Self-evaluation is difficult but I would challenge you to ask the following questions of yourself:

• Do you think people perceive you as a leader?
• What part does your technical abilities play in leadership?
• How can you convert your current activities today to be a leader tomorrow?

Based on your answers, building a career development plan will be beneficial to address any gaps that may exist but this will also help you recognize what qualities you, as a leader should have. Career mentorship is another great way to expand your capabilities and in the process, grow your network of leaders.

The Leadership Curve

As a new leader, you’ll most likely find yourself following the Leadership Curve. This curve has predictable sections and illustrates a few key concepts:

• Embrace the curve – To move up you first must move down
• Your career success depends upon going into the “pit of success”
• Avoidance (regarding specific decisions, knowledge, people or tasks) will influence your acceleration through the curve
• The addiction curve (i.e. whereby you only do the things you do well) won’t allow you to be successful

Leadership, Management and Coaching

I'll also mention that many people confuse leadership, management and coaching. To remove such ambiguity, here’s one way of thinking about each:

To Lead

By shaping the workplace through vision, innovation, and inspiration.  By moving people emotionally to make that vision a tangible reality. 

To Manage

By shaping work, projects, tasks, and outcomes through a system of organizing, planning, and directing.  By removing roadblocks and clearing the deck so the team can get things done.

To Coach

By shaping and developing people through real-time, on-the-job training, observation, feedback, and follow-up.  By making it personal, hands-on, on-going, and focused on the individual.

Final Thoughts

While there are many behaviors that excellent team leaders possess, here are 3 key ones:

• Asks precision questions to remediate issues and mitigate risks
• Helps the team practice the habit of reflection, a skill critical to optimal learning
• Reduces fear or apprehension the team may feel about change

In the end, embarking on a career progression towards leadership is an exciting endeavor although it’s not without its challenges. Never the less, becoming a well-rounded leader is a process that truly never concludes and is hopefully filled with a lifetime of achievements.

The following features are included:

• One ASP.NET Project Templates
• Support SSL when launching Web Applications on IIS Express
• Visual Studio Web Editor Enhancements
• Browser Link
• Windows Azure Web Sites Support in Visual Studio
• Create remote Azure resources when creating a new Web project
• Web Publish Enhancements
• ASP.NET Scaffolding
• NuGet 2.8.1
• ASP.NET Web Forms
• ASP.NET MVC 5.1.2
• ASP.NET Web API 2.1.2
• ASP.NET Web Pages 3.1.2
• Entity Framework 6.1
• ASP.NET Identity 2.0.0
• Microsoft OWIN components
• ASP.NET SignalR 2.0.2

Additional information can be found via the ASP.NET site.

ExpressRoute Preview Launch

ExpressRoute is a new capability available in Windows Azure allowing you to easily extend your existing network to Azure bypassing public internet with guaranteed levels of service and bandwidth. This VPN-less solution leverages IP exchanges through Level 3 or Equinix or MPLS VPN connections from AT&T to provide low-latency, high-throughput, and private connectivity for workloads running in Windows Azure. Additional information is available here.

Increased Co-Administrator limits to 200

Customers asked, and we delivered. For enterprise customers running workloads in Windows Azure, the 10 co-administrators limit to a given subscription introduced challenges for customers with large numbers of IT staff and/or with security audit protocols in place who were unable to share IDs. This week we launched the ability for customers to add up to 200 co-administrators to simplify subscription management.

Service Incident Notification

During an active service incident, it was sometimes difficult to ascertain whether your specific subscription was impacted when viewing the public service health dashboard. Sometimes incidents were isolated in a given region making it even more of a challenge to detect specific subscription-level impact. With the update deployed this week, you can login to the Windows Azure portal and, if your subscription is impacted by an active service incident, you will see a pop-up ‘toast’ with links to details on the incident.

VM Agents

VMs running PaaS (Platform as a Service) workloads have always had a lightweight agent running on them to facilitate server specific management operations. This week we introduced an agent that can be deployed to Linux or Windows IaaS (infrastructure as a service) VMs that can be used to easily install and configure extensions to streamline system management. One of the first extensions available is a BGINFO option to push the VM’s IP address, host name, memory/size information onto the ‘wallpaper’ of a logged on user.

Website Backup/Restore

If you are making use of Windows Azure Websites, you can now configure manual or scheduled backups of your website assets/code as well as MySQL/SQL databases driving the site. This new DR solution will streamline operations to improve your ability to quickly revert to a previous version. This feature is also available free of charge!

For additional information on these and many other new Windows Azure features, check out ScottGu’s blog post.

Building Siena apps is as easy as editing a document. Place some visuals on a canvas. Hook them up to your data. Customize how your app looks and works. Then, if you need special logic and intelligence, write Excel-like expressions. You can use your app immediately, or share it with colleagues or the world.

View the video and sample apps here. 

That said, while it’s difficult to summarize all of the Azure improvements that are being deployed (which almost seems on a daily basis), I did want to mention HDInsight as it relates to Big Data.

HDInsight is a service from Microsoft that brings an Apache Hadoop-based solution to the cloud. A modern, cloud-based data platform that manages data whether structured or unstructured, and of any size, HDInsight makes it possible for you to gain the full value of big data.

