Urban Turtle's blog

Dominic (product owner on our team) and I are both big fans of Apple laptops, having recently switched from our old PCs. While I already had a macbook pro at home, using one for work was a whole other story for me. I happen to be scrummaster and developer on the team, and as you should already know, we develop software using Microsoft tools, especially Visual Studio. Building the new version of Urban Turtle to integrate with Team Web Access 2010 forced me to use Boot Camp and boot into Windows to run Microsoft’s virtual machine available to try out Visual Studio and TFS 2010 (Beta 2 and then RC).

Dom kept on making fun of me for missing out on the fun that is using Mac OS X. Feeling a little frustrated, I decided to try and run Microsoft’s virtual machine inside Mac OS X, using VMWare Fusion, my virtualization solution of choice for the mac. VMWare Fusion does not allow you to directly import or convert a Virtual PC-based machine. I had to figure things out on my own a little bit and I faced some issues while doing so. This is why I thought sharing my experience with the world might be useful to someone.

First of all, VMWare requires you to download the VMWare Converter tool to convert your Virtual PC machine into a VMWare-compatible one. You first need to register with VMWare before getting to the bits. However, it’s free software (as in free beer), so go ahead, register and download it.

VMWare does not run on Mac OS X, so I had to boot into my Windows boot camp partition and install it. When that was over, starting the conversion process was a breeze. Well, that is if you don’t mind converting the virtual machine into a VMWare Fusion 2.* machine even though the latest VMWare Fusion version is 3.*. That was kind of odd, but I went ahead anyway. The whole process took around an hour (I was watching the Habs game so this is not a very precise measurement).

With the machine converted, I booted back into Mac OS X, copied the machine over to my external hard drive, launched VMWare Fusion and opened the machine. I was happy to see the Windows logo appear rather quickly, but I was in for a real disappointment when Windows was finally ready for use. Usually, when you boot into a guest OS for the first time, any VMWare user knows to install the VMWare Tools to improve performance and get decent mouse support. When I tried to do so, I got a message saying the tools weren’t available for this version of the guest OS. Some searching on the web yielded a different story. Microsoft’s virtual machine features Windows Server 2008 Standard 32 bits. This is a supported version by the VMWare Tools. The situation sure was disappointing. Performance just wasn’t there, rendering the virtual machine pretty much unusable.

However, I never give up this easily. I looked for actual documentation about how to convert machines to run them with VMWare Fusion. I found this document and paid attention to the part where it says to retain only the vmdk files, and drop the others. I hadn’t done that. I kept all files, especially the one with the actual machine settings. That was my first mistake. I started the process over but this time, instead of opening the machine with Fusion, I chose to create a new one. I specified the existing vmdk file as the hard drive to use, configured the proper OS version (the 64bits version of Windows Server 2008 was selected, I chose the 32 bits version) and completed the wizard, launching the virtual machine. Choosing the right version of the guest OS really gave me hope that I would be able to install the VMWare Tools. I was right. Once Windows was booted, I quickly tried to install the tools and the whole thing worked flawlessly.

So here I am, on my shiny Macbook Pro, running Microsoft’s virtual machine made available to try the Visual Studio 2010 family of products. While I will use it to test the new version of Urban Turtle for Team Web Access 2010, I also had a secret wish all along. I really wanted to test out the recently released Windows 7 Phone developer tools.

Can a turtle really fit inside a phone?

- Louis Pellerin

We are excited to announce that Urban Turtle, developed by Pyxis Technologies, is a sponsor at the Visual Studio Launch. The 2010 release of Urban Turtle will be showcased at the upcoming event in LasVegas http://www.devconnections.com/ (April 12-14, 2010). Pyxis representatives will be in booth # 425 and available to answer questions and to provide information about the company and its products. Come and see us. Let’s talk Agile!

Patil Tatoulian

By 2012, agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all software development projects (Gartner “Predict 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions”). Pyxis Technologies develops tools that help Agile teams deliver successful projects.

Pyxis Technologies announced that it has been selected to join Microsoft Corp.’s Visual Studio Team System Inner Circle program. The Inner Circle program engages specialized application life-cycle management (ALM) partners worldwide who enable customers to achieve ROI on their Visual Studio Team System tools investment.

“Pyxis Technologies is very excited about becoming a member of this elite program“, says François Beauregard, CEO of Pyxis Technologies. “With the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 launch and this new strategic relationship, we will be able to provide even more value to customers using Visual Studio Team System and moving to Agile development methods. Since 2005, we have trained and certified more than 1200 Scrum masters and participated in numerous Agile development projects. At Pyxis, Agility guides our practices every day. This is why we are the reference in Agile software development.“

Urban Turtle is an Agile project management solution fully integrated into Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. This innovative solution simplifies project planning, helps developers update their work in real-time, improves project progress visualization and encourages communication within the team.

GreenPepper has mature support for .NET and Visual Studio IDE integration which allows teams to efficiently use executable specifications and acceptance test driven development practices in their development process. The Inner Circle partnership will help us to rapidly reach one of our strategic goals in 2010, which is to have tight integration with Team Foundation Server and the Testing features of the Visual Studio ALM platform.

“Microsoft is delighted to add Pyxis Technologies to the Visual Studio Inner Circle program,” said Cyrill Glockner, director of Business Development, Platform and Tools at Microsoft Corp. “Pyxis Technologies offers a unique set of products and services to help customers consistently improve their software development productivity through the use of Agile development methods”

Pyxis Technologies will release the 2010 version of Urban Turtle simultaneously with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 launch on April 12^th 2010.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Aujourd’hui nous avons présenté notre premier Backlog Maintenance live sur UStream!

Donnez-nous vos commentaires!

Bonne écoute!

Vous pouvez voir d’autres vidéos sur urban.tv

} dominic

Someone asked me some good questions this morning in my mail. Here are my answers!

1. What made you develop this?
We at Pyxis Technologies are experts in Agile methodologies and it was obvious that TFS needed an interface where it would be easier to manage Scrum projects.

2. What do you do?
At Pyxis, Agility is guiding our practices every day. That is why we are a reference in Agile software development.
We offer agile coaching, consulting, development and training services. We also have a product business where we apply all those techniques to develop some great products

3. Have you got a version that works with the TFS 2010 RC ?
We currently have a Beta version of Urban Turtle for TFS 2010 Beta 2 and will have a version for the RC version available at the end of the current sprint (Friday march 5th).

4. What process templates do you support?
We will support virtually any template with the official release of version 2010 planned for April 12th. For the moment, in the Beta and RC versions, we restrict support to the MSF Agile 5.0 template from Microsoft.

5. URLs of screen captures?
We can only provide screen captures of Urban Turtle because of licence issues preventing us from allowing online access to a demo instance of TFS for trial purposes. We are currently looking into this with Microsoft and hope to have this issue worked around in the near future. With regards to version 2010, it is not currently available on the site but we can provide a trial version that can be installed on the VS2010Beta2 VM available from Microsoft on demand. Just send an email to urbanturtle@pyxis-tech.com to inquire about joining our early adopters program.

6. What have been the difficult things?
The integration with Web Access was a bit tough. The documentation available on the web is almost inexistent. We also had some performance issues at the beginning related to the way we accessed the TFS web services.

7. What things do you want MS to fix?
Microsoft needs to build a real Scrum template. MSF Agile 5.0 is a huge improvement over the previous version, but we still find it lacking when it comes to managing Scrum projects.

} dominic