My team is putting on an event in a number of different cities in the coming months. To register, click on the link for your city: Here is the detailed information about the event: Agile methods are a set of development processes intended to create software in a lighter, faster, more people-centric way. Many development teams have adopted "agile" methodologies to manage change and to improve software quality. These methodologies promote continuous integration as a practice to build and test software products incrementally as new features are included, bugs are fixed, and code is refactored. This one-day seminar will walk provide an overview of Agile Software Development, its principles, methods and values; highlighting of the most widely used, and simplest to apply Agile method known as "Scrum". Please join Microsoft and Neudesic, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for this one-day seminar. Thank you, we look forward to seeing you there! COURSE OVERVIEW Introduction to Agile (What, Why) | Agile methods are fast becoming commonplace in software development practices for many organizations. However, they represent a significant paradigm shift in the way in which stakeholders and team members are engaged, projects are planned, manner in which the team reacts to change, and which teams work together. The session will provide an overview of Agile Software Development, its principles, methods and values. Participants will learn the reason why Agile Methods are gaining share in software projects and driving up ROI.
Scrum Essentials | Several methodologies live within the space known as "Agile Software Development". One of the most widely used, and simplest to apply Agile methods is known as "Scrum". This session teaches the essentials of how to use "Scrum" on projects, focusing on the techniques and practices that development teams require while working on an Agile / Scrum project. The session will provide the required practices, roles and rules of Scrum, and answer specific questions about how to apply Agile Methods (via Scrum) to projects. Participants will review how a product backlog is used to plan a sprint, and learn how to read project status through a sprint backlog and burn down chart.
Agile Planning and Estimation | Session teaches how to plan the scope and schedule of a Scrum project, focusing on hands-on project planning techniques for Agile teams. Requires familiarity with Agile software development (or prior attendance to the above sessions).
The following areas are discussed -- how to: -
Set up a winning project "constraint profile" -
Manage customer / user scope expectations -
Create a release plan -
Create and prioritize a product backlog -
Use relative estimating -
Measure team velocity
Team Foundation Server | See how Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server can support your team’s Scrum process to fully benefit from Scrum’s practices and rules. In this session we’ll discuss how you can use TFS to leverage the Scrum essentials learned in the earlier session.
C-Level Speaker | In this final session, we will hear a “real-world” example of how Scrum is successfully being used today in a development organization.
AGENDA | Tuesday, September 23, 2008 | | 8:30 AM-9:00 AM | Registration, Welcome & Breakfast | | 9:00 AM-10:30 AM | Introduction to Agile | | 10:30AM-10:45 AM | Break | | 10:45AM-11:45 AM | SCRUM Essentials, Part 1 | | 11:45 PM-12:45 PM | Lunch | | 12: 45 PM-1:45 PM | SCRUM Essentials, Part 2 | | 1:45 PM-2:45 PM | Agile Planning & Estimation | | 2:45 PM-3:00 PM | Break | | 3:00 PM-4:00 PM | Team Foundation Server | | 4:00 PM-5:00 PM | C Level Speaker | Hope to see you at one of the events.
My team and I have been putting together an event that should be a lot of fun. From Tim Heuer's blog: miss the days of devdays? me too. my team is trying to bring a little of that spark back! joe shirey on my team has organized a full-day of developer and architect goodness. we'll be hosting two events, one in the phoenix, arizona metro area and one in the denver, colorado metro area. here's the gist: keynote: microsoft patterns and practices is being shipped in to talk about what they've produced and the logic behind it! developer track: - exposing and consuming data using the microsoft stack (rob bagby): take a look at the ado.net entity framework, linq and the ado.net data services (project 'astoria').
- office as a developer platform (tim heuer): didn't know you could easily write office applications using managed code? let me show you how easy it is and what visual studio 2008 has done to enable this and make it even easier.
- what is new in visual basic 9 (beth massi): that's right. beth massi -- if you are a vb'er, you've no doubt heard the name from the vb team. we convinced her that she needed to be a part of this and she agreed! come learn from beth all the new goodness that is VB9: xml literals, object initializers, anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions and some wicked intellisense improvements!
architect track: - why user experience matters: face it, developers are not good at defining user interfaces and thus it is often an aspect that is left out. let's discuss the reason this needs to change and how attention to the user experience affects application adoption.
- agile development at microsoft: the team from patterns and practices will discuss how they have fully adopted agile methods in their development team and their learnings over the years.
