Upcoming Microsoft Webcasts

Keeping up on technology is important and I find http://www.asp.net/learn/webcasts to be a valuable resource on learning what Microsoft is providing.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 2pm - http://www.asp.net/learn/webcasts/webcast-325.aspx - Building a Silverlight Application in One Hour - provide an overview of creating forms-based applications in Microsoft Silverlight 2, the new rich Internet applications platform

Thursday, January 15, 2009 2pm - http://www.asp.net/learn/webcasts/webcast-324.aspx - Enterprise Build Automation with Team System and Team Build - Explains the five key characteristics of every enterprise build automation solution. Even a discussion on integrating legacy code into your automated builds.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009 2pm - http://www.asp.net/learn/webcasts/webcast-317.aspx - Discover the Windows Azure Services Platform - Provides an overview of the components and services that make up the platform and the development environment for developing and deploying cloud-based applications. Windows Azure represents Microsoft's firm commitment to making cloud computing a compelling and cost- effective platform.

Thursday, January 29, 2009 2pm - http://www.asp.net/learn/webcasts/webcast-316.aspx - Windows Workflow Foundation Overview with Visual Studio 2008 - Covers the fundamentals of what Workflow Foundation is and where you might use it. Demonstrates using the development tools and several of the interesting activities included out of the box in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Blog engines at CodePlex with source code

Some of the most popular code projects at codeplex.com are blog engines. Here's a few to see:

http://www.codeplex.com/blogengine - Apparently this is the most popular one if you measure by downloads and its had a lot more use experience than the others.

http://www.codeplex.com/oxite - This one will probably surpass BlogEngine in functionality and code quality based on the support for it.

http://www.codeplex.com/dnnblog - DotNetNuke seems to have the biggest ambitions with plenty of subsites and functionality planned. However its yet to get as big of a mindshare as BlogEngine or Oxite.

Some must-reads

Some must-reads I've bookmarked:

http://delicious.com/ianfnelson - This blogger named Ian Nelson is good at keeping up on the latest/greatest for TFS, Sharepoint, .NET and all things Microsoft development related.

http://www.sheltonblog.com/archive/2008/09/24/free-training-developer-ramp-up-kit-for-microsoft-crm-dynamics.aspx

http://www.asp.net/learn/vsts-videos/video-129.aspx Watch this video on "Introduction to Manual Testing with Team System".

Videos for some training

I highly recommend looking at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/bb964616.aspx, http://teamsystemrocks.com/tutorials and http://www.asp.net/learn/vsts-videos for training videos on Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Suite (VSTS).

Some other links to see for training material on TFS, MOSS, Sharepoint, .NET, etc. include:

http://www.asp.net/learn/

http://blog.sharepointhosting.com/Downloads/SharePoint-Tutorials.aspx

http://betterecm.wordpress.com/2006/10/25/moss-2007-videos-screencasts \

http://www.sharepoint-videos.com

http://www.microsoft.com/feeds/msdn/en-us/videos/vsts.xml

http://channel9.msdn.com/Feeds/RSS/

Daily Scrums

I suggest that work teams establish a daily time to do a quick technical interchange and see where we're at. In "Agile Scrum" these are called the "Daily Scrum". They should NEVER last longer than 15 minutes. And we'd like to rotate weeks on taking on duties of being the "Scrum Master". If going longer its because we're going in-depth on some technical collaborative work, having a code review or something of that sort.

During the daily scrum each team member provides answers to the following three questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?

We'd limit the role of "Scrum Master" to really be the meeting facilitator and the person who records that the answers to these 3 questions were reflected in the TFS work items' changes and if not to follow up and do it themselves or ask the other team member to do so. See http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/daily-scrum and http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrummaster for some info.

Ultimately its an effective way to work as a team of peers using TFS out-of-the-box, to deliver in accordance to the project plan and methodology guidelines that the project manager has committed the team and to empower the leadership/customer to have full project vision and management capabilities as they wish.