Update on Key Projects

  • Article

While I've been quiet on my blog, we've been busy behind the scenes.  Here's a rundown on key things:

  • Arch Nuggets. These don't exist yet.  I'm socializing an idea to create small, focused guidance for key engineering decisions.  I'm picturing small articles with insight and chunks of code.  The code would be less about reuse and more about helping you quickly prototype and test.  You can think of them as focused architectural spikes or tests.  The scope would be cross-technology, cross-cutting concerns and application infrastructure type scenarios such as data access, exception management, logging, ... etc.  They'll be light-weight and focused on helping you figure out how to put our platform legos together.  For a concrete example, imagine more articles and code examples such as How To: Page Records in .NET Applications. 
  • CodePlex Site - Performance Testing Guidance.  This is our online knowledge base for performance testing nuggets.   We'll refactoring nuggets from our performance testing guide.  We'll then create new modules that show you how to make the most out of Visual Studio.
  • CodePlex Site - VSTS Guidance.  This is our online knowledge base for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server guidance.  We're refactoring nuggets from our TFS guide.
  • Guidance Explorer .   This is where we store our reusable guidance nuggets.  On the immediate radar, we're making some fixes to improve performance as well as improve browsing our catalog of nuggets.
  • Guide - Getting Results.  As a pet project, I'm putting together what I've learned over the past several years getting results at Microsoft.  It's going to include what I learned from the school of hard knocks.  I'm approaching it the way I approach any guide and I'm focusing on the principles, practices and patterns for effectiveness.
  • Guide - Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications.  We're wrapping this up this week.  We're finishing the final edits and then building a new PDF.
  • Guide - Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.   We’re basically *guidance complete.*  Since the Beta release, we added guidelines and practices for build, project management, and reporting.  We also revamped the deployment chapter, as well as improved the process guidance.  It's a substantial update. 
  • MSDN port of the guidance.  We have enough critical mass in terms of VSTS and Performance Testing guidance to justify porting to MSDN.  While many customers have used the guidance from the CodePlex site as is, for greater reach, we need to start the process of making the guidance a part of the MSDN library.  This will be an interesting exercise.
  • Sharepoint test for our guidance store.  We're testing the feasibility of using Sharepoint for our back-end (our guidance store) and our online Web application.  The key challenges we're hitting are creating effective publishing and consuming user experiences.  It's interesting and insightful and there's lots to learn.

I'll have more to say soon.