really works as advertised. In depth technical analysis here maybe difficult to most of the readers to understand that is why the paper will try to unveil facts without getting into deep detailed technical matters.

2.2.1 Availability

Oracle RAC Availability

It is true that RAC offers a good solution for server failures. This solution could be implemented on the low cost commodity servers. This makes some cost reduction on the customer hardware budget (this doesn’t mean that RAC as a clustering solution is a cost saving solution, please refer to the part of the price comparison latter in this paper). The RAC architecture is depicted in figure 1 that is shown below:

Figure1: A typical 4-node RAC configuration

Figure 1 shows a typical 4-node RAC configuration. The Oracle RAC Database Servers run on all the nodes in the cluster. The data resides in the shared storage. All the nodes in the cluster have equal access to all the tables in the database. There is no notion of data being “owned” by any particular node. As a result data does not have to be partitioned, though very often it is partitioned to increase performance. Applications just connect to the RAC cluster, not to a specific node in the cluster; RAC distributes the load evenly across all the nodes of the cluster.

SQL Server Availability

Database mirroring is a new SQL Server 2005 technology for increasing database availability.
Database mirroring ships transaction log records directly from the primary server to a standby server, ensuring that at all times the standby is a mirror image of the primary database. Database Mirroring also quickly fails over to the standby server in the event of the primary server going down for any reason. You can code client applications to automatically redirect their connections so that in the event of a failover, they automatically connect to the standby database. While the precise time to failover depends on a number of factors, it is possible to failover in around 10 seconds (according to Microsoft materials, it could failover in duration between 3-5 seconds, but practical experiences says 10 seconds is more realistic number). Comparing the 10 seconds in SQL Server 2005 with the 20 seconds of Oracle RAC is something notable. The 10 seconds difference of waiting for high availability system may not be acceptable in many business domains users. SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring does not require proprietary hardware and is easy to set up and manage. Mirroring supports a feature that is called client redirect. Mirroring architecture is shown in the figure below.

Figure 2: The SQL Server 2005 Mirroring Architecture

This feature enables system application to get automatically redirected to the mirrored server transparently if the session is dropped. This doesn’t need any changes to application code. This happens transparently because of that MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Component) is aware of Principal and Mirror servers. Upon initial connect to the Principal server, MDAC caches Mirror name. When client attempts to reconnect, if Principal is available, it connects to it, if not; MDAC automatically redirects connection to Mirror. It is important to mention here that the witness server, that is optionally used to make automatic failover, could be SQL Server Express which is free software. Moreover, the licensing model of Microsoft doesn’t charge for any standby server. Based on this, the standby server don’t requires extra license. There is an important piece of information that should be highlighted here which is that, Oracle claims that one of the most important features in Oracle that it supports clustering while SQL Server doesn’t. This is not true. Oracle has a clustering support because Oracle don’t have its own operating system. This is not the case for Microsoft. SQL Server is a Microsoft Product that runs always on a Microsoft Operating System (Windows). Clustering in Windows is supported by using the Clustering service of the windows. SQL Server doesn’t need to have its own separate extra layer for clustering instead, it integrated with the same vendor operating system to achieve this task without overwhelming the running sever with extra layers
2.2.2 Reliability
Oracle RAC Reliability
RAC by itself offers no protection against disasters or storage failures. RAC is based on shared-data architecture; therefore the storage is a single point of failure. If the storage fails for any reason, the whole cluster fails. Oracle offers DataGuard as the solution to this problem. DataGuard involves having one or more duplicate databases called “Standby” database. “Standby” databases are kept in sync with the “primary” using log-shipping technology. It must be noted that Oracle will charge full price for each “Standy”, so the total cost of an Oracle solution has to be multiplied by the number of standby databases. Away of the costing aspects, installing the Oracle DataGuard solution over the RAC that is installed over the Oracle 10g DBMS itself complicate the management and administration massively. It is widely known for all oracle products that when it comes to integration, Oracle products always suffer from many problems and difficulties.

SQL Server 2005 Reliability

It is apparent from the description above for the SQL Server 2005 mirroring feature architecture that SQL Server 2005 doesn’t work on a shared storage model. This solves the problem of single point of failure that could happen for the RAC solution without using the DataGuard solution. When the primary storage server failure happens the standby server with a complete another storage server failover and continue delivers system availability.

