Craig Bailey on Microsoft

I’ve always liked how the Team System team work hard to provide details on what they’re up to. This is becoming more the norm on Microsoft assets (just check out the great job Beth Massi has been doing on the VSTO site for example), and so I shouldn’t be surprised to see just how serious they see simple things like content management to be. as Jeff Beehler notes, the Team System team have hired a dedicated web site manager for the Team System site. Sharon Elkins is the lucky person, and she blogs here about what her plans for the site are. Here’s the Team System community site, featuring everyone’s favorite defacto Aussie: Chuck Sterling.

Why would I write a post about this? Simply because I feel that the best way Microsoft can widely reach developers is by providing consistently high quality, easily discoverable, up-to-date content. Forget all those events and outreach extravaganzas – the best way to engage with developers is from a Google search result. More on my thinking on this in a future post.

Grant has released the TFS Build site. He notes the thinking behind it here.

There's a few things I'm really liking about Microsoft of late. One is how much effort they are putting into products like TFS to make them truly amazing products. The second is how they are being transparent about so much of it.

Take for example their work on TFS. This beast of a product is powering almost all their internal development (only a few teams remain - according to a Joe Schwetz when he present last year). And Brian Harry's blog outlines the latest figures. They are truly astounding - over 140M operations per week, coming from over 3,400 users managing more than 350,000 work items. Staggering.

Seems to be working fine (according to Etienne), but with some manual steps required.

Brian Harry explains why. As Brian notes, this was a fresh install of W2K8, and the real pain will come when upgrading from W2K3.

As Brian Harry notes, the latest version of the TFS Times is available. Great reading for those wanting to stay up to date with Team Foundation Server happenings.

Brian Harry announces the release of the TFS 3008 Power Tools. Download here. There's a new MSSCCI provider too. (But not the Data Dude tools - they're coming later.)

The TFS team is on fire lately.

It's always good to see a company use their own product, and when it comes to TFS Microsoft has really excelled. Brian Harry details the current stats, including 300,000 work items across 148 million files. Especially impressive (to me) is how transparent the company is - they detail the memory management issues they are having due to the server cache of over 5 million files putting a hefty load on the algorithm behind it. Not really an issue for me :-) but good to know the product can scale... (is than an understatement or what?)

(via Brian Harry)

Corneliu has released a TFS quick search plugin.

From Paul Hacker comes the TFS Times Newsletter. All managed by... Joomla.

(Via Jeff Beehler)

Thanks to Brian Harry for highlighting how they are greatly improving the value of TFS licensing. For work item logging, your entire company can now log items without needing any additional CALs (you'll need to have the Standard Edition though).