Etienne's VSTS World

Boy such a busy day!! Microsoft acquiring TeamPlain and the roadmap released...

Microsoft as finally started to reveal information about Rosario, the version after Orcas.  Get all the info here

There are a lot great info on this page also so peruse away.

With this we can start to see where things are heading and feel comfortable in our investment in TFS V1 because Microsoft will hold our hand going forward by providing upgrade options and we will have more and more feature in that space going forward.  With the acquisition of TeamPlain, they can now focus on adding completely new features to Rosario and we'll have a great web access solution to boot.

The future looks bright indeed....

Cheers,

ET

This is a great news, TeamPlain are the leader in Team System web access as a group (MVPs and influencer) we told Microsoft "if you are going to provide web access to TFS, make it better then TeamPlain of buy them", looks like the listen to us ;-).  What is also great about this news is they will be able to spend more cycle on new features in TFS and just gain a whole web access platform which is good for everyone.

Nice move Microsoft read all about it here on Brian's blog.

Cheers,

ET

Last Saturday we had our TFS workshop, around 70 people came to hear me talk about Team System.  We had so much to cover I'm surprised I actually manage to cover it all.  I was great fun answering questions and talk about one of my passions Team Foundation Server.

Thanks to everyone who came and made this a day to remember.  Also thanks to our sponsors, Microsoft, TeamPlain (now Microsoft!!), TeamLook, TeamPrise and InCycleSoftware.  Finally a big thanks to Guy Barrette for getting all the logistics done and for keeping me on time during the day.

Cheers,

ET

My good friend Martin Woodward from TeamPrise just made a lot of happy people.  They are giving away free licences to Teamprise to connect to open source projects on Codeplex.  Check it out here

Nice one mate!!

Cheers,

ET

I get asked a lot, "what is the best branching strategy you recommend..." or some variant of this quite a lot.  Well John Jacob, Mario rodriguez and Graham Barry just wrote a nice white paper on just that subject and it's very good.  Go have a look here

Also J.D. Meier's does a nice summary of the white paper here

Happy branching...

Cheers,

ET

So here I am with 100 other Canadian at the last weeks' MVP Summit.  Good times

Big thanks to Jeffrey Palermo for throwing such a great party!

Cheers,

ET

Update: here are a few more... ;-)

Boy were we in Red :-) check out the Canadian Crew...

My good friend Noah Coad created a work item search box. Think of it as "google" "live" for work item search.  Nice Job Noah.  Read all about it and download it here.

Cheers,

ET

There is more and more good training material out there and one thing that works really well for people is the ability to watch someone accomplish a task and comment on how to do it.  It's sometime hard to follow from a book and you don't get all the nuances, a good narrator can get a message through much better in my view.  I'm about start doing some training material for our folks here and I like listening to others do this to get ideas how to make the message consistant and clear.  Eric Lee is a good example of someone that show a feature and explains them well.  Check out a few of his videos on his blog here

Also check the new MSDN Learning videos like this one here

The best thing is to keep them short (10-20 min) is good.  This way it's focused and people's attention doesn't wander to much.  IMHO this is the future of traning.

Cheers,

ET

I haven't blogged in while... I've been so busy it's hard to think strait sometimes...

I'm back from a trip to Argentina where it was the summer (+30C) leaving a nice (-20C) in Montreal ;-).  So many things happened it's like we can't go to bed...

1) SQL SP2 shipped

2) Virtual PC 2007 shipped (and it's FREE!!!) now this is great news and I love the fact it's released now (I just need a new PC that supports virtualization now ;-)).

3) March CTP of Orcas just released.  Now this is great since we finally have a version of TFS to play with.  I'll start looking into this next week. I'm linking to Brian Harry's blog because he's got links to the various flavor of Orcas, VMs/non-VMs etc.  Take your pick.

A band I'm listening too right now that got me totally going nuts is Porcupine Tree.  Man I'm crazy about them ;-).

Cheers,

ET

Oh and we score some great sponsors for our TFS Workshop day check them out on Guy's blog here but I'd like to also add the Team System Product Team which offered... (A secret for the attendees only ;-)) I will reveal tomorrow after I talk to them tonight.  Also, Software Architect sent some swag and probably a few others before the big day.  THANK YOU ALL FOR HELPING MAKE THIS EVEN A SUCCESS!!!