- the Windows Live platform: think windows live is just virtual earth? think again! come hear about the services available to you as service-based building blocks that microsoft has exposed for your use!
this is going to be a great day and a must-see event. it is completely free to attend. come hang out with us. we will also have a couple of surprises throughout the day and some fun stuff to show as well. register for your event today: PHOENIX 29 JAN REGISTER HERE DENVER 31 JAN REGISTER HERE do not miss out on this opportunity to hear from some locals as well as some people we are dragging out from redmond and the product teams!
Thanks to all of you who attended the Phoenix MSDN Power Series Event on 12/20. The slides will be posted via MSDN Events and I will provide links to them once they are live. A couple of other items for those of you that attended. Office as a Platform Session - If you want to know more about server side generation of documents, there is a good article on MSDN about it. I have also posted the code I used in the demo here. To get it to work, you will want to unzip the contents to a directory and open it using the "Open Web Site..." functionality in VS.NET. This demo should work in both VS.NET 2005 and 2008 as long as you have installed .NET Fx 3.0. I also had a question about what reference you need to add if you want to use System.IO.Packaging in your solutions - it is WindowsBase.
- If you are interested in the part of the talk where I modified Word 2007, you can check out my video on an earlier posting to see the walkthru. I have also posted my demo code that wires up the UI to a database here. If you download that code, you will need to have the Northwind sample database installed (it doesn't come with SQL 2005 samples) and you will need to modify the app.config file to point to the appropriate server. Also, you will need Word 2007 and VS.NET 2008 since I used Linq to perform the database interactions. The sample Word document is enclosed in the zip file.
- In both of my demos, I used Word Content Controls to bind the data to the document. If you are interested in building out your own Word Documents with bound content controls, I recommend downloading and installing the Word Content Control Toolkit. This tool enables quick drag and drop to wire up your custom XML to your content controls in Word.
Software + Services - If you want to know more about what Microsoft is doing in the Software + Services arena you can check out the website.
- Benny who did part of the presentation has a nice writeup here.
The Windows Live Platform - As I mentioned in my presentation, you can find out just about anything about the Windows Live Platform from a developer perspective at http://dev.live.com. If you are curious about the licensing model, select the topic you are interested in, and then select the Terms of Use.
I hope that you found at least one or two nuggets of information during the day and as always, please feel free to contact me if you want to provide me more detailed feedback.
Just a public thanks to Daren May of EMC for the fantastic presentation on Software Factories yesterday. I thought Daren covered a lot of ground in a very short time but was able to convey why software factories are valuable and how to get started using them. He also made me wish I had a British accent so I could sound more intelligent. I will be posting his presentation here later today. A couple of links of interest from the session. Again, thanks to all that made it out yesterday for the session. UPDATE: - The Webguide website mentioned above was down the last couple of days - it appears to be up now.
- Daren passed along his materials from the presentation, the following links will take you to:
There are a couple of events that are coming up that are worth noting... Visual Studio 2008 Installfest - you can find out more information on Tim Heuer's blog. The end of the year brings about a time of celebration. It is a time to embrace friends, family and the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 and Fx 3.5. Please join us at our holiday installfest to celebrate on December 12, 2007 at 6:00 PM. The fest will be hosted at the beautiful Marriott Denver Tech Center.We will have food drinks, demos and some great giveaways. Best of all, every attendee will receive a fully licensed release version of VS 2008 (to be mailed at a later date). MSDN Masters Series in Denver on Software Factories - you can register here. Have you ever created a software framework or tools to take care of the repetitive tasks on your projects? If you have, you created a form of a software factory. Microsoft’s patterns and practices team has focused on developing a set of software factories for many common types of development: Smart Clients, Web Clients, Mobile Clients, and Web Services. These factories are excellent to use as is, but can also be extended with your own customizations to suit your specific situation. This session will take a deeper look at what constitutes a software factory and the tools used to create and modify a software factory. Additionally, we will take a cursory look at each of the software factories created by Microsoft and take a deep dive into the Smart Client Software Factory with examples of how to get started and use a foundation that is well documented and thoroughly tested.
This month's presenter is Daren May of EMC. EMC Corporation is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions. Hope to see you at one of the events.
I am hosting an afternoon MSDN event around Silverlight in our Microsoft offices on October 29th from 12:30pm to 4:30pm. If you are interested you can register here. This session will cover the basics of Silverlight, using Silverlight with ASP.NET and AJAX, and media integration. Our friends from Statera will be delivering these sessions.
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