New Team System Stuff - 2004-08-06

Thanks to a comment left by Brady Gaster on one of my blog posts, Angry Richard has posted some additional information about profiling in a Virtual PC:

Trying out the profiler on the VPC

I've frequently heard the question asked, "Can I use the profiler on a Virtual PC?" It has even come up on the blog feedback a few times. My answer has always been, "Theoretically, yes." I didn't want to post this answer externally until I'd actually gotten around to trying it myself.

Christopher Bowen has a good idea in blog post about categorizing Microsoft blogs to make it easier to find related blogs (and some nice words for yours truly. Thanks, Christopher!). We're in the process of doing this for Visual Studio Team System blogs:

Tracking Microsoft Blogs - blogs.msdn.com/.Text Feature Wish

It would be fantastic if somebody (read “Microsoft“) could organize that list of bloggers according to teams/projects. Life would be much easier if I could import a prepared OPML listing of bloggers focused on the technologies I'm interested in. Having to cull through other peoples' blogs (Rob Caron is a great source for VSTS pointers, BTW) can get tedious, and that is just for VSTS bloggers - never mind Indigo, WSE, PAG, ASP.NET, ad infinitum.

An MSDN TV episode on Service-Oriented Architectures:

MSDN TV: Service Orientation and Today's Technologies

Matt Powell talks with Richard Turner about the benefits of Service Orientation, the four tenets of Service Orientation, and how to use today’s technologies to move toward a service-oriented world today and in the future with Indigo.

In this post, there was an item about Jack Greenfield that mentioned a new MSDN site for Software Factories. Here's more info:

.NET Architecture Center: Software Factories

Software Factories provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable approach to application development by significantly increasing the level of automation in application development, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components. Software Factories go beyond models as documentation, using highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation.

On a related note, Bill O'Brien has a post that talks about Jack Greenfield with a link to his article on Software Factories from the July issue of Microsoft Architects JOURNAL:

Content and feedback, software factories

I saw a great presentation from Jack Greenfield recently on Software factories. Jack used to work for Rational and speaks with a wealth of experience about the challenges of improving developer productivity and design. The demand for programming and automation is skrocketing but our approaches to design and development are not keeping pace (OO, SOA etc. UML and code gen). The factories angle is another approach to reuse and is closely related to the topic I spoke about at TechEd on Patterns, which is another way of reusing knowledge to speed future dev.