A Django site.
June 2, 2008
» APLN Seattle Leadership Summit - July 17 and 18

If you're going to be in the Seattle area next month, or need a reason to be, consider attending the APLN Seattle Leadership Summit at the Edgewater Hotel on July 17 & 18. The theme this year is, “Advancing the Agile Enterprise.”

The APLN Leadership Summit include the exploration of agile leadership of projects and enterprises. Under the guidance of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), the summit objectives are to connect, develop, and support great project and enterprise leaders.

There will be two leadership keynotes from:

  • Lisa Haneberg, author of seven books including 10 Steps to Be a Successful Manager and Two Weeks to a Breakthrough.
  • John Yuzdepski, a partner at Management Concepts LLC specializing in product transitions and commercialization of new technology and a veteran of the mobile communications industry.

Topics and experts include:

  • Collaboration Games by Luke Hohmann and Allan Shalloway
  • Kanban by David Anderson and Corey Ladas
  • Scrum by Brent Barton and Lance Young
  • Getting Started with Agile by Mitch Lacey and Julie Chickering
  • Writing Agile Contracts by Bruce Eckfeldt and Jim Benson
  • Agile Program Management by Mike Griffiths and Mike Cottmeyer
  • Real Option Theory by Chris Matts and Olav Maassen
  • Agile User Experience by Arlen Bankston and Jeff Patten

In addition, Dale Christian, CIO of Avanade, will head a panel of senior leaders discussing their experiences.

Register now and get the early bird special price of $300 until June 17th.

As you may recall, David Anderson was a member of the original Team System product team (now a principal at Modus Cooperandi) and made a number of valuable contributions, including MSF for CMMI Process Improvement. He is also an excellent author and blogger.

This should be an educational two days, and the best time to visit Seattle is July and August.

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May 25, 2007
» Rescheduling PDC07

The timing of PDC07 isn't quite right for why we usually have a PDC, so we're going to reschedule it when the next wave of platform technologies comes. Think of it like surfing and you missed getting up on your board in time to catch the wave, so you're going to sit on it and wait for the next juicy party wave.

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 code name “Katmai,” Visual Studio code name “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.

Microsoft will have a presence at several developer events this fall to provide deep technical training on the latest wave of software technologies, including at:

Source: MSDN Events and Webcasts: PDC07

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May 3, 2007
» How Your Boss Might Unwittingly Get You an Xbox 360 Elite with Training Budget

Convince your boss to send you to TechEd 2007 in Orlando!

offer_xbox_120x160

Be automatically registered to win one of five Xbox 360 Elites or one of five $500 American Express gift cards, when you register by Friday, May 11th. Please click here for full sweepstakes rules.

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May 1, 2007
» Chicago Visual Studio Team System Users Group

The date of the next Chicago Visual Studio Team System User Group meeting is set. Join Clark Sell in the Microsoft offices on May 9th for an evening of Team System information. This month features a presentation on MS Build and Continuous Integration with Team Foundation Server. See Clark's blog for the details and registration link.

Join us each month for new topics including how the different role based editions can help your team to finish your projects on time, on scope and on budget, dive into the many features included in the powerful and robust Team Foundation Server product, or speak to one of the many partners who have extended the platform to enable continuous integration scenarios, integrate into Microsoft outlook, even an Eclipse plug-in!

Source: Clark Sell : Chicago VSTS Users Group, Round 2

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March 26, 2007
» Visual Studio Decennial

No, that's not the name of a new feature coming in Visual Studio code name "Orcas" or Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario". March 2007 (March 19th to be exact) is the Visual Studio Decennial since it marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Visual Studio 97, the first release of Visual Studio. Microsoft PressPass has a page o'quotes from numerous Microsoft customers and partners (Comments on the 10-year Anniversary of Microsoft Visual Studio, March 2007), and Prashant Sridharan is celebrating the anniversary in his keynote this morning at VSLive! in San Francisco, where Sam Gazitt is making his on-stage debut.

Update: I'm happy to find a blog post by someone who attended the keynote. See Day 2, Keynote.

Ten years ago this month, the Internet start-up company I was at (IFusion) went belly-up. From there, I landed in my first role as a professional Visual Basic developer. Meanwhile, Microsoft released the first version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 97. I was largely unaware of it at the time as the Visual Basic project I joined was written in Visual Basic 3. My job was to move it to Visual Basic 4. My next set of projects were all in ASP, Visual Basic 5, or Visual Basic 6, which wasn't really incorporated into Visual Studio yet. In fact, I never actually used Visual Studio as a product per se prior to arriving at Microsoft.

Visual Studio has come a long way in that 10-year period. To see where it's going, at least for Team System, go see the newly published Team System Future Releases Roadmap.

Update: While you're on the Team System site, take note of the new coat of paint we gave it this weekend. We're still working through a refresh of the site, but this is a good start, I think.

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March 22, 2007
» Another Jolt Award Winner in the Team System World

In addition to Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Pros Wins Jolt Award, I'm happy to see that stpBA Storyboarding for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System also won a Jolt Award at SD West 2007 in the Design and Modeling Tools category. Congratulations!

stpBA Storyboarding for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System allows a business analyst or analyst developer to capture, elaborate and validate requirements and scenarios in a Team System project through GUI storyboarding. Requirements can be imported from stpsoft Quew. The tool seamlessly integrates with Team System process templates and generates screen flow diagrams, HTML storyboards, UI specifications, functional specifications, Team System work items and test scripts.

Source: stpBA Storyboarding for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System

I'm finally using it on a project, so I'll blog more about my experiences sometime soon. For now, here are my previous posts about it:

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» Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Pros Wins Jolt Award

As reported on Cameron Skinner's blog, Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals won the Jolt Award for the Database Engines and Data Tools category at the 17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards. Unfortunately, I didn't attend this year like I did last year when Team System won (Team System Wins Jolt Award), so I don't know yet how we did in the other categories (17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards Finalists).

Matt Nunn Accepting Jolt Award for Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

Matt Nunn Accepting Award (Photo: John Lam)

Update (3/21 11:43 PM): I just learned that both Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server and .NET Framework 3.0 won Productivity Awards.

Source: The What, The Why, The How : DBPro wins Jolt Award!

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February 27, 2007