Snow, turkeys, Win 7 phones, floods, Kinects, and cold: It’s been an interesting month here in the Northwest. In other news, VSALMDC released documentation for Visual Studio Feature Pack 2 and created additional content for the MSDN Library. And for those of you are having holidays this month and are planning on enjoying them: Happy Holidays!

– Patrick-MSFT

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 (which MSDN subscribers can download here) includes:

• Extended testing capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Test Professional 2010.
• Code visualization and modeling capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 includes Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack.

New documentation for the features included in Feature Pack 2 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg269474.aspx):

• Code visualization and modeling capabilities that were also in Feature Pack 1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg299177.aspx
• Playback tests using the Mozilla Firefox browser: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg269475.aspx
• Edit coded UI tests using the new Coded UI Test Editor: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg269469.aspx
• Create coded UI tests and action recordings for Silverlight 4 applications: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg269472.aspx

Updates to the MSDN ALM Library

Eclipse

If you use the Team Foundation Server Plug-in for Eclipse (Team Explorer Everywhere), you can now get the latest help content on MSDN.

Portfolio Management

If your organization has a Project Management Office that manages a portfolio of projects, and development teams that use Team Foundation, then the integration of Team Foundation with Project Server may have just made your life a little simpler. Kathryn Elliot discusses the content that she just published to support that integration. The MSDN docs are here: Manage and Track Your Software Project Portfolio in both Team Foundation and Project Server.

Build Customization

Andy Lewis published the build activity reference to round out the information you need to customize your builds. Andy discusses the new content on his blog. We also added the build process object model to the Team Foundation SDK in support of that content. That’s 11 new namespaces with over 150 types (classes, interfaces, enums). Those new types are still pretty sparsely covered. As we do with all of the Team Foundation SDK, we’ll watch the usage and take feedback to help direct where we spend time adding information.

Lab Management

Using a Virtual Lab for Your Application Lifecycle

In Lab Management, the capability of an environment to run tests, deploy applications, and take snapshots depends in part on the type of host that the virtual machines use. The environment capabilities differ if it is a physical environment or if the virtual machine runs on Hyper-V or a non-Hyper-V host (such as a VMWare host). To help you plan your virtual lab, we added a table to this topic comparing the capabilities across hosts, especially if you are already using VMWare-hosted virtual machines.