I've seen Test Driven Development work, so why not adjust it slightly and have the attendees (who own the requirements after all) drive the presentation? Today, at the in-between conference (a.k.a. Microsoft Community Summit 2008), I did just that. I had the attendees drive my four hour presentation. I did this in the Open Space room, and it not only fit with the theme of that room, but it worked great!

As the attendees arrived, I handed them 3-5 3x5 cards - the cool ones from 3M that you can sort, stack, and stick to surfaces.

Here are the topics (backlog items) that they came up with:

• How do you customize work item types?
• (What) team size to justify the usage of Team System?
• What's new and improved in VSTS 2008 vs. VSTS 2005?
• Continuous Integration (x 3)
• What performance degradation (can occur) from extensive branching?
• Integration with external tools (e.g. Mercury Quality Center, Doors)
• TDD
• Multiple builds running at the same time
• How to limit CI build to only trigger when for certain check-ins (by location)
• Best practices
• How to customize Code Analysis
• What makes VSTS more beneficial than VS Professional?
• What is Team Foundation Server?

And my personal favorite:

• I'm here to see if you're a good presenter because my company is thinking of bringing you in for a day to teach the team.

For those of you who attended my talk, here's a link to my notes and my worst practices presentation.

Let’s face it, going to technical conferences is good for your career, but it’s not a whole lot of fun. What you need is an outlet. You need to have fun. That’s where we step in.

Cheap beer and lousy pizza!

Microsoft is bringing back GeekFest! Join them at Howl at the Moon for a night of lousy pizza, cheap beer, dueling pianos, socializing and one wild rubber duck competition….yes, a rubber duck competition.

There is limited invitations available, so what are you waiting for? If you are attending the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference, you can pre-register here.

Register and pick up your "duck" ticket in the TechEd Technical Learning Center (TLC) at the Developer Tools & Languages (TLA) information desk. You must have a "duck" ticket to get into the party. One "duck" admits up to two people.

When:
Tuesday, June 3, 2008 from 7:00 PM -10:00 PM ET

Where:
Howl at the Moon, 8815 International Drive, Orlando, FL 32819

Ticketing:
You must have a "duck" ticket to attend the party. One duck admits two.

My final talk at VSLive! San Francisco this week was on one of my favorite topics - parallel development. In other words, dealing with the real-world situations where multiple developers are coding away on the same project, and even the same file.

The first order of business was to have a few of the ex-Visual SourceSafers lay down on my couch so we could discuss their phobias and irrational urge to run to their "safe place" - a.k.a. locking.

In all seriousness, we discussed the two locking models of TFS and then explored the many wonderful benefits of not using locks by default, known as shared check out. Most in the audience agreed that the benefits of not blocking each other with their routine development (for example, not locking .csproj files when somebody adds a new file) greatly outweighs the detriment of having to deal with a conflict that requires manual intervention. Of course, arguments can be made either way.

I pointed out that there are four situations where conflicts can occur that may require auto/manual merging:

• CHECK-IN - the most obvious; somebody else may have just checked in competing changes just before you
• GET - you may already have pending changes on one or more of the files you are trying to download
• MERGE - by definition; when you merge changes from one branch to another, the chances are good that you will have to resolve conflicts
• UNSHELVE - not so obvious, but this is basically like a GET, just coming from another location in TFS; unfortunately, Team Explorer doesn't know how to handle the detection/resolving of these types of conflicts, so look to the TFPT UNSHELVE power tool for help

Finally, we looked at setting up a source control folder structure that will support your teams promotion model (a.k.a. staging environment). I proposed a simple structure, that looks somewhat like this:

 

Some explanations

• Code holds code artifacts - C#, VB, SQL, WiX, etc.
• Documents holds snapshots of the SharePoint site archived at the end of each iteration, release/version, build, etc. (whatever your term is)
• Active development occurs in "Current", which you could name "Dev" or "Main" (although I prefer "Main" for integration)
• Under the "Current" folder you'll have folders for each high-level application/component in the system, including common, database scripts, build definitions, and even setup projects
• "Branches" are just that - QA, UA, RC, Release, and private branches (Bridges), etc.

