If you have read Mike Cohn's book on Agile Estimation, one of the techniques he recommends is something called Planning Poker or Estimation Poker. This is an interesting technique that helps team reach consensus on the estimate for each user story, scenario or requirement. I was doing some research on this technique and I came across a web site that can be used facilitate the game of planning poker for your team. Happy Coding...

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My personal laptop is a Dell Inspiron XPS (It’s a first generation and pretty much a piece of crap by the way) with a 60 gig hard-drive which is almost completely full (less than 10%). The Windows defrag tool was useless because the drive was so full. Being a MVP has some perks. One of those is that I get lots of software for free. I remembered that I had seen a product called Diskeeper on the private MVP newsgroups and thought I would give it a try. I was amazed! First, the limited space did not...

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I am smitten by Groove. I admit it. If you have not heard of Groove before, it is a new part of Office 2007 that is to date, little known. I am using Groove in the peer to peer mode as we do not currently have Groove Server installed. In the course of my daily work, I am constantly receiving links to websites that I may want to view in the future. I even have a folder in Favorites Center in Internet Explorer called "~ToBeRead" to store these links. The problem is that I there are times when I want...

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Someone posted about a tool to convert NUnit tests to Team Test tests on the VSTS Champs list the other day. I had no idea this tool existed! If you have a bunch of NUnit tests that you want to move into Team Test, this seem like the way to go. áHappy Coding

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So those of you who know me know that I have a mantra. That mantra goes something like this (depending on the amount of sleep I have had the night before): "Fancy tools make you weak." While I was preparing to fill in for my buddy Mickey Gousset at Tech Ed, I downloaded the TFS Power Tool (this used to be called the Power Toys) to use in the session. I have to admit, I was impressed. I think that the Annotate and the Treediff features are incredibly useful and there is quite a bit of additional functionality...

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I wanted to check out Safari and get an idea of what the fuss was aboutà <rant> áI tried several different ways to install ità </rant> áHappy Coding...

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It looks like my buddies over at Accentient have been hard at work on the widgets page for Team System. It has a nice new look, a search feature, and new friendly URL and a subscribe option. If you want to get a good idea of the universe of tools available for VSTS go check it out. Happy Coding! á

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A buddy of mine just created a newáweb site for .Net.á He is looking for bloggers and article writers.á If you are interested check it out at www.codearticles.com. Happy Coding

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My name is Mike, and I am a Google user.á When you go up to the MS campus in Redmond, that is one of the last things you want to say, but honestly I was not willing to give up Google Desktop Search.á That is until I stumbled across a tool called Windows Desktop Search. To quote a well known philosopher, this tool is "freaking sweet!" (ok, so I quoted Peter Griffin) The UI kicks Google's butt and WDS basically gives all of the niceness of Vista's search capabilities in your current Windows XP installation....

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Team Foundation Server has a pretty slick security model for source code.á On my current project, we have run into a situation that requires us to have two development teams running in parallel but deploying to production at different times.á One of the challenges that we face is that we share a code library and many common classes.á To make sure that no change slips through without both teams being made aware of it, we have locked down all of the files by taking away "Check Out" permissions from...

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