Thursday 09 November, 2006 (SharePoint | TechEd 2006 | Team System | Scrum | FlexWiki)
I have been working with Visual Studio Team System since the public Beta came out so the possibility of customizing, reconfiguring and extending Team System was not new for me. Unfortunately I am slightly disappointed with the content of this White Board Discussion since I have been looking forward to hearing how others are implementing Team System, I was expecting more information and tips on actually getting management buy-in and best practices for process adoption. We are in the middle of rolling out Team System for our Microsoft development projects so I know that the real value of Team System can only really be realized when you customize your setup. But at the same time it was good to hear that the work that we are doing thinking about how to customize Team System and our Team Foundation Server setup is what others also are thinking about.
Right now the state of our setup is the following:
- Team Foundation Server setup with SSL over multiple dns names. This was no trivial task since there was no official documentation for setting up TFS with SSL when we did this. Now there is a step-by-step guide on MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms242875.aspx. Additionaly you need to “hack” your IIS and TFS configuration if you want it to work. Perhaps I will get back to this in a future post.
- ScrumForTeamSystem (http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/). Since we have a couple of projects that use Scrum it made sense to have a process template that supports Scrum.
- TeamPlain Web Access (http://www.teamplain.com/). We are still evaluating this and although it works quite well, I am not sure that it is right for our use.
- FlexWiki (http://www.flexwiki.com/). I have come to love Wikis for simplifying and reducing the friction to start writing documentation of our systems. We have integrated FlexWiki into our SharePoint portal sites by simply adding a Page Viewer WebPart with a large height.
- SharePoint hotfix 915746 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915746). Without this hotfix you cannot add new Web Parts to you portal sites.
New features that we are looking at implementing:
- Custom Process Templates and work items. We have a project on our Team Foundation Server for Team Foundation Server customization (almost a meta project).
- Implementing some ideas from Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/). Mainly a changelog WebPart for aggregating a change history for our WorkItems, source code, portal documents, Wiki pages. This could probably be implemented as an RSS aggregator.
- One-stop dashboard in Sharepoint for a quick overview of the state of everything in our project.
- RSS feed for changes to make it easier for developers to participate in different parallel projects.
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
Wednesday 08 November, 2006 (.Net | TechEd 2006 | SOA)
I can only say wow! Ron Jacobs is a brilliant speaker, entertaining and very informed, an expert to say the least. A couple of his insights into SOA and what he things works and doesn’t work for SOA were real eye openers for me. Not because I didn’t understand the principles behind SOA or the problems with implementing SOA but because I do understand SOA and I realise it isn’t just about choosing the right technology and then claiming that we are service-oriented!
I will try and compress some of what he said in a short list, mainly to remind myself of this from time to time:
- Don’t loosely couple everywhere: tightly coupled components and services have a place in our architecture too they just aren’t service-oriented in the SOA sense.
- Rely on explicit behavior over implicit behavior: a service will do what the contract says it will. Just because it happens do something more right now (like ordering the returned data) doesn’t mean you should create a dependency on this implicit behavior.
- Business Processes are a good starting point for identifying your services: is this performed as multiple business processes then it is probably multiple services.
- Everything changes when we cross an external boundary: just like everything changes when we cross an international border in real life. Languages change, laws change, the weather, everything. But we should strive to make crossing the external boundaries as friction-free as possible.
- Think about services like paper-based business processes: what does the paper form like look? That’s our message. Who do we send it to? That’s our service. What do we expect them to do with it? That’s our contract and policy.
Start with the business process:
- Decide on a process
- Decompose the process
- Create the contract
a. Define the messages – messages define what we can do
b. Define the operations – operations move the process from one state to another
If anyone who reads this has the opportunity to see Ron speak on this topic then don’t miss it. Here at Tech-Ed he will be holding the same session again on Friday.
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
Wednesday 08 November, 2006 (.Net | SharePoint | TechEd 2006)
WSS3 seems like a great upgrade from version 2. The whole programming model is becoming more in line with other programming models that Microsoft have. You can create custom event handlers for WSS3 relatively easily linking directly to the SP API to create new lists or manipulate existing data, customing metadata and list behavior seems really simple too. One addition that I haven’t seen demoed but that is possible now is creating WebParts and custom features for a single site without having to deploy your assembly to the GAC.
The parts of WSS3 that I have seen so far look like they are going to make life a lot easier for anyone who wants to create non-trivial SharePoint solutions. In addition to what we can all there are a whole bunch of extra functionality already included with WSS3 like Blog and Wiki templates, which actually look like they could work. Although I think that the contrived examples that I saw Chris Bryant and Todd Bleeker demo could potentially put people off Wikis and Blogs altogether, anyone who has used these technologies in other situations will immediately see the potential in integrating this into SharePoint. Many of the customizations that I have been discussing with my colleagues for us to implement in our Team Foundation Server WSS would be a lot easier to implement with WSS3, unfortunately I have not seen an upgrade path from WSS2 to WSS3 for Team Foundation Server yet.
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
Tuesday 07 November, 2006 (.Net | Ramblings | SharePoint | TechEd 2006)
My first day at TechEd is over, it actually feels like two days now that I think about it which is kinda weird.
I managed to sneak into the Super Early Bird priority seating for the Keynote, well I really didn't do much sneaking I just walked over and sat down but still... I am always amazed by the way Microsoft tries to sell their products to developers who are already convinced that Microsoft is the way to go. There was a lot of Vista and Sharepoint 2007 in the Keynote, nothing bad in that but the way the tools were demoed is just silly.
Speaker - "Look how easy it is to create a People-Near-Me function in a Windows Presentation Foundation application!" Click, Click, typing (inserts a 200 line snippet)
Speaker - "Now I just start my application again and all the functionality is embedded in my application, all we needed to do was enable the functionality."
Of course you only have to insert and enable functionality that you have a prewritten snippet for! I'm guessing it's a completely different story if you need to write all the code from scratch... I doubt that there is a 500 line InsertCustomBusinessLogic snippet included with Sharepoint 2007 or .Net 3.
Other than that I have enjoyed my first day, I especially enjoyed the last session with Todd Bleeker on Custom Sharepoint sites and features. Although the pace he went through the material at pretty much knocked me out but thats the way it's supposed to be at TechEd. I can read sales presentations at home, while I am here I wan't to see hardcore developer action!
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
Monday 06 November, 2006 (Ramblings | TechEd 2006)
Arrived in Barcelona today for Tech Ed 2006, I am going to try to write down some of my experiences here over the next couple of days.
On the flight down I realized that Tech Ed is so much more that what I have realized. There are the normal technical sessions, sponsor exhibition (probably full of all sorts of freebies and trials), an XBOX360 corner (I hope), donut buffet (confirmed) but there are also 20 or so hands on labs where you can get your hands dirty trying out some of the stuff. I am not sure how the labs are setup, I am presuming they are some kind of Virtual PC setup with code samples that you can run through but we’ll see. The labs seem to be open till late every day so hopefully I’ll get to try some of them while I’m here.
Technorati tags: TechEd-Developers
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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
my employer's view in any way.
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