I am back!

Hi! After a looooong break, I am back again. So what kept me so long.....first, we had to ship beta 3 of VSTS in September. That meant the entire test team was heads down in a 4 week full test pass to ensure we run our entire colossal set of tests against the product. Second, as many of you might be aware, we are shipping VS 2005 soon. So, I was involved in a separate activity to test all Team Build dependencies that we had on VS 2005 features, which is really a long list. Team Build is built right on top of MSBuild, the build engine that ships with VS 2005 - so we needed to ensure all possible dependencies are covered and tested with respect to MSBuild. Other than that, there was some intensive testing around building web projects and C++ projects.

Last but certainly the most enjoyable, was the heavy involvement with newsgroups soon after Team Build B3 release. Boy! Did we receive a lot of interest! In fact, it was during answering posts on newsgroups, that I realised how valuable blogging can be. Very often, posts allude to blogs, many times appreciating them and asking for more info and some posts suggesting future topics for blogging. It seems to be a much more popular and faster alternative to reading reams of boring documentation! Of course, the bouquets come with the brickbats. The most unflattering comment I have seen so far on the forums said that a certain blog "was as clear as mud"! Ouch!

In my coming blogs, I would like to dwell on some Team Build specific features that have been the subject of forum posts ever so often. I would be delighted to hear from you of any such specific topic that you would be interested in. I am hoping to shed more light on some of these features in my coming blogs and would love to hear your feedback on them...as long as you don't say they are as clear as mud... ;-)