Etienne's VSTS World

I just got my hands on a the shinny new version of MindManager 7 and let me tell you you're in for a threat.  Lots of people where on the fence when Microsoft came out with the ribbon stating training would be and issue, users are used to a certain interface etc.  Well now that it's been around for almost a year counting betas every time I show it to someone they are a bit skeptical but after playing with it for a bit would never go back to the old menu interface.  Fast forward to today, Minjet just released their new version of MindManager 7 with a ribbon interface.  I've been a user of this great product for a few years now and it's awesome to design things, brainstorm ideas, moving topics around, etc.  You have to try it or at least look at a little flash tour here.  Because of my understanding of the Office ribbon, understanding the MM ribbon took me a whole 5 min, I looked at the various tabs and could now do the stuff I used to do in V6 much more intuitively.  Kudos Minjet for a great product.

Mind maps have been around for quite some time, and are a way to display ideas in a colorful and graphical way.  Our mind rarely think in a linear way, we think of things and write them down then we try to match or move ideas around to link them together in a way that makes sense for our target audience, I have yet to find an easier tool to use to design and brainstorm then MindManager.  You should try it you mind find it hard to resist... ;-).  I've been using Mind Maps for a while myself and we used to draw them on paper like this

MindManager makes it way easier and they now look more like this

Cheers,

ET

Not enough new stuff to talk about, they just said it all at Mix07 (I retrospect that was the conference to attend this year I guess).  Read all about it here.  I was looking forward to that one... Oh well.

Cheers,

ET

Great white paper on how to start properly and setup a team to use Team System.  Go and get it here.

J.D. Meier's also explains what is in this release here

Sorry for the long delay, I've been on vacation to Disney in early May (well if you can call that vacation... pff I was dead every night when we came back with the kids to the hotel) and then I gave three talks at DevTeach in Montreal last week.  DevTeach was awesome again this year lots of great speakers and good questions from the audience.  I gave a session in tandem with Mario Cardinal on Top Down design in Visual Studio Orcas, lets just say I was *very* disappointed with the state of the Team Architect SKU in 2005 and I'm not very much more happy with the Orcas version right now.  They will be adding support for Class Library as a power tool! this is great news but why not put it right in he product.  I don't understand it's not released yet so they are build things in parallel instead of baking it in the release.  We had about 30 people at both sessions and let me tell you there were not a lot of impressed people.  Looks like TA will be a dud it's and it's not even released yet.  I'll be reviewing Orcas in upcoming posts so stay tuned.

The second talk was on team build, how to setup and configure your build server.   Again about 30 people and they were very happy about the talk and the slide deck full of very useful link and best practices.  Quite happy with this one, I might give it again at a user group or code camp.

My daughter, Annick and I

Good friend Joel Semeniuk and I

Mario and I in our "Top Down design with VS Orcas" talk

Cheers,

ET