Methodologies (Team Development, Agile and so forth)

How does Ray Ozzie measure software projects?

Little noted but of major interest: At last months Microsoft MVP Global Summit, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie spoke about how he approaches his role as leader software technology steward at Microsoft. The session provided an inside view of how this famed technologist operates. Continued »

Report from the field: Visual Studio 2008

NOTABLE THIS WEEK - There is little question that tools these days are subject to rolling releases. Noris there much question that bosses still look for reasons to put off new migrations. Developers want to get their hands on the newest stuff so they are ready when the tools and runtimes are truly released. Managers are not always wrong in waiting until the software is more fully baked.

Well, Visual Studio 2008 went to its final debutante ball last week. The event was held in Los Angeles, and it was entitled ”Heroes Happen Here.” As Microsoft hoped, VS 2008 was rolled out along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (which, admittedly, is still something of a ‘player to be named later,’ as all of its parts did not get into the box on time for the Heroes launch.)

”With the launch of Visual Studio 2008,”  CEO Steve Ballmer told the Heroes crowd, ”you’ll see performance again ramp up dramatically as we improve compiler speeds and developer productivity really quite dramatically. Start times, load times, compile times are all quite dramatically improved with this launch of Visual Studio 2008.”

After a long journey the tool once code-named Orca is out as Visual Studio 2008. For some of us, the move from code name to product name is anti-climactic. For many more of us, the real game is just about to begin.

To get a gauge of where things are headed, correspondent Coleen Frye spoke to Visual Studio 2008 users, and her work is on display on SearchWinDevelopment.com. In ”A view on VS 2008, ” a development manager at a cutting-edge Internet agency tells Frye that improvements to Team Foundation Server are among the keys that led the firm to take the VS2008 plunge. So, Ballmer’s boast of load and compile time improvements may be sound.
 LINQ Learning Guide to get up to speed on this new way of working with data programmatically.

A slew of Visual Studio 2008 tips and tutorials is available as well in the site’s Visual Studio 2008 Learning Guide.

Interactive Builds with TFS

Steve Porter at Imaginet Academy has been working to get Team Foundation Server (TFS) up and running, and one of his tasks was to take an existing project and migrate it over. His former build was using a couple of tasks from the MSBuild Community Tasks Project (specifically the StopServices and StartServices tasks).

He writes: This worked without a hitch with our 2005 build machine, but when I migrated this script over to our 2008 build machine, the build started failing on these tasks.

The answer in getting these tasks to work lies in using the Interactive Build feature of Team Build 2008, he notes. Team Build now uses WCF to communicate with the build agent and the experience is different than with .Net Remoting based Team Build.

Curl up with a good book on Agile

Patrick Kua, a developer, trainer and coach with ThoughtWorks, has compiled a nice list of books that he has dubbed The Essential Agile Reading List:

One of the searches that stumbled across my blog was the “Agile Coaching Reading List”. Running the same query returned a huge mish mash of lots of different things so I thought I’d put together my list of essential reads.

Kua’s list is divided into several categories, including methodologies and planning, continuous improvement and development practices. Commenters have added a few volumes to the list as well.

Go check out The Essential Agile Reading List and find a tome for passing the time at work.

Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools released

The first set of Power Tools for Visual Studio 2008 is now available. Specifically, this release targets Team Foundation Server.

Ed Hintz of Microsoft has blogged about the TFS Power Tools release, which includes tools such as Find in Source Control and Open in Windows Explorer. (Insert joke about monkey wrench and screwdriver here.)

Meanwhile, you can download the TFS Power Tools release here on MSDN and pose questions in the TFS Power Tools and Add-ons forum also on MSDN.

Brushing up on .NET architecture

One primary aim in relaunching SearchWindevelopment.com is to focus greater attention on .NET architecture. Web services, workflow, object-relational mapping and other concepts continue to change the way applications are assembled, and, just as you don’t want to find yourself in the dark, neither do we.

Fortunately, SearchWindevelopment.com has a great sister site, TheServerSide.NET, that focuses on issues of importance to the .NET architect. And, as TheServerSide.NET undergoes its own transition to a community-driven discussion board, SearchWindevelopment.com benefits from an infusion of articles, tutorials and book excerpts that focus on the aforementioned architectural topics.

Here is a sampling of some of that content.

Assembly versioning in the .NET Framework 2.0 — Assembly-resolution mechanisms for the .NET Framework 2.0 provide a view into the CLR, focusing on versioning and safe execution of assemblies sitting side-by-side.

Ten ways to unit test your .NET code – Verifiable code is less likely to cause problems during development and after delivery; however, it can often be difficult to write an adequate unit test, due to the way your production code is architected. In this column, Justin Gehtland looks at ten ways to structure your code to make it easier to verify with NUnit, or any other xUnit framework.

Shifts in .NET Object-Relational Mapping: Seismic and subtle – For some developers, ADO.NET is good enough to deal with their data needs. For some other developers, Object-Relational Mapping software is needed to successfully field their enterprise systems.

Scrum, Agile development methodologies mix with VSTS projects – Agile and Scrum development methodology practitioners are no longer considered renegades. At the same time, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System is beginning to support Scrum practices.

Book excerpt: Using the Microsoft Enterprise Library – This chapter from Effective Use of Microsoft Enterprise Library explains how to build apps using application blocks.

We hope that you find this content both useful and relevant. We also hope that you get used to it, as you will see many more articles, tutorials and book excerpts in the coming weeks.