I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year’s Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas. This is my second Dev Connections and I must say its getting better with time. Logistically the conference was very smooth with the exception of wireless internet access but the sessions we’re (for the most part) excellent! I spent most of my time learning about the upcoming changes to TFS, WF, and WCF but I did manage to catch a couple other sessions.
I was also blown away by Juval Lowy’s session on Service-oriented Development Processes, in the 90 minutes of that session he basically explained all of the problems we have at my work with our development process and how we can fix them. I would highly recommend attending any of Juval’s similar talks in the future…
Here’s a quick recap of some of my notes (This is probably more useful to me but I thought I would post it anyways):
- Changes/Additions to Visual Studio Team Systems.
- Code Metrics.
- A new profiler.
- Web test enhancements.
- Now supports AJAX.
- Build Queues.
- Power Toys are now included.
- Auto deletion of builds.
- Check-in policy overrides have been added to the reporting cube.
- Microsoft’s New Sync Framework.
- Provides synchronization between providers.
- Comes with a Rational (Database) and file system provider.
- Might be getting support for SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions).
- Can sync any kind of data.
- Service-oriented Development Process
- Use lots of small teams (no more than 7 people).
- 1 service to 1 developer to avoid developers stepping on each other’s toes.
- Good design minimizes communication.
- If the developers work well together the services will work well together.
- Don’t make Developer A create a service for Developer B to use if Developer A and B don’t get along.
- Architects constantly plans/integrates, Project Managers constantly track tasks.
- Tell people you’ll get back to them to force them to come up with itemized tasks for better estimations.
- Finish the previous project before you start a new one! Developers need closure to move on.
- Create an integration plan.
- Juval has a new book coming out on this topic (Must get it!).
- Windows Workflow Foundation
- Use GetActivityByName instead of the activity’s property if you need the current instance because the property is a clone.
- Transactions require a persistence service.
- You can’t join external transactions (None WF transactions).
- You can’t call InvokeWorkflow from within a transaction.
- WF requires full trust in CAS to run.
- The workflow role membership is completely separate from all of the other membership providers in .Net so you will have to tie them together yourself.
- ASP.NetMichele
- Leroux Bustamante has a good article about creating custom Expression Builders.
- Windows Communication Foundation
- Increase the transaction timeout on development machines (in the machine.config) to help with debugging.
- Look into the iDesign Transactional<T> API.
Overall it was an awesome conference and I look forward to attending it again in the future.
