Thursday, November 12, 2009
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I’m preparing for a few presentations I’ll be giving next week at TechDays 09 in Calgary.
For me, preparation starts with the material. What is it that I’m trying to say and what are the important points I need to make.
Then I do a few dry runs where I go through the slides and demos by myself. This is usually not an ‘out loud’ preparation but rather just for me to ensure that things flow and I know what NOT to do in my demos.
Lastly, I try to do one or two ‘out loud’ dry runs. I find this part the hardest. For some reason I find it uncomfortable to talk to myself out loud. If possible, it’s best to have someone come over that you can ply with alcohol so you can present to them. They don’t even need to pay attention, but having a face to talk to that isn’t your own is easier to me.
Any techniques that you other presenters out there use? I’m always looking for improvement.
Technorati Tags:
Presentations
Monday, November 09, 2009
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Microsoft has purchased Teamprise, who created a Team Foundation Server plug-in for Eclipse as well as extensions for doing Java builds with Team Foundation Server.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/nov09/11-09TeamprisePR.mspx
This is big news since many of the industry experts from the analyst firms have cited lack of multi-platform support for Team Foundation Server Client as a weakness of the platform. Eclipse is now a fully supported MS environment for ALM.
I’ve made the slide decks I presented at QAI TesTrek 2009 in Toronto available for download here.
There is one deck on aspects of testing SOA and another on using VS 2010 test features supporting exploratory testing.
My apologies for the delay but I’ve been off battling the flu.
Thanks to the TesTrek organizing team and to all the attendees. I had a great conference.
,
Some EXCELLENT work done by Imaginet Resources is being featured in a Microsoft Ad Campaign. This solution is also a finalist for a Microsoft Impact Award.
Check it out here: http://www.imaginets.com/news--events/imaginet%27s-healthcare-software-featured-in-microsoft-ad-campaign.aspx
Notice my buddy Steve “Dr. Efficiency” Porter :) He is available for House Call’s :)
Monday, October 26, 2009
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I’m presenting 2 topics this week at the QAI Toronto TesTrek Symposium.
My first session is Wednesday and is about Testing in a SOA World. I’ll cover some of the challenges with testing Service Oriented Architectures as well as some techniques and tools that assist.
My second session is Exploratory Testing with Agile in Visual Studio 2010 where I’ll delve into the techniques of Exploratory Testing and how the new test tooling in Visual Studio 2010 helps improve the productivity and maturity of Exploratory Testing.
Give me shout if you will be there.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
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While in Redmond last week I was invited to attend and present at the TFS All Hands meeting. What a lot of brain power in one place (actually 2 places; North Carolina and Redmond.) I guess they usually try to get a customer share their real world experience with the product with the development team.
I was given the opportunity to discuss some of what we see as the Hits for TFS 2010, what we still see as gaps and to do a demonstration of the Telerik Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard that Imaginet developed.
The TFS team seemed to like what we had done and agreed with the gaps we set out to fill.
Special shout out to Charles Sterling and Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson for inviting me.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
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Today Telerik released our Beta 2 version of our FREE and popular Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard Tooling.
There are a bunch of bug fixes (it was a Beta 1 after all) that have been made and one exciting new feature.
We now have a way to assist with Iteration Planning. You choose a query (whatever you want) of the work items you want to schedule into Iterations or Sprints. You choose which Iterations you want to do allocation for, what your effort capacity is and we provide a drag-and-drop mechanism to fill your iteration buckets. We keep finding that it’s the simple things that have immense value. There was no great interface for doing this. Now you have a very easy to use interface that gives immediate feedback on how you are filling your capacity. You can see when dropping an item into an iteration takes more capacity than you are willing to allocate to it very visually.
Check it out on the Telerik site!!
As always, keep the feedback coming. Leave a comment here for general feedback. If you are having issues, please use the Telerik Support Forums here for WIM and here for PD. That way you can track our responses and the whole community can benefit from the conversation.
I had a requirement this week to create a video for a demo. I needed to demonstrate features that had already been recorded in other demos but I needed to grab those videos, cut and splice them together to produce a ‘new’ video.
I decided to try Expression Encoder 3 which I had heard about but hadn’t had need to use before.
(For simple team collaboration videos and screen captures I typically use Jing)
Well, Encoder rocked it out. I’m really not a Multimedia production kind of guy. I record audio and video as a mechanism to communicate, but don’t generally worry about quality. To me, ease of use is KEY.
Look forward to using Expression Encoder more often in the future. It was fairly intuitive, handled the video formats I needed and produced a pretty good result.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
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I was going to blog the AWESOME new install and configure for TFS 2010 Beta2 but Martin beat me to it.
If you have tried to install TFS in the past, you will definitely appreciate the simplicity and reliability of the new install and configuration processes.
Install
Configure
Technorati Tags:
VS2010,
Beta 2
Monday, October 19, 2009
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Folks with MSDN Subscriber licenses going to grab the latest version of VS2010 may wonder ‘Where is Team System? Team Suite? Team Developer? Team Architect?’
They are gone! Does that mean that MS is getting out of the ALM toolset market? Or does it mean that the ‘Team’ stuff is being released later?
The answer is NEITHER. The branding, naming and licensing of Visual Studio is changing for the 2010 version. The ‘Team System’ branding is being dropped. What ‘used’ to be the ‘Team’ client products are now being rebranded as Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate.
Team Foundation Server is still there (and is now actually available in 2 versions, a Basics version and the Full version). There is good news on this front. TFS is now INCLUDED in MSDN Subscriber licenses. And MSDN Subscribers also get a TFS CAL.
So, if your team has MSDN subscriptions, you now have everything you need to use Team Foundation Server within your team.
Don’t know how I missed blogging this along with everything else, but the Release data for VS 2010 and .Net 4.0 has been announced as March 22, 2010.
Technorati Tags:
VS2010,
.Net 4
There is a new logo for Visual Studio.
Still an infinity symbol, but this time more flowing.
Technorati Tags:
Visual Studio
Personally, I like it.
Seems fresh. Lots of content without looking too busy.
What do you think?
Also, notice the new product versions:
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Professional
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Premium
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Ultimate
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® Test Elements 2010
- Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Foundation Server 2010
Go to Somasegar’s blog for more info on the new SKU’s and the Ultimate Offer!
Brian Harry has a screenshot of the downloads available.
Technorati Tags:
VS2010,
TFS,
Beta 2UPDATES: From the MicrosoftVSTS Twitter feed:
“Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium and Ultimate and Test Elements with MSDN will include one production license and one CAL to TFS 2010”
“The Ultimate Offer will transition MSDN Premium subscribers to a higher #vs2010 product at launch. http://tinyurl.com/yzko3rr ”