Introduction

Microsoft has this great product that sounds too good to be true. It allows software development and product lifecycle workflows that integrate issue tracking with the management of virtual machines for debugging and testing. This product doesn’t support VMWare yet and is based on Hyper-V, but it nevertheless has a great potential. I am talking about Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management. I am getting ready to evaluate the software and here is a list of resources that hopefully will help me to climb the learning curve.

Figure 1: Lab Management is an integral part of Visual Studio 2010

Product home page

The product’s home page is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee712698.aspx. It has valuable resources that help you getting started.

Virtual machine image (Hyper-V) to test drive Lab Management

“To enable quick evaluation of the Lab Management 2010 pre-RTM, Microsoft has created a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V based Virtual Machine (VM) that provides an all-in-one setup with pre-configured System Centre Virtual Machine Manager, Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server with Lab Management enabled. You can download this pre-configured VM from here”.

The website that describes how to use this VM can be found here.

Did you know that Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V Server can be downloaded for free from here?

Walk troughs and tutorials

The walkthroughs are part of the VHD that I mentioned earlier. Here is a link to the Visual Studio 2010 test and quality aspects of the development lifecycle: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/solutions/software-quality/lab-management 

Videos

Official Getting Started videos

Here is a link to the official Getting Started with Lab Management videos: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lab_management/archive/2010/02/11/visual-studio-lab-management-videos.aspx

Channel 9

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Lab-Management-coming-to-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Historical-Debugger-and-Test-Impact-Analysis-in-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Better-Software-Quality-with-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Manual-Testing-with-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Historical-Debugger-and-Test-Impact-Analysis-in-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/katriendg/Visual-Studio-Lab-Management-Build-Deploy-and-Test/

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/kmcgrath/Introduction-to-Test-Case-Management-in-Visual-Studio-2010-with-Microsoft-Test-and-Lab-Manager/

Ausblick

As always there is lots to learn, but like I said, learning about Visual Studio Lab Management might be worth your time. I will keep blogging about my experience with the evaluation VHD.