ajoyk - patterns and practices, VSTS, Process

patterns & practices GAT/GAX and Software Factories for VS 2010

With Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 out, I have seen increase in number of emails I get about GAT/GAX and Software Factories. Don just posted this blog with an update on our plan. Please post a comment to that blog posting or send Don an email.

Excerpt from the blog post:

“Since everything else is dependent on GAX, getting it to a stable state on VS2010 is the first order of business. We hope to have early drops by the end of the calendar year so we can all start bringing forward the multitude of goods. I’m not yet sure where we’re going to post these drops of GAX, but stay tuned here and I’ll let you know when we figure it out. The early drops of the factories will be on their respective CodePlex sites.”

Thanks

My trip to Ukraine and Russia

I had the fortune of travelling to Ukraine and Russia accompanied by my colleagues Don Smith and Grigori Melnik. The two weeks trip was primarily for the p&p event at Kyiv, Ukraine and Moscow, Russia. Our itinerary also included several customer meetings and press interviews. This is one of the best trips I have been on in the recent times and suspect it will remain that for a while. Obviously many thanks go to the phenomenal hosts at Ukraine and Russia. Couple that with a great event we had, that is a recipe for one funtabulous trip :)

Ukraine:

We arrived in Ukraine on the 15th afternoon. The weather was surprisingly sunny and warm for the most part. We had a chance to walk around the city a little bit to fight off jet lag. One of the first things we saw within few yards from our hotel is the golden gate. After spending couple of hours walking around the city and a quick drink/bite at a pub, I resigned to the hotel to get some sleep before the big event the next day.

Event:

The event had gotten a tremendous response from the developers/architect community in Ukraine and Belarus. The event was sold out with a long waiting list. 

Event Venue: Microsoft Ukraine team had rented out a beautiful theater to host this event. With its fantastic architecture,  gorgeous interiors and auditorium style seating, it was already a great start to the event.

Here is the link to the agenda and you will also find the links to recording of the sessions from this event. I had the first session of the day and the first question from the attendees came 10 minutes into my session. And that was a start to a very interactive day. We were very pleasantly surprised by the amount of interaction we had during the event. Scores from the event indicate that it was useful for the attendees as well.

Kudos and big thanks to all the attendees.

The next two days, we spent our time doing several press interviews (link to a press coverage) and customer meetings. Most of these were held in the Microsoft Ukraine office.

Sightseeing:

On Saturday, our great host Viktor took us on a tour of Kyiv on foot. We walked for about 4.5 hours around the different landmarks and historical sites in Kyiv. Big thanks to Viktor for planning the day and spending the time with us.

It was great to have a local giving us a tour of the city. We thoroughly enjoyed it. Our itinerary included the friendship arch, love lock bridge, dynamo stadium, presidential complex, street market and many cathedrals. Amazing tour.

The day was capped off with a night out at an Irish bar. Viktor (again!) did a fantastic job of inviting local Microsoft team members, MVPs to join us as we complete our Ukraine visit. Viktor got us an autographed CD of the band that was playing that night at the bar (very nice band BTW). What a blast that night out was. A great way to say good bye to Kyiv.

After only couple of hours of sleep, we were on our flight to Moscow.

Russia:

We arrived in Moscow on Sunday. It was a bit cooler in Moscow than it was in Kyiv and occasional rain showers. Our hotel was built prior to the Moscow Olympics and hence was next door to the Olympic stadium and the pool.

Event:

Event in Moscow was sold out with over 100 on waiting list. We are thrilled by the reception the p&p event has received. The event was held at Microsoft Moscow office. We had synchronous translation arranged and that took some getting used to. Hats off to the two translators that did a brilliant job throughout the day. Attendee interaction during the sessions were light but we were mobbed by attendees after every session with questions. And such was the case during the evening social event. Feedback from this event is phenomenal and needless to say we are pleased by that outcome.

Big shout out goes to the Microsoft Russia team, Career Lab team and everyone else involved in putting such a great event together.

We spent two days doing press interviews and customer meetings. It was interesting that in one day we spoke to three  journalists from three different magazines targeting project managers/technical decision makers, developers and IT specialist/Hardware enthusiasts. Talk about diversity. It was a very educational experience.

Sightseeing:

On the day we arrived in Moscow, we went to Kremlin and the Red Square with an English speaking guide. She was overwhelming us with so many facts. The armory chamber museum has tons of artifacts and there are stories behind every one of them. It felt like I took a post graduate course on history with the amount of facts we were gathering during that visit.

Kremlin was interesting with the government buildings and gorgeous churches all nestled together. (See pictures below)

Red Square was breathtaking. We went back to Red Square a couple more times. St. Basils Cathedral is by far my most favorite. I can keep staring at this building for hours together. It is just simply outstanding. (the one on the right below)

We made it a point to take the subway trains a few times during the trip. Guess what. Some of these subway stations are museums by themselves. Simply outstanding. And you don’t want to get stuck in one of these stations when the escalators are not working (see the picture on the left below).

