Fall 2008 Connections Conference

Well, I just returned home from Las Vegas and the Fall 2008 Connections conference. It was good to see friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I think my sessions went fairly well.

As promised during the sessions, here’s a link to my Skydrive folder containing the slides from the presentations.

Please don’t hesitate to send an email or leave a comment here if you have any questions/comments.

Thanks, and see you in the Spring!

http://cid-a6f46d05d7a0a5a7.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Connections

Real World “Agile” Development

Those who know me know that I’ve been pushing for Agile development within my company for some time now. I’ve also been touting the Agile word in relation to database development at various conferences and user group meetings for several years. (I think my first Agile Database Development talk was at PASS in 2004)

Over the years I’ve been pretty successful at bringing Agile into our development model here at Configuresoft and have spent a fair amount of time working with various teams at Microsoft providing feedback and such around tooling and process. As part of this ongoing process, I’ve come to learn a couple of what I think are interesting facts:

1. Agile is as much of a mindset as it is a process
2. The very nature of Agile is adaptation

If you look at the Agile Manifesto (from www.agilemanifesto.org ) and really read what they are saying, you can see that they “Get It” when it comes to the 2 items above. It’s interesting to me though that there are what I will term, “Agile Purists”. These developers seem to glom onto a specific part of Agile and really drive it hard, sometimes to the extreme (No pun intended) and really miss the balance that Agile methodologies try to bring to the table. For example, I’ve worked with Agile Purists who feel that anytime a requirement is written down it’s a violation of Agile. I’ve also worked with Agile Purists who believe that Test Driven Development (TDD) is the only way to write software.

I think when you get right down to it, the true test of any Agile development plan is how well the finished product serves the needs of the customer. To get to this point though, you have to allow yourself to make mistakes and have to learn and adapt from those mistakes.

(Just some random thoughts for the day)

PDC Lunch Panel: The Future of Unit Testing

During the PDC Conference this year I was part of a lunch panel that discussed the future of Unit Testing. I’ll blog more about this later, as some interesting stuff came out of the panel, but for now, I thought I’d share the video of the session. The session is available on Channel9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL61/ (I am not in the video frame until about 17 minutes in)

PDC 2008 Visual Studio 2010 Chalk Talks

If you are here at PDC, check out the various Chalk Talks in the “Big Room” pavilion hall, near the Visual Studio booth:

Tuesday 28 October

12:30 – 1:30pm C# and LINQ Futures with Charlie Calvert

2:00 - 3:00pm – Visual Studio Tips and Tricks with Lisa Feigenbaum, Beth Massi and Sara Ford

3:30 – 4:30pm – Debugging, Profiling and Diagnostics Q&A

Wednesday 29 October

12:00 – 1:00pm – Database Development with Gert Drapers (Sorry I will miss this one, but will be doing my session during this timeslot!)

1:00 – 2:00pm – Brian Harry Unplugged (Team Foundation Server)

Thursday 30 October

11:00am – 12:00pm – Architecture tools Q&A with Mark Groves, Cameron Skinner and Peter Provost

1:00 – 2:00pm – New Test features with Euan Garden and Ed Glas

PDC 2008 – TL61 “The Future of Unit Testing”

If you are here at PDC 2008, stop by room 406A on Wednesday, 29 October during the lunch sessions, which run from Noon until 12:45. I will be part of a panel that includes a few Visual Studio Team System “Champions” leading a discussion on the future of Unit Testing. I of course will be taking the “Test Driven Development" for Database Developers” angle, and will be talking about why I believe database developers now have the necessary tools to move into the mainstream agile world. We will discuss tooling around pure database development and deployment, as well as some Business Intelligence challenges in this arena as well.

If you are here, I hope you can make it by. This should be an interesting session.

SQL Server Data Services Hands on Labs at PDC

If you are here at PDC 2008, stop by the Red Pod in the “Big Room” to see the Hands On Labs (HOLs) for the SQL Server Data Services stuff that was announced during the keynote this morning. You will not be disappointed!! These labs are very well done.

SSWUG Virtual Conference Discount Code

The SSWUG “Ultimate” Virtual Conference is coming up soon! The conference is November 5-7, and features a ton of good information around SQL Server, Business Intelligence, SharePoint and .NET Development.

The cost for these conferences is only $100 per track, but if you use discount code VCTAF457840-140 during the registration process, that will give you 10% off, making it $90 per track! This is a great deal, you will not get this much information for this little cost anywhere else!

Here is an example 10 minute clip from one of my presentations: http://www.vconferenceonline.com/speaker.asp?id=TMalone-BI

Hope to see you there!