TechReady 1 - 2005: Day 4 - Leisure Suit Clarry

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Day 4! Clarry and I had a very productive day today, including developing our first Pocket PC application (yes, I have never actually developed one of these), saw a really cool demo of Windows Vista, and attended an awesome session on How to Migrate to Team Foundation Server (another one of Eric Lee’s finest).

But before I get into today’s activities, I need to share an insight into Clarry that I wasn’t aware off when Rob first asked me to look after him. We got to the hotel today, and Clarry was a little grumpy as we had missed out on a chalk talk session with Anders on C#, and instead, he spent 2 hours in my pants pocket while I built my first Pocket PC app. So I left him on the bed and went to take a shower to freshen up. A few minutes passed, and I heard a commotion and what sounded like an Irish ballad, so I walk into the main room to find Clarry getting freshened up in his own unique way. Now, he may look pretty calm in this pic, but let me assure you, I had to wash my ears out with holy water after the barrage of filth that spewed forth from his little painted on mouth after I wrestled the bottle of scotch from his greasy hands. ‘Tsk ‘tsk Clarry, that kind of behavior will certainly get you locked in the drawer for some cooling out time.

Anyway, my first session today was on a hands on lab on how to build a Pocket PC application. I have been struggling with a psychological barrier over mobile development, and being surrounded by some of the best mobile dev guys around (Dave Glover, Andrew Coates, Darryl Burling), I didn’t really have the confidence. But after attending this HOL today, I’ve been blown away (yes, again!). The new support for forms based development (docking, locking..popping) and better emulators has made development even easier for the simple man (like me). I think the main thing though to mobile development is best practices, as with most things, with a nice front door, most people don’t wish to enter.

My next session was Migrating to VSTS, and was presented by Eric Lee. It was a fantastic session, and covered:

  • Migrating from other source control systems to VSTS SCC using our conversion tools
  • Accessing VSTS using the MSSCCI 1.0 compliant explorer
  • Extending work item schemas

The most impressive part of this presentation was some sample code projects that we have developed for migrating projects from ClearCase. I raised the concept of creating a shared source project that took the sample projects, and created a reusable framework for doing migrations from any system (SCC, RM, etc) to VSTS. I will be putting together some presentations around the three topics above, so I’ll post the dates when we lock them in.