ALM Readiness Treasure Map v2 about to be published!

Hopefully you’ve been following all of the hard work invested by the ALM Rangers since version 1 of our ALM Readiness Treasure Map was published back in January 2013.

What is it?

The ALM Readiness Treasure Map is a Windows 8 Store Application that brings all of the sources of Microsoft-produced Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) guidance into a single location to navigate to any content the user wishes to find and read/view.

Check out the overview here: TOC – ALM Readiness Treasure Map

Version 1

We produced the first version of the application and it was beautiful.  It was a great first effort to bring information together in a single application from the ALM Rangers, DPE, PAG, and PFE.  It made it easy to search for content and learn the different topics of interest.

We also produced a paper map matching the app’s home screen that was a masterpiece to be framed!  🙂

Finally, we released the source code to CodePlex so that developers could learn from our lessons about how to build great Windows 8 Store applications.

Despite the high quality of the app, the team felt we could make a lot of potential improvements to it.  This lead to…

Version 2

Next week is Microsoft’s internal-only TechReady 17 conference.  Anisha Pindoria and I will be presenting the history of the treasure map from concept to shipping app and physical map, the improvements we’ve made, and soliciting feedback for v3 of the app.

The team has done a phenomenal job enhancing the application with a lot of new features, including:

  1. Semantic zoom with parallax on the home screen,
  2. Progress tracking to determine how much content you have completed,
  3. Favorites
  4. News
  5. Revamped snapped view

There’s lots more to talk about, but for now, check out the Table of Contents (TOC) link, above, look for the app to be published in the Windows Store by next week, and for the updated source code to follow shortly thereafter.

Thanks for reading!

Rob

This post was migrated from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/rob/2013/07/18/alm-readiness-treasure-map-v2-about-to-be-published/.

Key Management Services (KMS) Windows Client Setup Keys

This document includes keys for Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612867.aspx

Rob

This post was migrated from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/rob/2013/06/20/key-management-services-kms-windows-client-setup-keys/.

Administering Team Foundation Service (on the web, not on-premise)

If you are using Team Foundation Service (i.e. in the cloud, not our on-premise Team Foundation Server), finding the administration pages from the web site can be a bit tricky if you don’t know where to look.

Log into your TFS account.  If you don’t have one, you can sign up at http://tfs.visualstudio.com.  In the upper-right corner of the page is a gear icon:

Once you click this icon, you will be able to create new projects, manage security, etc.

Thanks to Frank La Vigne for inspiring this post.

Rob

This post was migrated from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/rob/2013/04/26/administering-team-foundation-service-on-the-web-not-on-premise/.

Measuring How Long Commands Take in Windows

I was considering installing the timeit.exe command on my new laptop, but read that it may not work on the latest versions of Windows.  So, I found an article on StackOverflow that recommended using the Measure-Command command in PowerShell.  You use it as follows, where Get-ChildItem is just listing the current directory as an example command to time:

If you just want to see one of these results, you can specify the field, such as milliseconds, as follows:

Note that Measure-Command does not show you the output of the command that you have executed for PowerShell commands, just the time it took to execute the command.  If you want to see the command’s output, pipe it to Out-Default, as follows:

If you want to use it to execute cmd.exe commands vs. PowerShell commands, prefix the command with “cmd /c” as follows:

Thanks to Casey K and TechGibbon for the useful information.

Rob

Consolidating Hyper-V Differencing Disks into One

I deleted two snapshots from a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) this morning.  This left the base .vhd file and two .avhd differencing disks.  I decided I wanted to merge them into a single file and learned that the diskpart tool will let you do this.

  1. Open an elevated command prompt (i.e. run as administrator).
  2. Run diskpart.
  3. Enter: select vdisk file=”<full path to the latest differencing disk>”
    1. A differencing disk ends in either .avhd or .avhdx.
  4. Enter: merge vdisk depth=n
    1. n will be the number of parent files you want to merge.  Since I had two parents, one .vhd and one .avhd for this .avhd file, I used depth=2.

Happy merging!

Rob

This post was migrated from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/rob/2013/04/03/consolidating-hyper-v-differencing-disks-into-one/.

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