2.2.3 Availability/Reliability Comparison Conclusion

Both SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g can deliver a highly available solutions but, “SQL Server with Database Mirroring” can match the high availability capabilities of Oracle 10g RAC—at a substantially lower cost.

The above explanation shows that the Oracle RAC out of the box solutions is less reliable solution than the SQL Server out of the box solution. If DataGuard is added to the formula then, from technical point of view SQL Server 2005, and Oracle RAC delivers highly reliable solutions. It is important to highlight here that the Oracle DataGuard availability is based on a difficult to manage solution (this will be shown later.)

2.2.4 Manageability
Oracle Manageability
According to the Performance Tuning Corporation report, the Oracle RAC is very complex to get managed. The report stated that; RAC is an extremely complex piece of technology. Unless the complexity is reduced by an order of magnitude, RAC falls far short of its promise as a viable technology for the vast majority of database applications. Probably the single biggest reason to avoid RAC might be its complexity. The complexity associated with RAC is documented succinctly in “Real-World Challenges for Oracle RAC Implementation” paper (The paper is available in the following URL: http://www.linxcel.co.uk/Whitepapers/RealWorld%20Challenges%20for%20Oracle%20RAC%20Implementation-Issue%201.pdf). (i.e. linxcel is a famous Oracle partner that is specialized in delivering Oracle and Java Professional services in Europe.)
Here are the main problems in RAC manageability:

RAC requires Application and Schema Design Changes

Contrary to Oracle’s claims, according to many experiences has been that applications (and the associated database schemas) have to be specifically designed (or modified in the case of existing applications) in order to get them to perform on RAC. The nature and extent of the changes depends on a number of factors including the size of the clusters, the nature of the application (OLTP or DW), the speed of the cluster inter-connect and transaction volumes. Very often data has to be partitioned, especially tables that are hotspots.

RAC requires special storage solutions
Oracle RAC cannot run on a regular file system i.e. the file systems that usually ship with operating systems. Oracle RAC either works directly on raw devices or requires a clustered file system. This Includes:
¢ Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS)
¢ Oracle Automatic Storage Manager (ASM)
Due to the inherent complexity of using RAW storage devices, Oracle recommends OCFS or ASM, with more emphasis on ASM lately. While ASM has many interesting capabilities, it is very complex to manage and administer—it is a full-blown instance of Oracle requiring significant DBA time and skills to manage. Furthermore ASM is a proprietary file system; most of the backup & restore, diagnostics, monitoring and performance tuning tools that you are currently using will not work with ASM.

RAC is Composed of Many Components

Actually RAC into itself is composed of many several components:
¢ Global Cache Services (GCS)
¢ Cluster Read Service
¢ Automatic Workload Management
¢ Virtual Internet Protocol
¢ Oracle Cluster Registry

Patching RAC is difficult
Patches for RAC come in two flavors—those that can be applied one node at a time and those that need to be applied to the entire cluster at once. In the former case only the node to which the patch is being applied has to be down; the rest of cluster is functioning. In the latter case the entire RAC cluster has to be shutdown, thereby making the entire database unavailable. An analysis of Oracle’s patches shows the majority of the patches belong to the latter category. In this case Oracle recommends a very complicated technique for “rolling upgrades” that involve two standby RAC clusters connected with Oracle Data Guard.

Tuning RAC is Complex
The complexity of RAC and the numerous moving parts involved in a RAC setup makes it hard to debug and tune. In addition to all the things that a DBA needs to know to tune an Oracle database, with RAC a DBA has to take numerous other factors into account including interconnect traffic, inter-connect latency, pinging of data blocks between nodes, disk I/O for each of the nodes, table hotspots etc. Here is just a partial list of some of the workarounds that Oracle has suggested to get around the performance issues with RAC.
§ Assign transactions with similar data access characteristics to specific nodes, by partitioning users and applications.
§ Create data objects with parameters that enable more efficient access when globally shared.
§ Avoiding sequences as hotspots by creating node-specific staggered sequence ranges.
§ Reduce the number of rows-per-block (RPB) in order to reduce page contention.
§ Use as few indexes as possible to reduce intra-node pinging of index blocks.
§ Pre-allocate space by turning on dynamic space management.
§ Use reverse-key indexes to reduce index-page hotspots. This has the undesirable side-effect of eliminating the ability to use index-scans.
§ Design indexes such that the clustering factor is as close to the number of used blocks as is possible.

