The Visual Studio Ranger team has had an extremely hectic start to the year by shipping a few of the projects started last year to CodePlex. These releases are a major milestone in these projects as we are preparing for the release of Visual Studio 2010 later this year. I am also extremely pleased to have been involved in the VM Factory project as a contributor and extremely excited that it has finally been released.

Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory

The VM Factory project is first and foremost a set of documentation on how to correctly and effectively deploy Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to a Virtual Machine running on Hyper-V and other similar virtualization engines. The guidance covers the ideal installation scenarios as well as how to configure the server properly and optimise the VM. There is also a set of tools and PowerShell scripts that allows for the automated building of these virtual machines. The automated factories are also available from select suppliers in Europe and South Africa. The 2.6MB download has already moved a 172 copies since it’s release.

Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide

The Upgrade Guide covers all topics related to the issues and concepts when upgrading Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. It covers the configuration setting changes as well as system changes required to upgrade TFS, and potential pitfalls and catches during the actual process. It also covers the changes to the management tools and also covers advanced upgrade scenarios. Anyone planning on moving to TFS 2010 should not hesitate to review this guidance ASAP. The 1.3MB download has moved 223 copies since it’s release.

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance

The quick reference guidance are cheat sheets for the various capabilities and features within Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.  These are distributed in the form of posters that can be printed and posted for easy access to understand the various function and ways to access these tools when making decisions or working in the Visual Studio environment. These are a must have in any development office using Visual Studio. The basic 1.2MB download has already moved 1235 copies since it’s release.

Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance

The last project to be released is Requirements Managements which covers the how-to and processes involved when using Visual Studio for Requirements Management. This covers the whole application lifecycle as well as providing a handy checklist to keep track of the processes involved during the process. 214 people have already downloaded the guidance from CodePlex.

To learn more about the ALM Rangers and the various projects we are involved in please visit the ALM Rangers home page on MSDN here.