If you'd like to have a look at my slide deck, you can find it here.

That was the topic of our discussion today at VSLive! San Francisco. Unfortunately, in the short amount of time (75 minutes) we didn't get too deep into all of the tools and techniques, but I did get my point across: I feel that Team Foundation Server (TFS) can do it all, and you should strive to migrate your source/revision control system, requirements and defect tracking system, document managing system, automated build and deployment system, and even your custom process workflow over to TFS.

That said, there are certainly situations where existing systems must be used. I identified two categories of such legacy software:

• Politicalware - somebody important in the organization bought or built the system and you there are strong feelings about migrating away from it
• Guiltware - the organization spends oodles (that's a lot) of cash on said software, maintenance/support, training, etc. and they haven't seen their ROI (and they may never see it)

I don't know what to tell you about the above situations, except that running in parallel (not good) or integration (better) would be an option. That lead us to the discussion of building custom software to do one-way and two-way synchronization with said systems. We briefly walked through the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit (found on CodePlex) and I demonstrated the TFS to TFS Migration Tool (also found on CodePlex) which uses the toolkit.

I see Team Foundation Server as yet another great "grassroots" platform. Just like .NET was for the developers, TFS is for the team. So, I say get it installed no matter what, even if just for source control, which is the no-brainer. Once it's in-house, then work on migrating the work items, automated builds, and other systems over sooner, rather than later, so you can enjoy the end-to-end traceability, product quality reports, and process quality reports.

If you'd like to have a look at my slide deck, you can find it here and my demo files here (you'll need to download the SDK and CodePlex toolkit and tool separately).

For those of you who joined me at VSLive! this week in San Francisco, I had fun sharing many worst (or un-preferred) practices I've run into over the years. My talk broke them down into several areas: TFS installation, TFS configuration, team projects, work items, and version control. Hopefully I didn't make anyone feel tool uncomfortable when I highlighted your practice on the big screen!

Actually, it was all in good fun. By highlighting Team System worst practices, we were able to define Team System best practices and preferred practices.

If you'd like to have a look at my slide deck, you can find it here and my demo files here.

Feel free to let me know about any other worst or worster practices you may know of.

Back home now, and I have a moment to get the photos downloaded from my camera and uploaded to my blog. Next time I'll take my SD card reader with me.

As you can see, registration was quite busy. I heard that there were 4000 people there, but didn't count them myself. The long lines delayed the keynote by about an hour:

Douglas McDowell and I snuck into the press area. Well, he was officially press (SQL Server Magazine), but I wasn't - still I took more notes than most of the other pressies there.

The main screen was huge, and 3D. We estimated about 80' wide and 20' tall. When no slides were on the screen, there was a spinning 3D Earth enclosed in curley brackets. Hey, what about VB?

After the keynote, there was a short walk to the LA convention center, where the breakout sessions, chalk-talks, exhibitor area, etc. Fortunately, we had these interpretive dancers along the way to keep us from getting lost.

The line to lunch was too long, so we ducked inside to check out the exhibitor area.

 

I was there (where it says "You Are Here")

Attendees attending one of Doug Seven's chalk talks on Team System.

Doug was all about the writing quality code and the 3 C's in his talk (Code Coverage, Code Analysis, and the new Code Metrics)

After I turned in my evaluation form, I picked up the attendee bag, which had  lots of goodies, including a hard-bound, coffee-table style book called "Heroes Happen Here" which contains IT heroes from all around the world, photographed by Carolyn Jones. And yes, I got my book signed!

It's not much, but we heard that call that there "wouldn't be free coffee" at the Boise Code Camp 3.0 this coming March 8, so we're kicking in, so that we can enjoy free coffee. Ahem.

This way, we don't have to walk around with one of these things on our backs:

In this, my first post of (hopefully) several today, I'm sitting in the keynote session (next to Douglas McDowell), listening to Tom Brokaw warm up the audience. What a nice surprise. It definitely stopped all the geeks in their tracks, to listen to his wise words, gathered from years of experience in all matters mankind.