The list is based on content from the book “Oracle 10g and Real Application Clusters”. These are very complex tuning recommendations, requiring a deep understanding of the inner-working of the Oracle database management system. The book summarizes the situation quite aptly when it
says, “This may seem perplexing, since some of the suggestions are contradictory”!

SQL Server 2005 Manageability

MSSQL 2005 administration is as simple as every Microsoft product administration with a nice GUI and only a few parameters required a manual change. The major Goals for the SQL Server 2005 manageability focus on some main objectives to achieve. These objectives are listed below:
§ Integrated Management, Rich UI
§ Scale down time/effort for common management tasks
§ Server Transparency
§ Everything to be scriptable

SQL Server has many very easy to use management tools to do whatever administration task you need. This includes;

SQL Server Management Studio

§ This tool delivers integrated management environment for all SQL Server products including;
§ Relational DB
§ Analysis Services
§ Reporting Services
§ Notification Services
§ SQL Mobile
There are many tools that comes with MS SQL Server 2005 for manageability, Performance tuning, security analysis, and troubleshooting and diagnostics.

Manageability Conclusion

According to what is depicted above from much neutral technical comparison it could be discovered without any doubt that MS SQL Server is more manageable than Oracle enterprise solutions.
2.2.6 Scalability and Performance

Scalability is one of the most important enterprise features in any VLDB.
Oracle Scalability and Performance
It would appear that Oracle RAC has the edge here. Oracle 10g RAC R2 can support up to 100 nodes. Oracle does not specify whether there are any limitations on the number of CPUs per node. Therefore, in theory, Oracle RAC can scale beyond 64 CPUs. However, it must be noted that Oracle has not demonstrated publicly that Oracle RAC can scale beyond 64 CPUs. The largest TPC-C benchmark with Oracle RAC has 64 CPUs—a 16 by 4 cluster. The largest RAC installation widely known is a 64-CPU at Amazon, also a 16 by 4 cluster.
Oracle Claims that Oracle can scale out and always concentrate on scaling out rather than scaling-up. The main advantage of the scale-out solution of oracle is that it depends on low cost commodity servers. Oracle tries to promote this, claiming that this is a more cost effective solution (a more detailed look will concentrate on this).

SQL Server 2005 Scalability and Performance

Scaling Up With SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005 has proven that it can scale to 64 CPUs on a single SMP server. Interestingly, at some benchmarks, SQL Server 2005 has a better performance and price/performance than Oracle 10g RAC for 64 CPUs as can be seen from the table below.

Table 1 A TPC benchmarks for SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g

These two TPC-C benchmarks clearly demonstrate that that on a system with 64 CPUs, SQL Server 2005 can outperform Oracle 10g RAC, and is more cost effective.
It is important here to highlights that today the largest SMP server has 64 processors and can run over 99% of the world’s real-world applications! According to Winter Corp’s Annual Survey9 of the largest databases in production today, the largest OLTP and Data Warehousing database run on SMP servers, not clusters.

Scaling Out with SQL Server 2005
You might still prefer the scale-out architectures for the following reasons.

§ Some companies have standardized on commodity servers (e.g. Plate Servers), refusing to deploy medium or high-end SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) servers. Typically these companies have standardized on vendors such as Dell who do not offers servers with more than 4 processors.
§ Some customers have a highly distributed architecture that does not lend itself very well to large centralized SMP servers.
§ Some customers are uncomfortable with the a64 processor limit of SMP servers, even if the servers meet their current requirements. They want to know that their database can scale beyond 64 CPUs if the need arises in some distant future.

SQL Server 2005 offers a choice of scale-out technologies. Unlike Oracle, which is single mindedly pushing RAC as the only viable scale-out architecture, Microsoft has taken a more nuanced approach, offering multiple scale-out technologies. Each of these technologies has its own advantages and disadvantages. You should pick the technology that best meets you business requirements. The following are four scale-out strategies with SQL Server 2005.

