ALM for Agile Comes to Madison, WI

The Agile experts at Centare, in partnership with Microsoft, are bringing a day of Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to you in Madison, WI. The tour that started in the Fall last year, with Chicago, IL, Milwaukee, WI and Indianapolis, IN is now coming to Madison, WI on January 25th.

If you would like to learn how to drive your business forward with Agile Application Lifecycle Management, check out this FREE day of learning. Centare’s experts will dive into the basics of Scrum, emergent architecture, Agile testing and the Microsoft ALM tools including Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Team Foundation Server and Test Manager.

Register for the January 25th event in Madison, WI.

Coded UI Presentation from Chicago Code Camp

If you attended my Chicago Code Camp session on Saturday, thank you and I hope you got value from it! I want to take a moment to thank the organizers of this event. Without these community leaders, we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy such a great code camp. Thank you Michael D. Hall, Scott Seely, Jean Seely, Sergio Pereira, Tim Stall and Clark Sell, not just for Chicago Code Camp, but everything that you do for our community.

I also want to thank Angela Dugan. Angela is our Microsoft Developer Tools Evangelist for Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. If you got a book or shirt from my session, please thank Angela, she provided all of those goodies.

If you would like my slide deck, you can get it on my SkyDrive.

One of the questions asked, that I answered with 99% accuracy but wanted to confirm, was “Can I record UI actions with Firefox, or is it just playback?”. It is just playback and you must record using Internet Explorer. For more details, check out this documentation on MSDN. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg269475.aspx

Also, we discussed the VS 2010 and TFS VHD for exploring these tools. Microsoft has provided a VHD for each Microsoft virtualization technology and can be downloaded from the following links.

One of the books that I gave away, “Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010”, is a great little book that has broad coverage of the Visual Studio 2010 testing tools and I highly recommend reading it.

Thank you again. If you have any other questions, feel free to comment or reach out to me.

Speaking about Coded UI Tests at Chicago Code Camp

We are just days away from this year’s Chicago Code Camp and it is shaping up to be an outstanding event. Chicago Code Camp is an entire day of FREE sessions for developers of all walks, including C#, Java, F#, SmallTalk, Clojure and more. If you are a developer in the Chicago-Milwaukee area, you should set aside this Saturday, May 14th to attend Chicago Code Camp.

I will be presenting “Testing the User Interface: Coded UI Tests with Visual Studio 2010” and expect this session to be educational and interactive. In an attempt to make this session as valuable and targeted as possible, I’ve setup a UserVoice forum where you can suggest and vote on the content presented. I’ve seeded the forum with the topics that I have envisioned, but I’m sure there are other great ideas I haven’t considered. If you are planning to attend, please visit http://ericdboyd.uservoice.com to suggest and vote on the topics you would like to see.

There is an amazing lineup of speakers and sessions for Chicago Code Camp 2011, and you can get a complete listing with the schedule at http://chicagocodecamp.com. If you are planning to attend and you haven’t yet registered, please do so at http://chicagocodecamp.eventbrite.com. It is a completely FREE event, but event logistics are a lot easier when you know how many people are attending.

The organizers of this event have spent a great deal of time making this a world-class code camp, so please thank them when you see them. I would like to extend a special thank you to Michael D. Hall, Scott Seely and Clark Sell for all of the work they have done to make this event great.