 

I loved his opening line "I'm not here to write code, or wire this room". He did, however, wax poetic on the future of technology, the spirit and energy of the types of people who will drive it, and how we must handle it to get their safely."

Some of his quotes during the keynote (some paraphrasing):

• "The test or our place in this world is not yet complete. We don't want to become Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. The use of this technology is not just a virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out common sense, what then is the reward to each of us, collectively or individually? If speed overruns reason, what else gets trampled?"
• "We will not solve climate change by hitting backspace. It will do us little good to wire the world if we short circuit our consciousness, our souls and if we don't use this technology to advance mankind."
• "When I left Nightly News I said that I'm not only going to spend my time at suites in the four seasons ... but to spend time in the trenches to meet people who make a difference"
• "One day I woke up in Pakistan in a packing container with Americans who had been there for six months, trying to assess medical and health needs. When they hiked out, they put their hands on the keyboard and distilled what they had learned ... and in so doing, made a big impression ... of those of us in the West who have so much, while they (people in Pakistan) have so little."
• "This technology takes a guiding hand, an imaginative approach, and a hope ..."
• "We have the opportunity to become the next, greatest generation."

Steve Ballmer came on stage next to thank the many platinum sponsors, and discuss how "Dynamic IT" can help manage complexity and achieve agility (especially in the realm software development)

I heard the term "Agile" about 10 times in the span of 3 minutes. More to come ...

10:35 AM (Los Angeles)

A fictitious developer, from the fictitious company "Fourth Coffee" is demonstrating the new, agile development features in Visual Studio 2008. She's showing off how to manage team development projects (a.k.a. team projects and work items), giving her tasks to make some changes to her code. Mostly she is showing off the split-screen editor, synchronization of code and designer, integrated design tools, and the new JavaScript debugger.

Oops, she just called it "Team Services" as she closed out her work item. Well, we get the idea.

Man, I need to keep a closer eye on the work product over at .NET Rocks. I had meant to link up this transcript last Summer, but I dropped the ball. Apologies.

So, what this was was a VSTS panel discussion at Tech-Ed in Orlando last June, with Mike Azocar, Steven Borg, Doug Seven, Joel Semeniuk, and the hosts Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin.

Here's the panel (with Barry Gervin running the microphone)

And some of the audience (you can see Rob Caron and Mickey Gousset in the back).

There's some pretty good questions in there, especially those asked by yours truly!

Microsoft announced today that PDC 2008 is on!

 

October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conferences October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

 

PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your calendars and save the date. More information coming soon.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008

I apologize for the delay, but if you attended our PRCN05 pre-conference last week at Tech-Ed, you might be interested in downloading our demo files.

Microsoft (and others) had announed that its Fall Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) would be October 2-5, in Los Angeles. Yesterday, they canceled the event and are in the process of rescheduling it.

From their site:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies.

Pack up your compilers and IDES, because it's camping time in Portland!

Portland Code Camp 3.0 is back May 19th and 20th!

Location: Washington State University - Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave, Vancouver, WA 98686

Visit the site for more information.

It looks like I'll be speaking at BASTA! in a few weeks.

I'll be delivering two regular sessions:

• Team System Best Practices (Mar 1, 8:30AM - 9:30AM)

• Customizing and Extending Team Edition for Database Professionals (Mar 1, 3:15PM - 4:15PM)

And one full-day workshop:

• From Zero to Team System (In 5 Days) (Mar 2, all day)

Microsoft will be holding the next Professional Developers Conference (PDC) October 2-5, 2007 in Los Angeles, with two days of pre-conference on September 30 and October 1.  Save the date!

The PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. PDC 2007 attendees will have the opportunity to access new code, learn about the latest Microsoft product offerings and hear from Microsoft executives about the various platform developments.

Click here for more information.

Microsoft has made the difficult decision not to hold Tech·Ed 2007 in New Orleans. With this event drawing a large number of attendees from around the world and with the airlines only servicing the city with about half of their pre-Katrina flights, the logistics of moving that large a group into and out of the city is challenging and would likely result in travel and logistical challenges for attendees.

