Browse by Tags

All Tags » TFS/VSTS » General (RSS)
Thursday, July 31, 2008 1:57 PM

Why is the interoperability drive so important to us?

This must be the gazillionth time I am writing this blog post, whereby I deleted the previous attempts as I wanted to avoid the possible whiplash I will receive from some of my colleagues and the more 'radical' technologists. Henk, who is one of my colleagues involved in our interoperability drive within our company, in our technology communities and more recently at universities, emailed me two links, which everyone must have a look at: Microsoft Becomes Official Apache Sponsor Sam Ramji...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , ,
Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:33 PM

What’s your Circle of Interest?

Grant Holliday made us aware of Paul Stovell who put out the question to bloggers to define how they spend their time in terms if three areas: Core These are things I enjoy, care about, and follow as much as I can. When news breaks in these areas, I try to stay on top. I like to think I’m an expert in some of them, and have strong opinions on the rest. Non-core I find myself working with these things, or have a minor interest in them, but tend to follow announcements occasionally. I have opinions...
Posted by willy | 1 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Sunday, March 23, 2008 5:36 PM

Back from Nationals - Proud Dad, refocusing on upcoming TFS evangelism in Kuwait

I am back from Cape Town, where my oldest son Alexander fought a long, hard and cold battle in eight heats, ice cold swimming pool and against team from all over Africa. He did not bring any medals back home, missed 3rd place in 50m free by just over a tenth of a second and was at times low, frustrated ... fortunately he listened to reason and realised that medals are not the only thing, but instead to compete, to improve and to feel that you have given everything at the time, under the circumstances...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: ,
Tuesday, September 04, 2007 3:25 PM

Radio Silence ... busy times ... but Spanish posters appearing :)

I apologies for the radio silence, however, with lots of traveling and project deliverables, I am not finding much time to focus on things like this blog. It should all change by September 10th when we start preparing for TechEd 2007 in South-Africa and stressing out with chalk&talk session content and demos. Thanks to Luis Fraile (Team System MVP) we have two TFS posters translated to Spanish. As soon as my colleague JP manages to upload them to our www.drp.co.za site, I will post a notice....
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: ,
Friday, July 13, 2007 5:22 PM

Software Engineers on their way to Pluto ... we have a liftoff!

COWABUNGA! We have just received the green lights to wrapup and print our third book, titled " Software Engineers on their way to Pluto ". If you are in for an exciting journey to Pluto, while investigating 4 typical software development lifecycle environments and watching software engineers build their own spacecraft, then give us a shout and book your copy. Extract from the back cover: This book continues the discussion and sharing of best practices we introduced with the books "...
Posted by willy | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: , , ,
Monday, June 11, 2007 10:15 AM

SDLC - We can learn from other industries ...

" Dad, what are these people doing? " my son asked me while we walked past a construction site on the way to school. Being in a rush as always and dragging three really motivated sons to school on a Monday morning made me answer "don't know", without really having a look. On my way back, however, I wondered what he meant and watched the site for quite a while. The building team was in a hot-tub formation ... that's a circle for non-scuba divers ... discussing plans and...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , ,
Friday, April 27, 2007 7:02 AM

Redmond Sabbatical - Day 11 (D-Day ... or FiFi Day)

We have practically conquered the beachhead and "FiFi" is about to be beaten ... the "Find It Fix It" system checking initiative. This brings the first pha se of a very interesting and eventful sabbatical to an end and we can look forward to many more victories in due course q;-) So where does the "beachhead" actually come from? Well, what I refer to as paradise ... a place my wife and I spend the best holiday ever ... is a lonely atoll in the Pacific, named Truk Lagoon...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: ,
Friday, April 20, 2007 5:32 AM

Redmond Sabbatical - Day 5

The quest to analyses the TFS BPA tool and requirements continues and will most likely continue through most of tonight ... thanks to the jet lag and associated confused brain, this should be no problem. However, the highlight of the day was when Bill too me to the Seattle Safeco Field to watch the Twins and the Seattle Mariners battle it out on the baseball pitch. Used to gentleman's game of cricket from back home, the "men in tight pants" (as JP calls them), the round bat and the...
Posted by willy | 1 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 6:30 AM

MVP Summit - T+1: Museum of flight ... WOW!

