The Visual Studio ALM Rangers just released two projects, the Build Customization Guide and the Lab Management Guide.  Both projects provide real world, in-depth guidance and hands-on-labs (HOL) for planning and creating solutions for utilizing the Team Build 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.  Every development team should utilize the features covered in these guides for creating a build strategy that includes Continuous Integration (CI), packaging and versioning of applications, and automated deployments to at least the development and test environments. By utilizing Visual Studio Lab Management, these environments can be quickly provisioned and managed by those development teams.  They will be able to do things restore to a baseline before building, deploying, and running tests in those environments, clone the environment to provide multiple test environments for QA, and attaching a snapshot of the virtual environment along with other rich information to bugs for the developers.

Visit the websites for all of the details and downloads for the guidance.

Build Customization Guide

I am especially excited about the Build Customization Guide being released because this was first Visual Studio Ranger project I have had worked on.  I had the opportunity to work with many talented and dedicated individuals.

The Epics included in this guidance are:

• Practical guidance and tooling to simplify the customization of Team Foundation Build
• Practical guidance to use Team Foundation Build process templates to automate build and non-build scenarios in Microsoft environments
• Practical guidance to enable simple and flexible deployment of applications and their data stores
• Practical guidance for Activities to empower developers and build engineers
• Quality hands-on labs that complement the guidance and effectively guide the user through the features
• Visualization of the guidance using quick reference posters

http://rabcg.codeplex.com/

Lab Management Guide

I didn’t contribute to the Lab Management Guide, but I have read through the guidance.  It includes a lot of great information that include planning Lab Management, setting up the Virtual Lab environment, and creating Virtual Machines using the VM Factory.

The Epics included in this guidance are:

• Visualization of the guidance using quick reference posters
• Advanced golden image management using the VM Factory for Lab Management
• Provide guidance on setting up Test environments with respect to pre-defined personas
• Provide Guidance to enable large and small teams to setup and configure both automated and manual tests
• Provide practical guidance for managing and maintaining a Lab Management environment
• Provide practical guidance to enable teams to quickly setup and configure their lab management environment

http://ralabman.codeplex.com/

Visual Studio ALM Rangers

So who are the the Visual Studio ALM Rangers?  They are a group of internal Microsoft employees and external communities leaders/MVPs who’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of Visual Studio with out-of-band solutions for missing features and guidance.  Willy-P. Schaub has posted some great information about who we are, the past accomplishments, and future plan in the Visual Studio ALM Rangers 5 year Report.

Please contact us at tfs@deliveron.com for information on these guides or implementing these solutions in your environment.

Mike