Canberra VSTS User Group Rocks the House

It's 8am and I'm sitting in the inaugural meeting of the Canberra VSTS User Group. The turn-out is amazing. Over 40 professionals are crammed into the room in the Canberra MS office. This is a sensational turn out. Kudos to Grant, Sean and Mitch.

Grant kicked off with news, tips and tool of the month (he chose Brian Harry's TFSServerManager Power Toy).

Andrew Lyons talked about his experience migrating a 100 developer government department (DEWR) from a VSS environment to TFS (for source control mainly). His final word(s):

Planning is Key

  • Particularly with initial deployment
  • Disaster recovery plan
  • Security Plan

Practice Makes Perfect

  • Non-trivial migrations need trial runs
  • A development TFS server is invaluable

Next, Sean Ferguson talked about branching and merging in the ATO development environment. A couple of things that stood out for me were a reference to Buck Hodges' great post from 2004 on branching models and the usefulness of the TFS Power Tools (see also Brian's post).

Finally, Stu and Rick from AFP talked about their experience with branching there. One of their main points was that there needs to be a lot of work done to introduce the TFS culture to the dev team (especially as many of the current devs have strongly entrenched opinions about the current process and are resistant to any sort of change).

All-in-all a great first meeting and I'm looking forward to the next one on Feb 28!