Apart from the buzz of the MVP passion and brainpower humming through the museum of flight ... the experience of visiting the was simply "awesome". I really, really wish I could have had my three sons with me this evening, because they would be on cloud nine for the rest of their lives. The blackbird ... my youngest son's favourite plane, the Phantom ... my oldest son's favourite plane, F14 Tomcat, Fiat, Sea Harrier, the infamous Starfighter and a gazillion other bits and pieces to be admired. I...
Posted by willy | 2 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 1:25 AM

MVP Summit - T+1: The Summit is heating up, while the weather is cooling

The day started at 2C ... quite "coolish" for us South-Africans. Last night we enjoyed the regional dinner, which resulted in most of us getting captured on a sheet or paper VISUALISATION and receiving a tattoo IDENTIFICATION ... relax, it only lasts a day. Today was quite eventful, with Bill Gates delivering the Keynote and, both Chris Anderson and Don Box talking about modeling ... what energy, what passion ... WOW ! For those that believe that typed datasets are on their way out ... watch the...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , ,
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 12:18 AM

MVP Summit - T-0: Registration

Day 1 is drawing to an end, after the completion of registration and the Expo, where I met some interesting people ... the most interesting obviously from the Team System Group, i.e. Etienne Tremblay from Canada ( http://geekswithblogs.net/etiennetremblay/archive/... ), Chris Menegay from the US, David Mckinstry from the US and Martin Woodward from the UK. View from the Washington State Convention & Trade Centre (Left) ... Etienne (Middle) ... "Mo" on top of the world (Right) Tonight is the regional...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , ,
Monday, March 12, 2007 10:53 AM

MVP Summit - T-0.2: Mohammed our hero

The summit has not started, but my South-Africa time clock has thrown me out of bed at 3AM ... good time to quickly post two pictures, from last night's MVP dinner arranged by Mohammed Seedat (goold old "Mo") at the Coldwater Bar and Grill in the Westin Hotel, and then to do some work before bracing the rain, wind and 11 ° C temperature outside. Mo ... that's the guy on the left ... has been our lead in South-Africa and has done an immense job for the South-African MVP group and the community as...
Posted by willy | 1 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,
Sunday, March 11, 2007 7:40 PM

MVP Summit - T-1: Arrival

After an elapsed time of 26 hours, flying time of ~22hours from Johannesburg, via Dakar, via New York and finally landing in an overcast and foggy Sea-Tac Airport, I am finally in Seattle. My bets are on that immigration back home will be far more efficient ... I nearly missed my connecting flight after spending 1.75 hours at immigration, connectign terminal re-checking and a brisk walk to terminal C this morning. As promised, I will post one or two photos every day from the MVP Summit. As it is...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , ,
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 2:52 AM

Errata: .NET Enterprise Solutions … Interoperability for the Connoisseur

Our second book is finally available and shipping. Packed with a wealth of information covering interoperability it is also littered with TLAs. For those that hate TLAs (three lettered acronyms) as much as I do, we extend an apology for undocumented TLAs within the book. Here are two of the TLAs and their actual meaning: POX – P lain O ld X ml describing basic XML. WXS - W 3C X ML S chema, used to express shared vocabularies, allowing machines to carry out rules defined by humanoids. Share...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , , , ,
Saturday, September 02, 2006 11:56 AM

Microsoft ... when will you give us one IDE?

I am not one for complaints, but the INTEGRATED development environment is very DISINTEGRATED at the moment. If you have the joy of being in the early technology adoption teams you will be forced to run your production environment and a number of separate CTP/BETA bits and pieces, forcing most of us to resort to separate machines or polluting our precious hard drive and memory space with Virtual instances of separate environments. CTP/BETA implies that one has a thick skin and an understanding that...
Posted by willy | with no comments
Filed under: , , ,
More Posts Next page »