Instead, Tech·Ed 2007 will be held on June 4-8, 2007 in Orlando at the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC).

Here is the official site.

If so, then you might be interested in downloading my Team System presentation and/or my SQL Server 2005 script for developers.

Yesterday's 'camp rocked! We had over 130 people attend, and ran several successful sessions throughout the day.

Code Camp Attendees

A few of the presenters (Steven Borg, Cory Isakson, Richard Hundhausen, Jason Mauer)

Not only is it Saint Patrick's Day.

Not only does Team Foundation Server RTM today, but tomorrow is the Boise Code Code camp:

Boise Code Camp is this Saturday! March 18th – 8:30am to 6pm Sign-in from 8:30am to 9am

Just a quick reminder about Boise Code Camp v1.0. Come and join over 180 Boise developers who are already registered for the event. What about your developer buddies, coworkers, etc? Spread the word and have them register before it’s too late! Free to attend, free food, a wide array of content, over 150 giveaways… don’t let any developer miss out. Schedule The final schedule is now available online. Check out when your favorite sessions are and start planning your day at Code Camp!  See you at Code Camp! www.boisecodecamp.org

The BoF sessions submission and voting is now live. Visit their page to submit a hot topic (or vote on one).

Spread the word!

Some changes this year from Microsoft. It seems that they are merging the usually separate and distinct Tech-Ed Europe (traditional audience of 50% devs/50% IT pros) and Microsoft IT Forum (100% IT pros) into just "Tech Ed Europe". They will be run in two consecutive weeks in November:

• Tech Ed: Developers (week November 6th, CCIB Barcelona, Spain)
• Tech Ed: IT Forum (week November 13th, CCIB Barcelona, Spain)

For more information, check out the Tech-Ed Europe site.

If you are wanting to play an active (or passive) role in the Boise Code Camp, please visit www.boisecodecamp.org to stay in tune with the happenings.

At this point, we have a location (University of Phoenix in Meridian), but not yet a date. We're choosing between the weekends of March 4th, 11th, and 18th.

I'll continue to blog more information as it becomes available.

 

Rich Hundhausen and myself just spoke to crowds of over 1,200 people at the Dev breakouts at the Seattle Visual Studio 2005 launch.  I provided a Team System End-to-End, while Rich made sure everyone knew how to create enterprise applications using the Architect features of Team System, SQL Server 2005 and some of the cooler features of BizTalk Server 2006. 

A huge adrenalin rush!  No matter how many times you speak in front of large audiences, it's still a rush! 

Photos coming!

You can watch Steve Ballmer's keynote here. I've also uploaded a few photos from the event. My personal favorite was meeting Paul senior from Orange County Choppers (American Chopper).

Tip: To view my photos, select Conferences and Launch 2005 - San Francisco.

Code camp is this month!  It comes to the DeVry campus on October 22nd and 23rd.  Yep!  That's a weekend, and that means you don't have to ask for time off work to attend. 

If you missed the Code Camp in Portland, this is your chance.  I attended and spoke there, and it was the best conference I've ever attended, including PDC 2005 and TechEd 2005!  It's a great idea.  Just coders talking to coders!  Every presentation includes CODE, and there's no marketing...  And the presenters are all coders. 

It's FREE to attend!  And, if you'd like to speak, you can submit an abstract.  You don't get paid for speaking, but you do get to talk about something cool!  Here's a quick summary.  You can read more about it, and register, here.

Code Camp Details
We are going to have 13 tracks and probably 300+ attendees (we have capacity for ~1000). Portland registered 300 in two weeks.  This is our first Camp so we don't really know how many will attend. We are looking for about 80-90 talks for the two days. There will be a big publicity push this week and every week till the start of the camp.

Code Camp is devoted to coders, regardless of platform, OS or favorite programming language.  That means we are encouraging talks in lots of disciplines.  We want to cross-pollinate the developers in the area - exposing them to ideas and tools that they may not have seen before.