§ Service Oriented Database Architecture (SODA)
§ Shared Scalable Database (SSD)
§ Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Replication
§ Data Dependent Routing
Getting in more details regarding these strategies is out of the scope of this context.

Scalability Conclusion
SQL Server is as scalable as Oracle 10g R2. They are peers. At some cases SQL Server can outperform Oracle 10g. Moreover, it delivers scale-up as well as scale-out solution in less cost than Oracle 10g.

2.2.5 Security

This is one of the peaking points for SQL Server 2005 over Oracle 10g. For years Microsoft products have suffered from security issues but, nowadays this doesn’t apply anymore. Microsoft has focused during the last couple of years in increasing the quality all its products from the security point of view. Bill Gates has launched and implemented an initiative to deliver a one week training for all Microsoft Campus developers (20,000 + developers). The training subject was (how to write a secure code). Moreover, Microsoft translates analyze every discovered security hole and learn lessons of it and transform this in a bad programming practices should be prohibited to be done by any Microsoft developer. The following are some very prestigious information sources that made a neutral comparison between SQL Server 2005, and Oracle 10g. As will be seen all of them depicts that SQL Server 2005 is more secured far beyond Oracle, and that one of the major advantages of SQL Server 2005 over Oracle 10g is Security.

2.2.5.1 David Lachfield Paper

David Litchfield who is one of the famous security specialists all over the world who used to criticize Microsoft for its poor security products has written a paper titled “Which database is more secure? Oracle vs. Microsoft”

Figure3: The number of security flaws in the Oracle and SQL Server

According to David’s paper, Figure 3 shows the number of security flaws in the Oracle and MS SQL Server database servers that have been discovered and fixed since December 2000 until November 2006. Each block

Figure 4 flaws that have been discovered by external security researchers in in Oracle 10g R2 and SQL Server 2005

According to David’s paper too, these two graphs indicate flaws that have been discovered by external security researchers in both vendors’ flagship database products – namely Oracle 10g Release 2 and SQL Server 2005. No security flaws have been announced for SQL Server 2005.
David has stated verbally that:

It is immediately apparent from these four graphs that Microsoft SQL Server has a stronger security posture than the Oracle RDBMS. Later at his paper he stated, SQL Server code is more secure than Oracle code. He expected that even if oracle have approached fixing these security bugs they may not be able to finish fixing them before end of 2007 or 2008!!

David said that he think the secret behind this gap between Oracle and SQL in the recent products is the Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle which is not as same security oriented as Oracle – SDL. SDL is far and above the most important factor. A key benefit of employing SDL means that knowledge learnt after finding and fixing screw ups is not lost; instead it is ploughed back into to the cycle. This means rather than remaking the same mistakes elsewhere you can guarantee that new code, whilst not necessarily completely secure, is at least more secure than the old code.
He added that, Oracle keep making the same basic mistakes and that some of their security “fixes” indicate that they don’t understand the problems they’re trying to fix.

Note: The Whole paper is downloadable from the following URL:
http://www.ngssoftware.com/research/papers/comparison.pdf

2.2.5.2 The Computer World Business Magazine

On 19th October 2006 the 35+ years old very prestigious IT business magazine-ComputerWorld- has published an article titled (Let's give Microsoft SQL Server some credit) In which the author has declared that at the same time that SQL Server proofs his powerful security level, Oracle began to suffer massively from security vulnerabilities. He rooted this to the difference in the SDLC of Microsoft as well as Oracle. The article is available for public at the following web address: http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/3778

2.2.5.3 The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) Website (http://cve.mitre.org)

CVE is A list of standardized names for vulnerabilities and other information security exposures - CVE aims to standardize the names for all publicly known vulnerabilities and security exposures
The content of CVE is a result of a collaborative effort of the CVE Editorial Board. The Editorial Board includes representatives from numerous security-related organizations such as security tool vendors, academic institutions, and government as well as other prominent security experts. The MITRE Corporation maintains CVE and moderates Editorial Board discussions.

