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January 04, 2008
Windows Live! Lives...
Microsoft is massively increasing its offerings under the Windows Live platform umbrella and it's worth a look if you're doing anything in the web space (who isn't these days).
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Posted by Mark M. Baker at 05:09 PM Permalink
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December 07, 2007
Visual Studio.NET 2008 goes live!
Well, the long wait is finally over for Microsoft-technology developers. Visual Studio.NET 2008 (formerly code-named Orcas) was released by Microsoft on Nov 19th 2007. Microsoft immediately made the release available for download from MSDN for users with a current subscription. In addition to the IDE and other developer tools, an enhanced Team Foundation Server was also released providing a series of new capabilities to users.
Continue reading "Visual Studio.NET 2008 goes live!"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 12:41 PM Permalink
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November 07, 2007
Scrum: Are distributed teams an oxymoron?
As an Agile practice, Scrum puts great emphasis on frequent daily colloboration among the team members. As an example, the Daily Scrum is a 15-minute, daily, stand-up meeting where the Team comes together to discuss the all important 3 questions - what did I do/finish yesterday, what am I working on today, and what is holding me up? Often, Scrum teams work in large, open rooms where dedicated workspace is eschewed in order to work more closely together on common tables. Whiteboards are hung on the walls with notes, product backlog items (PBIs), impediments, the Scrum burndown chart, and so on. So it would seem that a team that needs or wants to be distributed outside of a single space is a no-can-do in Scrum, right?
Wrong.
Continue reading "Scrum: Are distributed teams an oxymoron?"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 12:50 PM Permalink
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October 19, 2007
TeamPlain v2.0 is unleashed
You may recall that Microsoft purchased TeamPlain v1.0 from DevBiz Solutions earlier this year. This is the web based front end to the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. It's much simpler and easier to use that the Team Explorer that comes with Visual Studio. And it relieves end users from having to install Visual Studio to interact with a TFS project. DevBiz was in the middle of v2.0 when they were purchased. Since this, all has been quiet.
Until now.
Continue reading "TeamPlain v2.0 is unleashed"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 02:57 PM Permalink
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Windows Workflow Survey
Kavita Kamani posted a link to a Windows Workflow Survey now being conducted by Microsoft's Connected System Division. They're looking for input on potential improvements for future releases, but they're also interested in hearing from developers who aren't currently using Windows Workflow. The survey takes about 30 minutes.
Posted by John Dorsey at 12:19 PM Permalink
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October 12, 2007
PowerGUI: get-beta –newest
Recent MVP inductee Dmitry Sotnikov has released the latest beta of PowerGUI, the free admin console for Windows Powershell. PowerGUI.1.0.11.207 includes several improvements suggested by users, including the standalone mode script editor. Last August, Dmitry demonstrated PowerGUI for Microsoft's Jeffrey Snover on Channel 9. Jeffrey and Dmitry also contemplated future enhancements: Learn and Master Windows PowerShell with Quest Software’s PowerGUI. The PowerGUI site also features several additional screencam demos.
Posted by John Dorsey at 04:28 PM Permalink
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September 28, 2007
Bundles of Advice
The Microsoft Patterns & Practices team has been busy bundling their advice. So busy in fact, they've decided to package the advice along with software bits including software components, test harnesses, guidance documents, How-To tutorials, and so on. And you guessed it. They're calling these things bundles.
Continue reading "Bundles of Advice"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 04:34 PM Permalink
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September 04, 2007
Moving up the Food Chain
The astonishing, and to me, profound thing about some the new .NET technology coming out from Microsoft is how we are now beginning to move away from low-level, implementation worries and toward enabling construction of applications from ever larger abstractions. In a way, and to me at least, this is what will get us to where we need to be to deal with ever larger amounts of complexity.
Time for bigger plates.
Continue reading "Moving up the Food Chain"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 04:56 PM Permalink
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August 14, 2007
.NET Future Directions
So you've gotten used to .NET 2.0, and are probably reading up on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), LINQ, and so on. You're probably thinking that there's a lot of parts to .NET now, and you're drinking from the proverbial firehose.
Microsoft hasn't even gotten warmed up.
Continue reading ".NET Future Directions"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 03:44 PM Permalink
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July 30, 2007
Scrum: How to be consistent about Team weighting
Occasionally I'll return to the theme of Agile/Scrum and cover more detailed HowTo's that hopefully will give you additional insight into applying Scrum to your development practices. This time I'll cover issues around Team weighting of Product Backlog items for a Sprint, and the challenges of keeping consistency in the weights themselves.
Continue reading "Scrum: How to be consistent about Team weighting"
Posted by Mark M. Baker at 12:54 PM Permalink
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