Code Camp is open for kids and teens too.  At the Portland Camp there were numerous fathers there with their 10-16 year old kids.  The younger ones were totally thrilled to be there.

Code Camps encourage new speakers to join in too. Friday night we will have a gathering for speakers which includes speaker training and the opportunity to talk to seasoned presenters. 

Dates: October 22,23, 2005
Times: Daytime
BBQ: Saturday Evening
Location:  DeVrys University -- Federal Way WA
Cost: Free
Payment to Speakers: None
Session Length: Variable but most will be 75 minutes
Registration:  If you are a speaker you must be registered for the event.

Tracks
Client Development
Database
Fundamentals
Game Development
Hands On Labs
Hobbyist
Methodology
Languages And Frameworks
Mobile
Security
Web Development
XML And The Web
Migration

Microsoft is running a SharePoint training tour around the country.  It covers, from both business and technical perspectives, how to effectively implement, configure, manage and extend Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server.  In addition to the normal goodies Microsoft normally hands out at these events (software, etc), attendees will get an actual 5 user permanent license for BrightWork's IT Work Manager application, a SharePoint application that assists in Project Management.

Check out the dates, and register at http://register.unitedtraining.com.  If you want a discount (and who doesn't) enter the UTNETDESK as the RSVP code! 

I'll be presenting many of these, and I've got to say, the content, which I received last week, looks great!  It promises to be very, very well worth your time.  Plus, it's cheap!  Two days of training for only $399 with the RSVP code (above).

I'll see you there!  Here's a list of dates and locations!

AZ, Phoenix	Dec 7-8
CA, Irvine	Oct 27-28
CA, San Diego	Dec 1-2
CA, San Francisco	Oct 24-25
CO, Denver	Nov 17-18
CT, Hartford	Nov 10-11
DC, Washington	Oct 19-20
FL, Jacksonville	Oct 31-Nov 1
FL, Tampa	Oct 17-18
GA, Atlanta	Dec 5-6
IL, Chicago	Oct 18-19
IL, Chicago	Nov 14-15
IN, Indianapolis	Nov 3-4
IN, South Bend	Oct 31-Nov 1
KS, Kansas City	Oct 31-Nov 1
MA, Boston	Oct 31-Nov 1
MI, Detroit	Oct 31-Nov 1
MN, Minneapolis	Oct 27-28
MO, St Louis	Nov 7-8
NE, Omaha	Nov 29-30
NJ, Hasbrouck Hts	Dec 8-9
NY, New York	Oct 20-21
NY, New York	Nov 16-17
NY, New York	Nov 19-20
NY, New York	Dec 12-13
OH, Cincinnati	Nov 3-4
OH, Columbus	Oct 24-25
OH, Columbus	Nov 14-15
OR, Portland	Oct 27-28
PA, Philadelphia	Dec 5-6
PA, Pittsburgh	Nov 10-11
TX, Austin	Nov 3-4
TX, Dallas	Nov 17-18
TX, Houston	Nov 14-15
VA, McLean	Nov 16-17
WA, Bellevue	Oct 24-25
WI, Milwaukee	Nov 3-4

Steven Wilssens attended the preconference on Team System that Rich and I presented at PDC this year.  He's blogged it.  But the best is his incredible summary!  He manages in just a few paragraphs to effectively summarize the content of the full day pre-con.  I whole heartedly recommend his post! 

In addition, he's got several other great posts.  I especially like his post on the testing "V model".  It explains how the various classes of tests (unit, integration, acceptance, etc) relate to the software development lifecycle.  You can find that post here. 

I've gone ahead and added him to my personal blogroll.  There's good stuff on his blog for all of you Team System addicts, especially those of you interested in testing.  It doesn't have a lot of posts yet, but the posts it has are all very valuable.  Check it out!

For those of you interested in OpenHack 2002, as I talked about in my presentation, take a look at this MSDN article.  You can also download the source code for both Microsoft and Oracle here.

For those of you interested in using Aspnet_setreg for securely changing the identity of the ASP.NET process (in machine.config), here's a good KB article from Microsoft.  It explains everything you need to do, as well as providing a download link.