At the time of writing this paper, the reported common CVEs for SQL Server 2005 are just four while they exceeds 40 for Oracle 10g. This could be validated through checking the following URLs;
Oracle
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Oracle+Database

SQL Server
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Microsoft+SQL+Server

Important Note:
It is important to mention here that these two URLs contain all known CVEs for both products across all their versions.
Security Conclusion

According to all reports, papers, and articles above, with a high level of confidence it is clear that SQL Server is more secured far beyond Oracle 10g. Some neutral parties like the famous security expert; David Lachfield, the prestigious IT Magazine; Computer World, and Enterprise Strategy Group considered Microsoft, with proper execution, years ahead of Oracle in producing secure, and reliable database solutions.

2.2.7 Cost

In spite of the fact that Oracle claims that its hardware requirements costs less, when it comes to calculate the overall budget that is needed for an overall oracle solution (on less expensive commodity servers) you will find it more expensive than the overall MS SQL Server 2005 solution. It is true that the single high-end SMP servers that MS SQL Server 2005 requires is more expensive than the commodity servers that oracle requires but, let us calculate the hole payment:

Oracle: $40,000 (Oracle Price) + $25,000 (RAC Price) + $18,000 (the cheapest commodity server available) then, The total of Oracle solution on the Least expensive commodity server is 78,000$ per processor

MS SQL Server 2005: $25,000 (SQL Server Price) + $50,000 (The most expensive known high-end server) then, the total of SQL Server solution on the most expensive high-end server is $75,000 per processor.

Important note:

We are using the publicly available list prices for both Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005. It is quite likely that academic as well as governmental accounts don’t pays full price for either product. However that does not change the relative pricing differential between Oracle and SQL Server 2005.
Cost Conclusion
Oracle on the cheapest commodity server is more expensive than SQL Server solution
If the claim that the Oracle required hardware solution costs less considered true then, it should be phrased as it cost less for Oracle benefit not the customer benefit. Simply because, Oracle, not the customer, who gets the difference and more.

SQL Server 2005 vs. Oracle 10g -An important introduction

2006-11-08T18:32:00.000+02:00

This is something I have decided to do because I thought it is must and obligation on us as a Microsoft society to do.

A month a go, my friends in Microsoft Egypt has asked us to help them in comparing SQL Server 2005 to Oracle 10g as neutral consultants. They asked us to do so transparently, and honestly. This was because of that there was an important regional account who was about to take a decision to oracle 10g. I have accepted the request and began to prepare for this meeting not only as a technician but also as an academic guy. Actually, this makes difference because academic guys evaluate things by a rational and more scientific way, and according to non fuzzy results. I decided that this comparison should be posted to be used by many people who search for such a comparison. Actually, I have found during my work a whitepaper that has been previously published by an Oracle Partner Called WisdomForce.
For people who have read this paper, or may find it and read it later, please take in considerations the following facts:

1-The most recent version of this paper(version 1.2) has been published in November 2004 (when SQL Server was in Beta phase as much as i remember it was in beta2 phase). Based on this, many of the criticism that is done to SQL Server 2005 was done for the beta version that has massively enhanced in final release.

2-As evidence that this paper is not accurate into it is criticism is that it is talking about some SQL Server Obsolete products like DTS!!!!

3-Another evidence that this paper was not talking about SQL Server 2005 that it mentioned clearly that they are talking at specific points about SQL Server 2000, and even 7.0 sometimes!!!! (Why?!)

4-Wisdomforce has promised to launch another updated version later but they haven't up till the time of writing these lines.

Actually if you searched the Web, most probably you will find people talking about this white paper while it is not that accurate. Moreover it doesn't really talks about SQL Server 2005. Instead, it may talk about earlier version of this wonderful product.

According to all of that I decided to post our neutral prepared white paper in a series. For those who are interested to read it all, you can download the .PDF version of it that I will make it available at the end of this series.

VSTS At a Glance

2006-11-01T16:14:00.000+02:00

Actually this is a composed of my first post about VSTS.

I have received a request from My friend, sherif Eltony (The ISV Evangelist in Microsoft Eastern Mediterranean) to make this composed version so, it could be read faster and easier.
I hope that it fulfill this requirement:
1-The Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers

Nowadays, software development tasks get more complicated. In a complicated development environment, developers need to build their application by easy way in order to be concentrating on the complicated business logic. Moreover, they need some tools that help them to test their applications before delivering it to the testing team.

