Thanks to all who came out for the Visual Studio Team System Big Event on Thursday, May 7th! 
We had a great time with the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team, Microsoft Technical Specialists, MVPs and influencers who at the end of the full day of action packed training left no doubt that Visual Studio Team System is BIG!
Dan Weinman, Senior Consultant at Neudesic kicked off with the keynote on "Development Best Practices & How Microsoft Helps" and set the stage for what the day full of training had in store. Dan talked about the various roles that VSTS supports and how each role comes together to enact process under a single tool that maximizes transparency and communication on Agile teams.
Next, Brendon Birdoes, Principal Consultant at Neudesic delivered a great talk on 
Test-Driven-Development with Visual Studio. Brendon covered unit testing, including test first development and showed off the refactoring capabilities right within the IDE along with code coverage. Brendon talked about how important code coverage and quality assertions are to ensuring that your unit tests are as useful as possible in maintaining high degrees of quality within your software projects.
Following the excellent session on TDD, Visual Studio Team System MVP Dave McKinstry delivered a session entitled ""It Works on My Machine!" Closing the Loop Between Development & Testing" which discussed the close integration between testing tools in Visual Studio Team System and the code itself which minimizes the cost and complexity in task switching.
We were then treated by another excellent talk by Rob Bagby, Developer Evangelist on "Treating Databases as First-Class Citizens in Development". In this session, Rob made clear that 
database work can no longer hide from unit testing and how the Database Project in Visual Studio Team System makes synchronizing DDL and DML objects seamless and eminently testable.
I was lucky enough to show off the new Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Architect bits which include fully compliant UML 2.1 diagram support as well as assembly, namespace, class and method visualization using the VSTS 2010 Architecture Explorer. I talked about VSTS 2010 Team Architect being yet another clear signal of Microsoft's commitment to modeling which is, and will continue to manifest itself in technologies like Windows Workflow, BizTalk Server, Entity Framework, and Quadrant to name just a few. As a Connected Systems guy, VS2010 Team Architect is really going to go a long way in helping me and my teams visualize the problem domain and partition our big balls of mud into the right architecture.
Speaking of which, I think my favorite new modeling feature in Team Architect is the Layer Diagram which lets you define your layers and then validate them at build time! What this means is that
I can use a layer diagram to define separation of concerns and single responsibility principle and then make sure that team members are honoring the layer rules. It is just awesome to be able to map namespaces to a layer diagram, wire it up to the automated build and keep violations from every being delivered.
The day winded up with a great talk by Steve Lange, Technical Specialist on how to get the most out of TFS. The session was aptly called "Bang for Your Buck" Getting the Most out of Team Foundation Server, and Steve gave away some great tips on things you can do with your investment in TFS that you may not have even known about.
I want to thank Steve and Rob for inviting us to speak at this event. The room was full of great folks with lots of passion and great questions which is exactly what we like to see at these events. If you have any follow up questions that I wasn't able to get answered at the event, please don't hesitate to contact me.