Whilst preparing for my session at Techdays I have upgraded my 2010 Beta2 Lab Manager to RC. I am pleased to say the process is far more straight forward than the initial install. Again I used the Lab Manager team blog as my guide, they have revised ‘Getting started with Lab Management 2010 RC’ Parts 1, 2 ,3 and 4 posts to help.
I was able to skip through the initial OS/VMM setup as this has not altered. I chose to throw away my TestVM (with its Beta agents) and create a new one. I upgraded my TFS 2010 instance to RC. The only awkward bit was that I had to extract the RC version of the Lab Build Template from a newly created RC Team Project Collection and load it over my existing Beta2 version. I then recreated the Lab E2E build – and it just worked. My basic sample created for Beta2 build and tested OK.
I got confident then and so decided to build my own application with Coded UI tests, and surprise, surprise it work. OK this was after some reconfiguring of the Test VM to allow UI interactive testing, and a few dead ends, but basically the underlying system worked and I think I now have a working understanding of it.
The whole process is just much slicker than it was, and the online MSDN documentation is much more useful too. This is certainly becoming as more accessible product, but you still do need a good mixture of ITPro and Developer skills that I bet many teams are going to struggle to find in a single person. The best thing I can recommend is build your own system step by step (following the blog posts) so you know how all the moving parts interact. Once you do this you will find it is less daunting.