This Edition empowers the developers with the following capabilities:
-Class Designers: for Building class graphically instead of writing it by code.
-Unit Testing: Generate necessary code for automating the test without the need to make the developer lose his time to make these tests manually. Unit tests can get its test data from a database. This feature can test lots of scenarios at no time.
-Code Coverage: Unit tests can insure that the known scenarios have been passed by the written code. But it doesn’t ensure that the scenarios covered the whole code. Code coverage can show the tested code colored. The fully tested code will be shown one color. The partially tested in a second color, while the not tested code is shown in a third color. This feature can eliminate the bugs that arise after deploying the solutions on the customer side. Moreover it can lead to a 100% tested code.
Static Code Analysis: Static code analysis can help team to write better object oriented code. Better standardized code, better code style that obeys to Microsoft design best practices, ..etc.
Performance Analyzer:
Performance Analyzer can help developer to optimize the performance of their application by reporting which functions are called most of the times, which function take long time to get executed,…etc.
2-Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers

This Client is directed to the testers. Using this edition of VSTS tester can perform the previously explained Units testing, Code Coverage, Static Code Analysis, and Performance Analyzer. In addition to that, this edition integrates with separate module which is Load agent module that enables the tester to perform what is called load test. Load tests are very important in order to test how my website will behave in front of huge amount of users. This feature is very important for corporations who build web systems that are exposed to customers for public on the web.
3- The Visual Studio Team Edition: Software Architect:

The problem that usually arises for architects is that each of the two architect types (Application, and infrastructure) works in an isolation of the other. The Application architecture may build his application to work on certain operating system (e.g. Win2003 SP1) while the infrastructure architect is not designing his network for this operating system (Use Win 2000). This may lead to a lot of deployment problems that couldn’t be caught before the deployment time. Problems of this kind may lead to disasters that may result in the whole project failure. The Visual Studio Team Edition for Software architects solve the architectural problems like this by empowering the architect with a graphical designer that make both architects capable of building his architecture graphically and then validate both of them based on the other.

Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Professional

Actually, this is the most recently released version of VSTS edition. This edition is delivering a broad range of capabilities to the database professionals. This includes:
Managing Database Objects and Schemas as Version Controlled Items
Importing Schemas from a existing DB
Comparing Schema changes
Generating Data
Compare Data between Different Data Sources
Generating DB Unit Tests

4-Microsoft Team Foundation Server
The team foundation server is the server through which all clients can communicate. For project managers it is very important to utilize the Team foundation Server (TFS) capabilities. These capabilities permit many important features for the team this includes:
Source and Version Control
This enables more control over the source code. This control can secure the source code in a centralized secured server, not on the client computers of developers.
Check In Policy
The Project Manager can define polices for all work that will be performed by certain team within certain project. This may include not being able to upload the source code unless passing certain tests. Moreover, it can enforce developers to apply design best practices to their code.
Build Automation
By this feature, the team can have at each night a complete build for the project that yields to a stable version of the system everyday. Build history reports are generated too.
Team Reporting
The Team Foundation server empowers the project manager with more control on the team by presenting a large set of predefined reports about the project status, remaining work, number of bugs,….etc.
Work Item Monitoring
Each Work Item could be tracked by means of its status. Who has gotten assigned with? Whether is it bug, risk, or regular task?
Team Portal
Once a team has been created on the team foundation server, a new portal is automatically generated to enable different members to communicate together. The Portal contains the required documentation, and the project status reports.
Process implementation
Team foundation Server can help the team to apply the MSF CMMI standard process to be able to get certified as CMMI team fast. It provides them with the documentation.
Extensibility capability
Tam foundation server is open for process modification. If certain team has different process than the MSF process to apply, the team can define the process by simple way.
Moreover, if the project manager needs to see more reports about the performance of the team, it is not a hard task to build his own extra reports.

Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Publisher Support

Excel and Project are the 4th, and 5th clients that could work within the Team System. With their easy to use interface new assignments could be granted for different team members.

Conclusion

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) can help any software team by the following ways:

1-Empowers the manager with a good control level on what is going on the project. This happen through delivering a rich status reports about the project tasks

2- It helps the team members to increase the quality of their products by applying advanced testing techniques. e.g. Units tests, Web Tests, and Load Test

3- It helps to increases the overall team quality by enforcing process standards that can lead to getting certified as CMMI.

