So now I am back...back to a different world of testers. No I havent become an SDET, am still a PM but my team has moved out of Team Foundation and now we are all working in the Test Tools space. Fun times ahead - planning how best to make the world of testers more productive.

But hey Team Build is and will be my first love..something that I was involved in from day one at MS and my first ship.

  From Left: Dinesh Bhat (Test Mgr), Neeti Kapur (test), yours truly :) (Program Mgr)

...drink merry..

from left: Gijo (test Lead), Ankur (Dev) - dont worry they werent like this while building the product :))

..and are proud to be a part in building ..the Visual Studio Team Foundation...

seated from left - Rubel(test), Satinder(dev), Rituparna(test), Akash(PM), Ankur(dev), Amit(dev), Srivatsn (Test), Manish(Dev). Standing from left: Neeraja (dev lead), Gijo (behind the box), yours truly (the one waving :)), Anu (Test) and Neeti

[Edited - added names to the pics as requested in one of the comments]

My first ship experience in MS and in my entire career cause this is the first time I worked for a product company, my first ship it award which I can proudly display in my office soon......Vohoooooooooooooooooooooo!!! Cant say more....

We are 13.5 hours ahead of PST - so when I woke up this morning (Saturday), the first thing that came to my mind was - "Gawddd!!! Show me the ship it email" and rushed to my laptop and here I am still half asleep making sure I jot this down in my blog to remember this day always....

Now waiting for Monday morning for the celebrations @work - will post some cool pics of that ..

So now with 2 years gone -    I am actually looking forward to completing 5 years @MS. Well there are a bunch of benefits that you get if you complete 5 years (especially in the India Dev Center)..

- You get an office (yes the lesser mortals sit in cubicles here)

- You get a nice fancy shield for completing 5 years

- You get a card signed by BillG (no I dont think he signs it himself :( )

- And you get a nice sticker which says 'Ask me for how long have I been here' ...just makes people walking by think that you are a fairly senior person ;)

BTW if you want to take a look at the contents of the 'box' - the cool posters and what not - take a look at abhinab's blog...

Again, many of you must have noted that the article needs a small update in the bissubscribe command if you use it with the RC build to subscribe to events. The only change is that the /userId <your id> parameter does not have to be passed as it picks up the current user (I have updated my blog to reflect this change).

If you face any issues with the latest updated sample - do let us know

“wow – I would love to be in the usability team of this!!”

Now- obviously it’s a considerable change in the user experience and some terrific usability studies must have gone behind it. That set me reading Jensen’s blogs which talks tons about office 12 and the history of usability and the usability studies and then that made me feel like…

“wow – I would kill to be in the usability team of this!!” J

Anyways – for those who haven’t yet got a taste of what all is instore- here are two of my favorite things (till now cause I haven’t yet seen much)..

1.      Preview it before applying it – remembering trying to figure out which font would look best in your document and then going through the cryptic list of “Abadi  MT condensed light, Algerian, Arphic Kaisho Medium……..” and applying and then reapplying ? Come Office12 no more! Look at this – I select a text in my document and then simply hover on the options either in the drop down list of fonts, font sizes, heading styles and whatever ..and it actually shows me a preview of what would the text look like. No more guessing, no more reapplying – cool isn’t it?

2.      Another pretty useful thing in outlook. Yes I know there is this “Reminder” pop up which keeps popping up 15 mins, 20 mins, 30 mins prior to a meeting – but maybe its just me but for some reason – I just loathed it..and almost always hit ‘Dismiss All’ without even thinking twice. Yes and I have almost missed a lot of my meetings too (not a good idea when you are a Program Manager in MS – c’mon you draw half of your salary because of meetings!). Another frequent problem that I used to have was I would almost always forget some late night calls that I needed to have with the Redmond folks. They used to send invites a week back – and the reminders were supposed to pop at 10:15 pm my time but how would it when I was getting ready to sleep with my laptop safely tucked in my bag!! Well..with office 12 - so much easier..I have this cool sidebar which always shows me all the appointments I have for the day..no more relying on pop ups to remember what’s in line today.

