I took in two channel 9 screencasts (or whatever they call them) today as I was traveling and had some extra time.
The first was Brian Harry talking about one of my favorite subjects (TFS) - Brian Harry on Team Foundation Server Past, Present, and Future . It was very cool to hear Brian talk about the evolution of TFS and where they are headed. He struck me as being a very straight-shooter good guy. A couple of points from the video that I thought I would point out are
- About 24 minutes in he talks about some details with how they manage source control and some challenges that they have run into including insight into a problem that DevDiv had on their TFS server when doing some large scale integration of Orcas
- About 31 minutes in he gets to what is coming for TFS, VSTS, Orcas, and out in the future
In the p&p screencast - Patterns and Practices - A Team of Thieves I captured the following gems from Ed and Peter that I thought were especially relevant and thought-provoking
- There is no such thing as "best" usually there are "proven" practices and that is what p&p provides
- You have to provide context around your proven practices because the context can change everything when it comes to a practice
- Sometimes people want to know what "not" to do instead of just what to do
- They bring people/customers in and have them use the existing system (early drops) and can change the code "real-time" to address customer concerns or needs
- p&p teams are constituted as some developers, some testers, an architect, project or program manager, and a product manager with the product manager being the customer facing component
- One of their goals with their new space on how they work is to lower the friction of communication
All in all good stuff - I am headed up to Redmond on Friday to visit with some of the team and some other outside customers about VSTS - the agenda looks great including a visit from Sam Guckenheimer - can't wait!!