4- It increase the productivity of the overall team by establishing an automated communication channels between them subsequently saving their times to perform their architectural, development, and testing tasks.

5-VSTS is the least product by means of cost and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in comparison to other tools of other companies (i.e. IBM Rationale Clear Case Suite).

What is VSTS

2006-10-31T16:21:00.000+02:00

As one of the Evangelism team of the Visual Studio Team System that works tightly couple with the DPE team of Microsoft Egypt, I feel that there is a self obligation to write about VSTS here. People who have time to read about 6-pages article about this subject are highly recommended to read this article. I will put another summerized one (about 3 pages) and i will call it VSTS in a Glance for people that needs something smaller to read.

Visual Studio Team System Overview

VSTS is a software development team integration and collaboration tool. It consists of 5 clients and one server in addition to the load agent and the usage of MS Excel, MS Project and Internet Explorer as extra clients.

Visual Studio Team System is based on the Visual Studio Professional Edition in addition to more the team integration features. These features help the Project Managers, Infrastructure Architects, Application Architects, Developers, and Testers to perform their tasks by a higher quality in a standardized way.

The following is a block diagram that shows the Visual Studio Team System:

As it is clear above there are Tree clients:

1-The Visual Studio Team Edition: Software Architect:

This edition I directed to the Software Architects. Usually, there are two kinds of Architects. The first type is the Infrastructure Architect. Infrastructure Architect is the one who is responsible of defining the network zones, security, operating systems, firewalls, ..etc. The second type is the Application Architect. This type of architects is responsible of defining the architecture on which the application will be built. This includes; Platform used (web/ windows/ Smart Devices), client server/Three Tiers, N-Tiers, Component architectures (COM+, .NET dlls, XML Web Services), ..etc.

The problem that usually arises here is that each of the two architects works in an isolation of the other. The Application architecture may build his application to work on certain operating system (e.g. Win2003 SP1) while the infrastructure architect is not designing his network for this operating system (Use Win 2000). This may lead to a lot of deployment problems that couldn’t be caught before the deployment time. Problems of this kind may lead to disasters that may result in the whole project failure. The Visual Studio Team Edition for Software architects solve the architectural problems like this by empowering the architect with a graphical designer that make both architects capable of building his architecture graphically and then validate both of them based on the other.

2-The Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers

Nowadays, software development tasks get more complicated. In a complicated development environment, developers need to build their application by easy way in order to be concentrating on the complicated business logic. Moreover, they need some tools that help them to test their applications before delivering it to the testing team.

This Edition empowers the developers with the following capabilities:

-Class Designers: for Building class graphically instead of writing it by code.
-Unit Testing: Generate necessary code for automating the test without the need to make the developer lose his time to make by his hand the test each time. Unit tests can get its test data from a database. This kind of tests (Data Driven Tests-DDT) can test a lot of scenarios very fast.
-Code Coverage: Unit tests can insure that the known scenarios have been passed by the written code. But it doesn’t ensure that the scenarios covered the whole code. Code coverage can show the tested code colored. The fully tested code will be shown one color. The partially tested in a second color, while the not tested code is shown in a third color. This feature can eliminate the bugs that arise after deploying the solutions on the customer side. Moreover it can lead to a 100% tested code. This is very hard to achieve by the normal visual studio tools. The following figure depicts how the code coverage result is shown to the developer.

Static Code Analysis: Static code analysis can help team to write better object oriented code. Better standardized code, better code style that obeys to Microsoft design best practices, ..etc. The rules, on which the static code analyzer test the code based on, can be extensible to include more rules than those who are built in.

Performance Analyzer:

Performance Analyzer can help developer to optimize the performance of their application by reporting which functions are called most of the times, which function take long time to get executed,…etc. Performance analyzer is utilizing to mechanism to accomplish its task. The first mechanism is the sampling. Sampling doesn’t consume a lot of time to have but at the same time it scans the whole code to generate its report. To have more detailed reports it is preferable to use the second mechanism which is Instrumentation. The following figure depicts how the one of the reports that are generated by the performance analyzer

3-Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers

This Client is directed to the testers. Using this edition of VSTS tester can perform the previously explained Units testing, Code Coverage, Static Code Analysis, and Performance Analyzer. In addition to that, this edition integrates with separate module which is Load agent module that enables the tester to perform what is called load test. Load tests are very important in order to test how my website will behave in front of huge amount of users. This feature is very important for corporations who build web systems that are exposed to customers for public on the web.

