Hive Studios Blog

Team Foundation Service Offers Free Plan

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:55:59 GMT

Team Foundation Service is Microsoft offer in the growing arena of hosed Application Lifecycle Management tools. After months of beta testing and great user acceptance of the new service hosted TFS is ready to roll.

What do I get?

With Team Foundation Service free package you will get unlimited number of projects for 5 team members which is probably the best offer for small development teams. Removing the burden of constant maintenance of TFS box, backups, upgrades and patching will definitely increase productivity of small software development shops.

Agile Planning Tools and Customer Interaction

Microsoft has invested greatly in the Agile tools for Team Foundation Server 2012. Your team can now manage the product backlog and run your sprint or iteration cycles according to Agile practices by using the backlog and task board pages available.

Another big advantage is integrated customer feedback and bug reporting portal that comes for free with Team Foundation Service and enables team to maintain close interaction and collaboration with dispersed customers and users. This feature does not require any additional TFS licenses.

Source Control

According to the release info published by Microsoft there is no limit to the source control storage (Nice, nice, nice)

Builds

Build is the only component that is still in Beta. Once Build reach the production stage each account will get certain number of free builds each monthly.

There is a neat feature introduced by TFS and Azure few weeks ago. If you have Azure account, you can continuously deploy web apps from TFS Build to Azure. You can find step-by-step guide here.

Clients

You can access Team Foundation Service from almost any platform. This is shortened list of available clients

- Visual Studio 2010 and 2012

- Eclipse (connect to the service using the free Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 plug-in)

- Xcode (connect your local Git repository to the service using the free Git-TF command-line tools)

- Any SVN client using SvnBridge, free and open source software hosted on codeplex.com

Limitations

Hosting Team Foundation Server on the Azure platform have some constraints. Right now, it is impossible to customize Process Templates for your projects and it is one of the most requested features. According to the members of TFS team, this requirement stands high in their product backlog too.

More Info

For more information check out Team Foundation Service Features Tour

Hive Studios Offer

If you are planning to move your on-premises TFS Server to the cloud feel free to contact us for additional information and quote.

Hive Studios on DevReach and Sinergija

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:52:18 GMT

Last week was packed with Microsoft conferences in the region. DevReach (17th – 18th October) took place in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is one of the few premier conferences on Microsoft technologies in South and Eastern Europe. Featuring an all-star crew of speakers, DevReach 2011 gave us unique opportunity to gain valuable practical knowledge as well as insights on the Microsoft technology roadmap to tech-no-logical thingies like Kinect and new generation of input devices. It is (perfectly) organized by Telerik and Kulov.net for the sixth time in the row.

Second one is Sinergija 2011. Microsoft Sinergija has been the largest and most influential conference dedicated to information and communication technologies and their business deployment in the region of South East Europe, since its very beginning in 2001.

Hive Studios presented Behavior Driven Development using Specflow and Visual studio 2010 on both conferences.

You can grab slide deck and examples here

Demo 1 - Intro

Demo 2 - Coffee Machine

Demo 3 - UI Automation With White

Download Slide Deck

First Agile Project Management Course in 2011

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

Hives Studios held two-day Agile Project Management Course from 19th to 20th January 2011.

This course provides two days of experience in managing and software projects, looking at the underlying philosophy and motivation that drives participants towards the common goal. It also explains core practices and techniques like stand-up meetings, ‘done’ criteria, time boxing, burndown charts and their impact on project management.

Next Course

Next Agile Project Management Course is planned for May 26th in Belgrade. If you want to take part feel free to contact us on office@hive-studios.com

Web Fu 2011

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

Ivan Pavlović will present Orchard CMS on the upcoming Web Fu 2011 conference. Web Fu is one-day gathering of web developers and designers in Belgrade organized by Microsoft Serbia and it focuses on the latest technologies and trends in the web world. Sessions range from technical, code-based topics to expert advice on content strategy, usability and design.

If you’re in Belgrade on 30th March 2011 and speak Serbian, you can register on http://www.webfu.rs/EventFlex

Hive Studios Presented OrchardCMS on WebFu!

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

Ivan Pavlović presented Orchard content management system on Web Fu. According to the early feedback gathered on twitter (#webfu) Orchard seed has been planted into the local community.

Orchard CMS is open-source content management system built on top of ASP.NET 3 and SQL Server. It is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes.

Click here to download slide deck

Orchard 1.1 CMS Is Shipped!

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

What’s new?

Orchard 1.1 fixes bugs and addresses common feedback from the prior 1.0 release, and also adds the following new features:

1. New design for the administration interface, and several usability workflow improvements.
2. Setup recipes: at setup, you have a choice between three installation profiles. It is possible to create your own.
3. Module recipes: modules can specify a set of recipe actions to optionally perform when installing, such as downloading and installing dependencies.
4. Improved module and theme installation workflow.
5. Improved widget and layer management.
6. Improved list management.
7. A new media picker dialog on the rich editor for uploading, inserting, and browsing media items.
8. Improved MSDeploy packaging and deployment from Visual Studio.

