TechReady 1 - 2005: Day 2...Update #1

Ok, so this morning Clarry and I headed off to the Convention center for the first session of the day. Clarry was bit grisly since he had been out on the town the night before (I was back at the hotel with my room mate Mario D’Silva trying to get the wireless network to treat us like human beings!), so he was insisting on getting a coffee. As you can see from the picture, he was looking for the kind of caffeine hit that can only be achieved by ensconcing yourself in coffee beans! He’s still buzzing around in my pocket!

The first session was a Visual Studio Team System industry review, and included a good presentation on the importance of security and secure code development, and the impact VSTS has on that, specifically around the static analysis and dynamic analysis tools, and the whole quality tools framework, such as unit testing. The highlight was sitting next to Dino Chiesa, who is one of our best interop guys and the person responsible for introducing me to the cleverly written yet vulgarly expressed The Bile Blog.

Clarry and I then took off to catch Doug Neumann’s presentation on Visual Studio Team System Source Code Control. I’ve been looking forward to catching-up with Doug, as he was very supportive of the VSTSEclipse community project, so I wanted to acknowledge this and pass on my thanks. The presentation was fantastic, and I gained a really important insight into why VSTS SCC is so good. There may be a number of other products available that do SCC, and on a feature by feature basis, there are probably a number that beat VSTS SCC, but not many select feature implementation based on development best practice. This was apparent as Doug went through the features that made it into SCC, and the ones that didn’t. Almost all the features that were dropped where left out because they either created problematic scenarios for developers, or just encouraged bad practice. There were some features that were left out because they were too hard to implement in the time frames, or just weren’t baked enough, but I like that fact that our development tools are built with developer productivity and best practice in mind. He also spent some time discussing Workspaces in VSTS SCC. This was really valuable, as with the whole Shelve thing, it can be confusing as to where the code is at any point in the process. It seems to me that you have your local workspace on your machine, which is where you do all your local dev. Everything that happens on the server occurs though a committed changeset. So even when you’re doing branching in the SCC explorer, it’s happening in your workspace on your local machine, until you commit those to the server. When I get a chance, I’ll post the TechEd slides on all this.

Clarry and I are taking an unplanned break now in our hotel room as the session we were hoping to attend got booked out, so we are now waiting to hear Anders Hejlsberg talk about some the cool extensions to the C# language. Oops, jeez time flies, gotta run, I reckon this session will pack out. TTFN!