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!
 Those of you who know me well, likely know I'm a big fan of TradeSports, a marketplace where you can trade options in things like political races, supreme court nominees and European metric football (soccer) matches. (They had the 2004 election nailed prior to the polls closing, unlike the pollsters who were still confused two days later.) So when Google announced on their blog that they were using an internal options exchange to predict their launch dates, when managers would quit and other important internal pieces of information, I was excited. Even more exciting is they've totally geeked out, even showing graphs like entropy of their decision prices over time. But the most exciting thing... IT WORKS! Google is able to predict their launch dates with a remarkable degree of accuracy! Microsoft, can we have some predictive markets for your launch dates? Pretty please?
You can find the article here. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution)
Ever get tired of pushing numbers on your phone repeatedly just to get through to an operator or helpdesk employee, when you KNOW that your answer can't be handled by the automated system. Sometimes there's a workaround, a fast way to get to a human. And the wonderful folks at Intuit Quickbase have a list of many commonly called companies, along with the secret handshake to get to a human fast! They call it their Find-A-Human -- IVR Phone System Shortcuts list. Find it here.
I especially like this one!!! They make it hard, but it can be done!!!
Dell Customer Service (800-624-9897) : option 1, xt 7266966, option 1, option 4, option 4
I just found out that Martin Danner of Arrowrock (one of the professionals that Accentient has proudly worked with several times) has just passed the Project Management Professional certification exam. It's a 4 hour exam, and that was the last step in Martin's Project Management certification! Even before his certification, Martin has excelled at Project Management. He's managed several of our projects here at Accentient, and I'm proud to say that the one's he's managed have been some of our most successful! Congratulations, Martin!
This adds to his already impressive credentials and certifications, including being an Architecture MVP for Microsoft.
If you've been trying to find GssUtil.exe so you can script the new Beta 3 release of TFS, you won't be able to! Instead, you'll use the new TfsSecurity. Luckily, adding groups and individual users uses the same command line (except of course, the name of the EXE), so it's a simple search and replace! So, in short, there's been a name change, GssUtil.exe is now TfsSecurity.exe (at least for the purposes of roles and logins).
Happy TFSing!
I just found the URL to my forthcoming Team System book on Amazon. This is the revised edition that I just finished last month! Too bad there's no graphic, and the date is wrong. I was told it'll be up there the first of October.
Thanks again for all your support on this!
Update: A friend, Peter Nowak, from Germany pointed me towards the listing on Amazon.de! He also mentioned it in a recent blog posting.
This was a last minute thing that came up, but yesterday morning I presented a 1-hour session on Team System to this virtual conference. I understand that they had 4500+ attendees signed-up. I know that my session had 100 people in it, which is great for a conference that was devoid of any specific tools (most topics were on management, theory, and best practice).
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If you haven't played with the new Code Snippets features in Visual Studio 2005, you're missing out! It makes it easy to keep an entire library of useful code snippets within Visual Studio 2005, and at the ready to help with any programming assignment. Integrated Intellisense invokes them automatically.
In anticipation of this feature, my fellow RD J. Michael Palermo IV has created www.gotcodesnippets.net which will become the uber repository of such snippets. It will launch officially at PDC. 
Focused primarily on the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) developer communities, the beta experience contains the latest news, free resources, training, and a free newsletter. Note: You won't find United States in the dropdown list, so try United Kingdom.
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