Sprint 9 Review

It’s been about a month since we last talked about Sprint 9, and it’s time for an update. If you recall, the MSBuild team was planning on two parallel sprints: one for platform investigations and one to support internal dogfooding efforts. Last Friday marked the end of the sprints, and on Monday we held our sprint review. Here’s a recap of what we accomplished.

Dogfooding Sprint

Managed C++ Targets: We completed the authoring of .targets files for building Managed C++ code that makes up Visual Studio, including support for managed resources and asmmeta generation.

Conversion Support: A large part of the sprint was supporting a very active internal conversion alias. With so many teams making forward progress on converting their builds to use MSBuild we wound up answering a lot of questions. We now have approximately 40% of Visual Studio building with MSBuild.

Platform Sprint

Multi-proc scenarios: We agreed on our key scenarios for enabling multi-processor support.

Core design docs: Design documents were written and reviewed for many of the core pieces of our multi-processor support.

Dogfooding roadmap: Since dogfooding MSBuild technology is critical to what we do, we’ve already prepared a plan for how we’ll roll out multi-processor support to our build lab once it’s usable.

Partner engagement: We met with a wide range of teams to discuss our multi-processor work, including teams that want the functionality as well as teams that have technologies that could help us in our implementation. As part of this engagement we also posted to our blog about some of our Visual Studio integration concerns.

Compatibility tests: We successfully reviewed and signed off on our compatibility test plan, and wrote compatibility tests for project, binary, and add-in compatibility verification. We also moved numerous test suites from our old test system to live directly in our developer code branches. This makes our tests vastly more portable between machines, and simplifies running them in conjunction with unit tests.

That’s a quick wrap-up of what happened in the last month. Our next sprints will also run in parallel, and planning starts today. The sprints start next Monday, the 14th, and we’ll post the backlog as soon as we have it.

[ Author: Neil Enns ]