Mickey Gousset's Blog

I’ll be speaking at Tech Ed 2011–North America

mickeygousset — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:10:37 +0000

Wow! I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be speaking at Tech Ed 2011 – North America this year. The past couple of years I’ve spoken on Web Testing with ~~Visual Studio Team System~~ Visual Studio 2008. Now, I’m moving into the 2010 world. This year, I’ll be speaking on Intellitrace with Visual Studio 2010:

Here is the abstract for the session:

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate provides a wealth of functionality for figuring out what is happening with your application or even being able to debug what happened up to that point with IntelliTrace. But for most developers pressing F5, adding the odd breakpoint and stepping through the application is about as far as they get when debugging. Come to this session if you want to learn more about how to use the debugger and also IntelliTrace to track down those hard to spot errors fast, leaving you more time to write the code you want to be writing.

This is going to be a really cool session and I’m very excited about it. I’m starting to ramp up development of the session now, so, as I do on most topics that I speak on, I want to solicit from the community what they would be interested in hearing about, based on the session abstract.

Do you use Intellitrace at all? Do you have any horror stories, or success stories, about Intellitrace? Any examples that you want to share?

Ultimately, the success of my session will depend on delivering the content that you, the attendee, find both intelligent and helpful. So help me do that. Email me at mickey underscore gousset at yahoo dot com with any suggestions you might have around what you think would be interesting on the Intellitrace talk.

As I start to put the talk together, I’ll post what I can to my blog, so ya’ll can see how things are going, and can provide feedback.

Finally, I’m going to have some good giveaways at Tech Ed, either at my session, if they’ll let me, or afterwards at the booths. Some items I’ll be giving away include:

A copy of Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010, signed by all four authors.
T-Shirts! Everyone loves T-shirts.
Still working on some other ideas…

I’d love to have a packed session, so spread the word! And don’t forget to send me your thoughts on Intellitrace. I’d love to have a slide that presents the community’s thoughts and feelings.

System Center Service Manager 2010 – Cumulative Update 1

mickeygousset — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:33:03 +0000

Cumulative Update 1 for Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010 is available for download at the Microsoft Download website. This cumulative update is a rollup of fixes for System Center Service Manager 2010. This cumulative update is also a prerequisite for Service Manager Authoring Tool 1.0 Release Candidate. Additionally, this cumulative update contains a fix for a problem in which out-of-box workflows are run multiple times.

If you are using SCSM 2010, then you really need to install this update. It will fix several issues, as well as allow you to use the RC version of the authoring tool, which contains some nice new functionality.

Management Pack Authoring Guide Is Complete

mickeygousset — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:23:02 +0000

Brian Wren has posted that the Management Pack Authoring Guide is complete.

Go check it out here.

If you are interested in learning more about management pack development, check out the Management Pack Development Course at Infront Consulting.

Speaking at DevLink in August

mickeygousset — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:10:47 +0000

I am SUPER excited to back at Devlink this year speaking. There are still tickets available for the conference, but it is expected to sell out soon, so if you are interested in one of the best conferences in the South-East, go hit the website right now and register.

I’ll be speaking on two topics:

8/5/2010 12:00:00 PM
"Yes Virginia, You Do Care How Your Version Control Repository Is Configured"

"Having the best version control software in the world doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know how to configure it correctly. In this session, we will look at how Team Foundation Server Version Control works, and give out some best practices on how to configure your version control repository, as well as look at different change management and branching strategies, that apply not just to TFS 2010, but any version control system."

Room: E109

8/6/2010 4:00:00 PM
”These Aren’t Your Daddy’s Testing Tools”

"Visual Studio 2010 delivers a new crop of testing tools that raise the bar for testing, as well as provide testers with everything they need to do their job right. And the best thing is, they don’t even have to go into Visual Studio 2010 to use them! In this session we will look at some of the new testing tools available with Visual Studio 2010, including the Manual Test Runner, Test Cases, and Coded UI Tests. Once you watch a test run using the Manual Test Recorder, and see all the information it collects for you, as well as the video playback, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without these tools!"

Room: E109

I’d love to have a packed crowd at both. I’ll have a couple of things to give away as well.

I’m still refining both presentations at this point, so if you have anything that fits into these topics that you would like to see discussed or mentioned, or if you have specific questions you would like to be addressed, contact me and I’ll do my best to incorporate it into the talk.

Tech Ed Europe: Vote For The Sessions You Want To See

mickeygousset — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:58:22 +0000

You have the ability to influence what sessions will be shown at Tech Ed Europe.

Go to http://europe.msteched.com/sessionpreference. There you can see a list of sessions that have been shortlisted for possible inclusion into Tech Ed Europe.

One of my sessions has made the short-list. Enter “Management Pack” into the Keyword search box, and you’ll pull up Real World Management Pack Development. Check it out and see what you think. If you think it would make a nice addition to Tech Ed Europe, please vote for it. And make sure you check out some of the other great sessions that could potentially be available as well.

Opalis Introduction Videos

mickeygousset — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:22:27 +0000

Opalis is Microsoft’s IT Process Automation Software, that will enable you to automate many IT processes across multiple systems, even from different vendors.

Here are a couple of good 10 minute videos, by Charles Joy, that give you an overview for what Opalis can do

Watch the videos here.

Installing the Service Manager Console on my netbook

mickeygousset — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:28:24 +0000

I want to install the Service Manager console on my Toshiba NB305 netbook. It has 2 GB of RAM, so while the console will run slow, it should still run.

To get started, I downloaded the evaluation copy of Service Manager, available here. I ran the downloaded file to extract the installation materials When you do this, it creates two folders for you: x86 and amd64. Obviously, my netbook is not a 64-bit machine so I’m going to go with the x86 installation.

To start the installation, I open the x86 folder, and double-click the file. This opens the main page for installing all the different components of Service Manager 2010.

I’m only interested in installing the console, so under Optional, I click the link Install a Service Manager Console.

On the Product Registration page, I check the box indicating I have read the licensing agreement, then click Next.

I’ll keep the default directory for the installation, and click Next

I did not pass the prerequisites check, as the Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable is not installed. The installer is nice enough to provide me a link to the Report Viewer so I can install it. I click the link, and navigate through the Report Viewer installation. Once that installation is complete, I click the Check Prerequisites button, and this time I pass.

I click the Next button to continue.

I indicate that I am not interested in participating in the Customer Experience Improvement program, and click Next.

I indicate that I don’t want to use Windows Update at this time, and click Next.

I review the information on the Review Summary page (which isn’t much, just the folder where the application will be installed) and click Install.

The console has installed successfully.

Next up is to install the RTM version of Service Manager 2010 (not on my netbook of course), and then I can see if the Service Manager console on my netbook can connect to Service Manager.