Planet SCM

Today's edition of the Redmond Channel Partner newsletter links to a piece titled Minding Your Microsoft Manners, which is an interview with some companies who advise Microsoft partners on how to work with Microsoft. As I was reading it, I thought it was written as a piece of satire. Unfortunately, it's dated July 1st, not April 1st.

Yes. Don't run Lotus Notes as your e-mail client. Don't talk about the music you listened to on your iPod on the trip to Redmond or to a field office. Don't schedule online meetings on WebEx or call people from Microsoft on Skype. And, above all, don't "Google."

...

"Mention Vista," he continues, referring to the operating system that Microsoft released earlier this year. "Say [you're] running it and what a productivity boost it is." Harvath notes that bad feedback about Vista has filtered back to Microsoft through corporate accounts and the channel, so a positive review of it from a partner could be a key to making a good impression.

Source: Redmond Channel Partner Online | Feature: Minding Your Microsoft Manners

In my new role, I meet with partners more frequently than I have in the past. If you meet with me, please don't follow the guidance offered in response to the first question (Are there any gaffes that I should absolutely avoid when meeting with people from Microsoft?) and to the last question (Are there any other little tips I should know before I go into my meeting?).

Please don't hide that you use a competitor's product. Worse still, please don't heap false praise on a Microsoft product to gain some kind of advantage.

Etiquette Rule #1: Don't be a sycophant. It's not a good foundation for a business relationship.

If you use a competing product, I'd rather understand what our gaffe was that made it the more attractive choice. What could we do better to earn your business next time?

If you think one of our products sucks, please tell me why. What can we do to keep your business?

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For those who have experienced any problems getting eScrum (Now Available: Microsoft eScrum Version 1.0) installed and working due to ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit version conflicts:

Since you can't download previous versions of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, and eScrum is compiled with a specific version, you may need to update the web.config file to allow automatic usage of a newer version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. eScrum has not been tested with newer versions, but may work well.

Add the following XML to the eScrum web.conifg file after the </configSections> close tag. Afterward, update the newVersion attribute to the version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit that you are using.

<runtime>

      <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">

            <dependentAssembly>

                  <assemblyIdentity name="AjaxControlToolkit"

                        publicKeyToken="28f01b0e84b6d53e"

                        culture="neutral"/>

                  <bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.10301.0" newVersion="1.0.xxxxx.0"/>

            </dependentAssembly>

      </assemblyBinding>

</runtime>

Let me know if that helps/hinders.

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If you're looking for another Scrum template to try with Team Foundation Server, consider using eScrum, which is an implementation of Scrum that's used internally by some teams within Microsoft:

eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help.

Source: Download details: Microsoft eScrum Version 1.0

In addition, take a look at the VSTS Scrum Process Template on CodePlex, which is under the guidance of several Team System MVPs.

Update: A great summary post I suggest you read if you're interested in eScrum: A Quick eScrum Review.

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While reading the comments on Sam Gentile's post, What's Great about Being a Microsoft Developer, I followed a link to a post by Martin Plante that ended with: 

So for me, the "Microsoft Way" is only a street name, as there is no Microsoft Way, no real influence in the future decisions we make, no single "graspable" philosophy, just an aggregation of bits. Microsoft sells bits. Microsoft sells ingredients. But don't ask them for recipes.

Source: slimCODE, aka Martin Plante : Microsoft: No recipes, just ingredients

Their posts got me thinking about something that's been nagging me for months: What is the Microsoft Developer Story? What is that "single 'graspable' philosophy" that puts everything into perspective? Is it even possible to capture it in a single story anymore? Thirty-two years after releasing our first developer tool, Altair BASIC, we now have a list of ingredients that seems to grow faster and more complex every year.

I think the steps we're taking for Managing Complexity on MSDN are steps in the right direction, but it I think it only provides the framework for the story. Walter Fisher proposed a theory called the Narrative Paradigm that "all meaningful communication is a form of storytelling or to give a report of events and so human beings experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, each with their own conflicts, characters, beginnings, middles, and ends."

I don't think technical content is exempt from the narrative paradigm. I think this is one reason why blogs by people like Raymond Chen and Joel Spolsky are so successful - they don't just dish tech babble, they tell stories. In addition, their posts appeal to our narrative rationality:

Fisher says that not all stories are created equally. He thinks that everyone has the same innate ability to determine the narrative rationality (interpreted value) of the stories we hear based upon two aspects. First we examine the narrative coherence. This is our way of determining if the story holds together and makes sense in our world. Then we check the narrative fidelity. Here we see if the story matches our own beliefs and experiences and, hence, portrays the world we live in.

Source: A Brief History and Theory of Speaking: Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm

Once we start to tame the complexity of MSDN, I think we'll be in a better position to tell the Microsoft Developer Story, which over the years has grown into a multi-volume tale consisting of several, more focused stories - such as the Microsoft Developer Story for Windows Developers or the Microsoft Developer Story for Game Developers. Until then, it remains a messy pantry of ingredients.

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Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group on Friday, April 27th from 10:00 - 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team System. In addition, discuss what's new in the Visual Studio code name “Orcas” Beta 1 releases for Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.

Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones | Join the Chat

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For those are downloading Visual Studio code name "Orcas" Beta 1 files from Microsoft Downloads, you may have seen what appears to be a misprint:

I can assure you that the Team Foundation Server with Team Suite VPC is much larger than 9 KB total and that we're not using a compression technology from an advanced alien civilization.

To make a long story short, we sometimes have the need to shortcut our publishing system to publish some of these really large files in a timely manner. To do so, we need to put placeholder files for each file expected in the download. In this case, the placeholders are only 1 KB. Since the file size displayed comes from the files that go through the system, you're seeing 1 KB when in fact these are 700 MB volumes of a self-extracting file.

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About a month ago I wrote a post titled, Groundhog Day at MSDN. In that post I talked about cleaning up the content mess on MSDN and I likened it to organizing things at home. This weekend I started reading The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. In Law 2: Organize, I found this passage, which hits again on that common theme:

The home is usually the first battleground that comes to mind when facing the daily challenge of managing complexity. Stuff just seems to multiply.

Maeda goes on to cover what I recognize as part of the challenge - keeping things organized:

Without much thought and enough hands on deck, a messy room becomes free of clutter in no time, and remains so for at least a few days or a week. However, in the long term an effective scheme for organization is necessary to achieve definitive success in taming complexity.

Getting things organized will take time, but it will be all for naught if steps aren't taken also to create a system to keep things organized.

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