Visit to Argentina

Last week I was invited to Argentina to work for a couple for days with a local customer and Microsoft Consulting Services in SouthCone region (that's Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia). A really great project and another example of how patterns & practices assets are being used in the "real world". (in this case Enterprise Library and some of the Smart Client deliverables). As an engineer is always good to see our stuff actually solves problems and is being used in real solutions.

I was also very gladly surprised to see the team adopting practices like TDD, continuous integration, weekly iterations, etc. I've seen those practices in action in my team here in p&p and the results achieved are great.

Here I am with my friends Martin Salias and Wilson Chiesa currently working on this project (in the far wall you can almost see the 2 new Smart Client posters we created for the last p&p DVD):

During the third day of my visit, the Microsoft Evangelism team organized a meeting with architects and dev leads and I gave a presentation/open discussion on p&p. It was a great session, lots of really good questions and discussions. We had originally planned for a 2 hours session but we ended up talking for 3 hours! Thanks to all of you who have attended!

I started with a very weak voice (a consequence of a not fully recovered cold) and surprisingly I ended up almost intact! (well, to be honest, I saw a doctor before the event and he gave me a pill of Dihydorxy-16beta-something which worked great! Thanks doc!)

Also, even though it was a very short trip (just 3 days), it was a great opportunity to see my friends and my family.