In addition, HDInsight offers the following benefits:

• Insights with familiar tools: Through deep integration with Microsoft BI tools such as PowerPivot and Power View, HDInsight enables you to easily analyze data for insights. Seamlessly combine data from several sources, including HDInsight, with Microsoft Power Query for Excel. Easily map your data with new Power Map, a three-dimensional mapping Excel 2013 add-in.
• Enterprise-ready capabilities: HDInsight offers enterprise-class security, scalability, and manageability. Thanks to a dedicated secure node, HDInsight helps you secure your cluster. You can also take full advantage of the elastic scalability of Windows Azure. In addition, we simplify manageability of your cluster through extensive support for Windows PowerShell scripting.
• Rich developer experience: HDInsight offers powerful programming capabilities with a choice of technologies including Microsoft .NET, Java and other languages. .NET developers can exploit the full power of Language-Integrated Query with LINQ to Hive. And database developers can use existing skills to query and transform data through Hive.

 To get started with HDInsight:

1. Visit the Windows Azure Management Portal.
2. In the bottom left, click New.
3. Under Data Services, click HDInsight.
4. Click Quick Create, and then follow the quick-start steps.

For additional pricing information, please see the HDInsight Pricing Details webpage. For more information about the service, visit the HDInsight Service webpage.

• The new Integrated Sign In enables a seamless experience to interact with any service associated with the developer’s Windows Azure subscription. Developers just need to enter their credentials into Visual Studio to start publishing web apps and cloud services, use Windows Azure diagnostics, and fully interact with their Windows Azure services through the Server Explorer.
• A preview for the new Remote Debugging capability for Windows Azure. This feature greatly improves developer productivity by enabling a live debugging session with a remote service hosted in Windows Azure, whether it’s a Web Site, a Cloud Service or an application hosted in a Virtual Machine. Remote Debugging for Windows Azure brings all the power provided by Visual Studio for debugging local applications to the cloud, making it the perfect tool for developing and troubleshooting remote services.

The download is available here and also details how you can use Windows Azure with Visual Studio 2013.

As in the past, no VS release would be complete without a launch party so definitely save the date for Visual Studio 2013 launch on Nov 13^th.   

If you have any comments/questions, please direct all feedback to Connect (bugs), UserVoice (suggestions) and the Forums (Q&A).

Finally, since I’m mentioning new releases, I couldn’t leave out Windows 8.1 as it's now available!

Enter: The patterns & practices (p&p) team. The goal of this new guidance is to put you on the road toward continuous delivery. By continuous delivery, they mean that through techniques such as versioning, continuous integration, automation, and environment management, you will be able to decrease the time between when you first have an idea and when that idea is realized as software that's in production. Any software that has successfully gone through your release process will be software that is production ready, and you can give it to customers whenever your business demands dictate. They also try to show that there are practical business reasons that justify every improvement you want to make. A better release process makes economic sense by providing:

• Faster time to market
• Better quality software
• More productive employees

Along with the guide (which is designed to help testers and developers understand the role of Dev-Ops within the team and work flow and to build out a continuous delivery release pipeline using Team Foundation Server ALM tools) there are also Hands On Lab (HOL). These HOL’s show engineers how to implement a fully continuous delivery release pipeline with Visual Studio ALM Tools.

About patterns & practices

The Microsoft patterns & practices (p&p) team is responsible for delivering applied engineering guidance that helps software architects, developers, and their teams take full advantage of Microsoft’s platform technologies in their  application development project.

Their goal is to help software development teams be more successful with the Microsoft application platform. They do this by delivering guidance that:

• Helps to simplify the Microsoft application platform
• Provides solution guidance to common problems
• Helps development teams grow their skills and learn

For more information about p&p visit their site.

• Best Practices Analyzer - A diagnostic tool to perform the following actions:
• Verify that the deployment for Team Foundation Server is configured according to recommended best practices.
• Identify the source of problems in an unhealthy deployment.
• Take a snapshot of the configuration of a deployment.
• Obtain usage data about the volume of data stored or accessed in the past 14 days. Includes specific information about database tables that have a tendency to grow and that may need to be reduced in size.
• Check-in Policies
• A Visual Studio add-in that includes the extra useful check-in policies.
• Process Template Editor
• A Visual Studio add-in providing a GUI for customizing work items (field, workflow and the form) and process templates.
• Storyboard Shapes
• Enables the creation of shapes for the PowerPoint storyboarding add-in with custom resize logic.
• Team Foundation Power Tool Command Line (tfpt.exe)
• A companion tool to “tf.exe” that offers additional version control commands, work item tracking, and team project manipulation.
• Windows PowerShell Cmdlets
• Support for basic version control commands and a pipeline and glue to enable scripting.
• Windows Shell Extensions
• Provides integration with Windows Explorer and the common file dialogs to perform many source control operations without having to run Visual Studio or a Team Foundation command-line tool.

And in case you're looking for the 2013 build extensions or the MSSCCI providers, here are the links:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 Build Extensions
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 MSSCCI Provider 32-bit
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 MSSCCI Provider 64-bit

• New TFS Features
• Work Item Charting – visualize your work items like never before
• Browser Based testing (TFS web portal) – run unit tests from your browser
• Cloud based load Testing – push your application to the limit without user interaction
• New VS Experience Features + Improvements: – interaction improvements to make tasks simpler
• Peak Definition – see code definitions inline
• Enhanced Scroll Bar – convert your scroll bar into a bird’s eye view of your code.
• Roaming Settings – never re-configure VS again!
• In menu search – without remembering where they are quickly find the settings you need
• Code Lens – get a heads up display of your code map.

Just to name a few…

For additional information check out the VS ALM+TFS Blog and if you would like a walk through tutorial of how these new features work there be sure to visit Channel9.