The Start

It has been over a year since I started with the Team Foundation Server team in Raleigh, North Carolina but just now I decided to start blogging. I know, I am a bit late, and I know several of you have told me repeatedly to do this so I can share some of that much needed knowledge, so to you I say : here is the start for what is to be a long relationship

Before getting into any topic let me give you a couple of sentences about me. I graduated from the University of Miami ("The U") and got a job at Microsoft in the Xbox department- that was back in 2002. My job? Software Test Engineer, and more specific I tested racing games. Those first three years were incredible and I got to ship three amazing titles: RalliSport Challenge PC, Project Gotham Racing 2, and Forza Motorsport. From there, I decided to take a new challenge and accepted a position as a Program Manager on the TFS team, and here I am, getting busier and busier with our next version.

Now that the introduction is over (frequently I dread that part) lets talk about how I will use this blog? The true answer is for almost anything that I can think of, but I do want to give you an inside into what my focus will be. Let’s start with my areas of concentration:

a. Team Foundation Server Version Control- anything to do with past and new features. Topics will range from best practices, to feature use and feedback requests

b. Industry news and how it impacts us- I will share my 2 cents on what I think about specific news/events that are happening in the ALM space which impact TFS and Version Control

c. Partners and Integration- what are partners delivering? How to use it? What are some of the integration points that we envision our customers and partners using?, etc

d. Program management- what does it take to be successful, project management best practices, etc. I think there is a lot to share on this with the industry so I am going to do my best to give back from what I have learned from great minds

e. A topic submitted by you- Once a month I will have a blog entry entirely about something one of you guys- who read and post comments in my blog- want. I think anything that the MS legal team approves is fair game so if you would like start submitting those requests- although I will have a blog post to take those entries in a more formalized fashion

One point that I want to bring special attention to is that I will use this medium to communicate with you about new features coming to TFS and all I need from you is to provide us with feedback. We constantly use customer feedback to make crucial decisions so more information means better features at the end.

With that I leave you and I hope you got what you need from this first post … and to start tradition my last sentence will be a quote that I will use as the basis for a topic in my next post.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein