Team System, Agile Development and p&p @ PDC 2008
This year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is taking place in Los Angeles between Oct 27th and 20th. Check out the conference web site at https:///www.microsoftpdc.com to register and save $200. As a member of a track team, I can tell you that we are working on some great sessions for PDC this year. You can get a taste of it at from the sessions that are already published here. We have the following two Team system talks that are already published and are putting abstracts together for few more talks on the next version of Team System code named "Rosario".
Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft
Take a detailed look at the present and future of Team Foundation Server. With close to 14,000 users, 2,000 projects, 33 million files, and over 2 million work items, Microsoft runs one of the largest known installations of TFS. In this session, we'll share our internal best practices for version control, branching and merging, work item tracking, metrics, reporting, testing, and integrations with TFS.
Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services
In this session we will present processes and tools from the upcoming Visual Studio Team System Codename "Rosario" release and Microsoft Research and show how we deliver on quality, scalability, and experience goals for the new class of applications that demand rich UI, service consumption, and frequent release.
On October 26th we will host the pre conference which are essentially day long sessions by industry and Microsoft experts. You will find the list of pre conference sessions here. I worked with Jaime in putting together the following two pre conferences.
Get More Out of Visual Studio Team System 2008
Presenter(s): Brian Randell
This preconference will focus both on implementing best practices and avoiding worst practices when working with Team Foundation Server and the suite of client tools. Throughout the day you will cover end-to-end life cycle management. Begin with guidance on defining your team project, source code control, and project classifications system, tips for customizing your process templates and using work items to drive your teams progress. From there you will learn effective techniques for getting your builds set up and running, using quality practices and tools including unit testing, web testing, test publication, profiling and load testing. We close by covering how to move forward once a major milestone is complete. This session assumes familiarity with Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Client Tools; each section of the session will provide practical guidance so that you are getting the most of VSTS and you leave prepared for changes coming in future releases of Team System.
Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft
Presenter(s): Mary Poppendieck, Grigori Melnik
Agile development is here! During this all-day agile session Mary Poppendieck, author of "Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit" will share profound insights that will optimize your agile processes. The session will focus on best practices and advice to avoid the most common pitfalls for teams practicing or moving towards agile. During the second half of the session, Grigori Melnik, Technical Program Manager in Microsoft Patterns & Practices team, will share the lessons learned his team has acquired over many, many agile projects. The session will close with a panel - including Mary, Grigori, and a few guest speakers - for you to ask your tough questions around agile development.
Don't forget to register for one of these pre conference while you are registering for the conference. You can hop between the various pre conferences as you desire.
See you all at PDC!