4-Microsoft Team Foundation Server

The team foundation server is the server through which all clients can communicate. For project managers it is very important to utilize the Team foundation Server (TFS) capabilities. These capabilities permit many important features for the team this includes:

Source and Version Control

This enables more control over the source code. This control can secure the source code in a centralized secured server, not on the client computers of developers.

Check In Policy

The Project Manager can define polices for all work that will be performed by certain team within certain project. This may include not being able to upload the source code unless passing certain tests. Moreover, it can enforce developers to apply design best practices to their code.

Build Automation

By this feature, the team can have at each night a complete build for the project that yields to a stable version of the system everyday. The build will be accompanied with group of reports that describes the build history of the application.

Team Reporting

The Team Foundation server empowers the project manager with more control on the team by presenting a large set of predefined reports about the project status, remaining work, number of bugs,….etc.

Work Item Monitoring

Each Work Item could be tracked by means of its status. Who has gotten assigned with? Whether is it bug, risk, or regular task?

Team Portal
Once a team has been created on the team foundation server, a new portal is automatically generated to enable different members to communicate together. The Portal contains the required documentation, and the project status reports.

Process implementation

Team foundation Server can help the team to apply the MSF CMMI standard process to be able to get certified as CMMI team fast. It provides them with the documentation.

Extensibility capability

Tam foundation server is open for process modification. If certain team has different process than the MSF process to apply, the team can define the process by simple way.
Moreover, if the project manager needs to see more reports about the performance of the team, It is not a hard task to build his own extra reports.

Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Publisher Support

Excel and Project are the 4th, and 5th clients that could work within the Team System. With their easy to use interface new assignments could be granted for different team members.

Conclusion

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) can help any software team by the following ways:

1-Empowers the manager with a good control level on what is going on the project. This happen through delivering a rich status reports about the project tasks

2- It helps the team members to increase the quality of their products by applying advanced testing techniques. e.g. Units tests, Web Tests, and Load Test

3- It helps to increases the overall team quality by enforcing process standards that can lead to getting certified as CMMI.

4- It increase the productivity of the overall team by establishing an automated communication channels between them subsequently saving their times to perform their architectural, development, and testing tasks.

5-VSTS is the least product by means of cost and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in comparison to other tools of other companies (i.e. IBM Rationale Clear Case Suite).

WinFx name has changed to be .NET Framework 3.0

2006-06-18T12:38:00.000+02:00

It's official: Windows Communications Framework (Indigo) + Windows Presentation Framework (Avalon) + Windows Workflow Foundation (WinOE) + InfoCard (now known as Windows Cardspace) = .Net Framework 3.0. If you want a shorthand way of describing .Net Framework 3.0, it's the new Windows programming model that commences with Windows Vista.
On June 9, company officials disclosed the latest name change.
Microsoft has decided to avoid any confusion in the naming scheme for its core developer technology and is renaming it in an effort to better reflect the direction the company is pursuing.

Microsoft is making a move to rename WinFX to the .Net Framework 3.0.
WinFX is a programming model for Vista and is the follow-on to Microsoft's Win32 technology.
.Net Framework 3.0 consists of the .Net Framework 2.0, WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), WF (Windows Workflow), and InfoCardÂnow known as WCS (Windows CardSpace) as part of the renaming scheme.

According to the Microsoft Internal news, Windows Vista will be released for public users next January (Jan 2007) while being availalble for Enterprise accounts as early as October 2006.

Most of the Microsoft developers community is amazed from the WinFX new name (.NET Framework 3.0). They see that it was not an appropriate strategic move from Microsoft to launch two major versions of .NET framework in less than one year.

In contrast, I think it is a perfect move from Microsoft that shows how much this team has a very good plans.

I will talk about this very soon here but not now, as I should go to prepare for my Tomorrow Session (What is new in Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0) that will be held at Microsoft Egypt at 9:00 am.

Anyways, people who will attend will hear my comment about the rebranding issuee Live :)

see you later