What’s New In The Orchard Gallery for 1.1

- Import/Export: transfer metadata, data, and settings between sites.

- Designer Tools: New “shape tracing” feature allows you to inspect the rendering of your site to customize and override templates and placement. URL-based alternates are now supported for targeting template overrides at specific URLs.

- Warmup: Improves site response times in shared hosting environments.

How To Upgrade From Orchard 1.0

There is a great article in Documentation section of Orchard web site that describes standard upgrade procedures in the most common cases:

- Upgrading a Running Instance of Orchard to a New Version
- Performing a Clean Upgrade
- Performing a Not-So-Clean Upgrade

Grab Orchard Bits

View the release notes
Download as a zip (8 MB)
Download the source (17 MB)
Docs and walkthroughs

What do you think?

Have you had a chance to try out release 1.1? What are your thoughts?

Getting Started With Sprint Reviews

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

As most of you probably know, Scrum is process for a agile product development based on principles stated in Agile Manifesto more that 10 years ago. Process consist of short iterations named sprints that usually last 1-3 weeks. On the end of each sprint team presents result of their work to the peers, users, customers and stakeholders.

Sprint review meetings facilitates three important aspects in product development

1. Fast feedbacks

Sprint review serves as a Poka-Yoke mechanism and enables to detect design flaws and hidden requirements early in the process, long before we ship final version to the market. Once the problems are known it is easier to reprioritize work items to meet new requirements.

2. Thrust and co-operational relations

Sprint reviews promote frequent communication between users, customers and the team. For customers, more often than not, it is refreshing to see progress on the regular basis. On the other side, team gets opportunity to show what is done and to verify if product really matches user needs. It builds co-operational relation between parties.

3. Learning

Each party learns how to play it’s role in the product development process. Users will quickly learn how to specify requirements and developers will learn more about business rules and process.

Who should participate?

Well, everyone is invited. Developers are there to present what is done. Management, trainers, domain experts, end users, peer developers are there to learn what is done and to give input on new features planned for next sprint. There are some rules that we must adhere:

1. Sprint meeting is held on regular basis each week, or each two weeks in the same time

2. Sprint meeting is time-box meeting (1 or 1,5 hours), with max 2 hours for preparation

3. No PowerPoint slides, just deliverables (working code, training material) that has value for customers.

4. Developers should present only those features that are done, with no known outstanding work. It means that they are implemented, tested, integrated with the rest of the code and basically ready to be shipped.

5. Features that are not ready for shipment should not be presented in any way during this meeting

6. It is informal meeting

7. Someone should take notes and write down all suggestions for improvements during the meeting

What we want to archive?

1. Presentations will help the team to come up and maintain common done criteria for the system you are building.

2. Right now we really miss fast feedbacks. Time span from initial requirement to build a feature to the actual rollout is at least couple of months. We have to do what we can to make it less than six weeks.

3. This meeting will enable the team to discover and resolve flaws and impediments in work process quickly.

4. It will make obvious what is done and what is not

5. It’s a great way to build trust between participants on the project and stakeholders

6. Presenting results of work usually boosts team morale. It’s always nice to share results with peers and users

Inspect and Adapt

First couple of meeting will uncover a lot of problems. Undefined done criteria, foggy requirements, over commitment and complex code base are just some of them. It is essential to encourage everyone to talk about problems openly. Inspect your work process and adapt it to address observed flaws and impediments on regular basis, after each and every sprint review meeting.

Next steps

1. Schedule first Sprint Review, now!

2. Meet with team members and share your experience and expectations from the first Sprint Review (30 minutes meeting)

3. Define initial done criteria for software (30 minutes meeting)

What do you think?

What is your experience with Sprint Reviews? What would you suggest to someone who is just about to take part in the first Sprint Review?

BDD With Visual Studio 2010 and SpecFlow

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

Few days ago I had opportunity to speak about Behavior Driven Development with Visual Studio and SpecFlow on the ZamDevs User Group in Lusaka, Zambia. It was introduction talk and the reaction of audience was really great.

Download slide deck here (sr-Latn-RS)

Download slide deck here (en-US)

BDD With VS 2010 and SpecFlow on TechDays Belgrade

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

Few days ago I had opportunity to present BDD on TechDays Belgrade 2011. You can grab slide deck and examples here

Get BDD Slide Deck

Get BDD Example

Video: Orchard CMS on Web Fu

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:01:33 GMT

Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform. In this session we are covering following topics

1. What is Orchard CMS?
2. How to get started
3. Writing simple modules
4. Theming

You can watch it online on Web Fu web site or download video file from here.

Video is in Serbian.