Oh BTW and I love the ribbon..though I am sure there is much more to it but I just remembered once when my dad (not exactly a tech savvy guy) was all bewildered over the phone asking me how some options from his toolbar had “just disappeared” and he  was completely blocked and worried that there was some major problem with his MSWord. The fact that he hardly knew what each icon was used for is a different story altogether..he just knew a couple of them like B U and maybe a couple more. Come ‘ribbons’ I am sure a lot of his problems will be solved ..with the cool tool tips and getting rid of the cluttered old menu and toolbar – I just cant wait to show him this . It just makes me wonder - there might be a organisations in this world who would be hiring as smart or maybe smarter people than MS, may work on maybe as cool or even cooler technologies, might be as or maybe more innovative..but..usability studies and user experience - MS rocks!(I dont want to sound like a typical loyal employee - but this is what I have always felt ..even before I joined MS and get convinced about it more and more each day!)

Go change your outlook ..and give a new look to your office as soon as you get a chance!

An interesting part from the book..

"I once was asked by a test manager to summarize everything I learned about builds in one sentence. I told him that “there are no free lunches, especially in the build lab, but there might be free beer.” He told me that he was disappointed that I did not have anything deeper than that. He then said his motto was “Testers close bugs.” I knew what he meant, so I said with tongue-in-cheek, “Wow, that’s deep.” I’m not sure if he took that as a compliment or just thought I was not very funny. Regardless, he did have a good point."

Pretty deep I must say !

I was also surprised that Vince actually had a chapter on Team Build and that he used my blog content for it. And to think of it yesterday was the first time I actually spoke to him :)..its a funny thing how huge MS can sometimes be ..but its great that inspite of its size and the fact that I am in India and Vince in Redmond..it just took one email exchange and we got talking together on the future of Team Build..it indeed isnt that big a world here after all!!

Happy Reading !!

As we are gearing towards locking down our V1 more and more ..we are looking to plan and make our products better come Orcas..and that is where I am coming from. Sure..we do our usual stuff of talking to our very own build lab engineers for the SQLs and Offices and Dev Divs of the Microsoft world to gather some ideas, but I guess it just makes us so so MS centric and definitely thats not how the world operates always. In doing so we sometimes miss out on the other "non MS"scenarios of huge build labs, mini build labs and builds for the individual contributors right from their desktop. This is something that worries me often..especially since we are in the Dev Tools business and we have some a huge number of Devs and Tests, most of them incredibly smart (rest convinced that they are incredibly smart)..we are so prone to taking it for granted that we know the users of our products very well. At times it turns out to be a blessing and an awesome situation to be in..but sometimes I feel it is too limiting....

...so lets hear from you...My previous blogs asked for feedback around Team Build ..but here I dont want you to be limited by the 'it doesnt have' list of TB ..but to look outside of TB and inside what you folks are doing currently and what you find extremely painful and hoped and wished some tool would make easier ..I would love to hear from people handling huge build labs, mini build labs and also Individual contributors who do desktop builds or simply anyone on this..

As a part of the build process in team foundation build, we report changesets associated with each build. This is done primarily to help you quickly view what all checkins that went into this build with the name of the dev who made the checkin and his comments. This makes it much simpler to point out the possible cause of a build break..

But in cases where you have a huge number of changesets being reported (say around 5k of them)..this might take several minutes hence holding up your report and build. A very typical scenario would be when you have just migrated an existing project with an already existng store of changesets and work items and you have started a build. An interesting fact which causes this is, that we report changesets only between two 'successful' builds for a team project and for a build type. Pardon me for diverting from the topic but - the definition of a 'successful' build that we use in Team Foundation Build is a "build which has 0 compilation errors and has passed all tests included in the build" (Again we had a huge debate whether test results should or should not be included in determining a 'successful' build but we finally thought that any good daily build process should have this behavior - here is what Martin Fowler says about it ( I would love hear your thoughts on this though).

Ok so back to where we were - now that you have changesets taking several minutes to report and the matter is made even worse if the builds are failing - cause everytime you have to invest the same time to even debug what went wrong with the build..here are some tips to help you..

1. Did you know that you can actually skip this step of getting changesets altogether in team build?

To do this you would need to edit the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets file. You simply need to change the property value of SkipPostBuild to 'True'. Here is what it would look like