We took a cruise on the Moscow river with the stunning view of the city from the river. One thing I missed to visit (but really wanted to) is the Lenin’s Tomb at the Red Square. May be next time.

Food: I am a vegetarian so a little trying and communicating the fact that I am looking for vegetarian dishes got me more than enough to eat. Usually the menu had one or two vegetarian dishes. My favorite dish is the “Vareniki”, kind of like a dumpling filled with potatoes or cabbages and a sprinkle of fried onion on top. Yummy. I really wanted to try  “borshch”, it looked and smelled good. But unfortunately didn’t find a vegetarian version of it. And then, there is vodka. Of course. In one of the souvenir stores, they greeted us with a shot (tiny qty) of Vodka :). I also got to try the horse radish vodka and cranberry vodka. Nice!

Next Year:

There is already discussion underway for next year’s p&p event at Ukraine and Russia and I am starting to countdown already! :)

Thanks to everyone (Microsoft teams at Ukraine and Russia, partners, event organizers, press and attendees and of course, the great company of Don and Grigori) for making this such a memorable experience.

See you all next year!

Building WPF and Silverlight Applications with a Single Code Base Using Prism - MSDN Magazine Article

Erwin from patterns & practices team wrote an article for MSDN Magazine on "Building WPF and Silverlight applications using Prism". Check it out here.

Related links:
p&p Prism: http://www.microsoft.com/prism
p&p Satisfaction Survey: http://tinyurl.com/pnpsurvey

Happy Reading!

Survey says…

Not yet. We need your input first. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey and let us know which p&p assets you use/ or used and how satisfied you are with p&p assets and of course, overall with p&p.

Thanks for taking the time to complete the survey.

Survey Link: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229HEVSWBED

Guidance for the Web from p&p

I am writing this blog post from India.  I am in Chennai on vacation and having a great time connecting with family and friends. It is a hot and humid and that is to be expected. What is not to be expected though is the traffic pattern here in Chennai. It  is important to watch for what the car and bike next to you and ahead of you is going to do next. It is fun and good times.

On the work front, p&p is gearing up to create next set of guidance for web applications. Before we get going on this, true to p&p spirits, we would like to gather feedback from you on what are the important areas to focus with this guidance effort. Your input is very important to the project’s success. Blaine just posted a survey to capture your input.

Please take a moment to complete this survey. Feel free to forward the survey link to your colleagues and friends.

We appreciate your help,

Become a Fan of p&p summit!

Become a fan of p&p summit on Facebook by clicking here. We have a fan drive going on right now to get 250 fans by June 30th. If we hit that number, one lucky fan will get a free pass to the p&p summit. Act fast and become a fan. Accessories for your blog You can help us by blogging and tweeting about the summit. We have created some images (i.e. blog buttons) that you could use in your blog. Here is a sample below. You can check out the rest of the images at our facebook page here. p&p summit on Facebook/Digg/Twitter Facebook: Stay tuned to updates on p&p summit by becoming a fan of p&p summit in Facebook. Click here to become a fan. Digg It: Show you support, by digging the p&p summit announcement here. Twitter: In your tweets about p&p summit, please add the tag “#pnpsummit”. Thanks and see you at the summit, patterns & practices Summit 2009 Team http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices

I am a PC and have Windows 7 RC installed

I got my primary machine loaded with Windows 7 RC this past Friday. Had an issue with multiple monitor but a video driver upgrade took care of it. I am liking it so far.

If you want to give it a try, here is the link to download Win7 RC bits:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Happy downloading!

p&p Column in MSDN Magazine

I am sure many of you are regular readers of MSDN Magazine. We are happy to announce the launch of a new "patterns & practices" column starting with the May 2009 issue.

Alex Homer from the p&p team authors the first installment : You Can Depend On Patterns and Practices

If you have topic suggestions for this column, please post them in the comment section of this blog,

Happy Reading!

What’s in p&p SharePoint Guidance v2?

patterns & practices released SharePoint development guidance v1 back in November of last year. Check out this video for a brief overview and the patterns used.

As you may know, we are working on the next version of the guidance which will cover:

Enterprise Quality

• Tested and well understood scale characteristics
• Performance tuned application utilizing techniques to achieve high throughput and scale
• Manageable - configurable with instrumentation and diagnostics

Content Driven Applications

• An application that mixes authoring and development
• Composite oriented with more loosely coupled application logic
• Employees content authoring and WCM(including publishing)

Extending LOB Systems

• Securely integrates LOB system information with collaboration and publishing scenarios
• Demonstrates techniques for managing connectivity to LOB systems (BDC, credential management and SSO, WCF,etc)

Check out the CodePlex project site for more information.

We run two week iterations and release the source code and guidance from each of these iterations into our CodePlex project site. We are planning to do a video with every drop that will guide you through the content.

We are very interested in your feedback on the guidance. So please let us know what you like and what you don't. Of course, you could tell us if you liked the video or not as well.
Watch our Channel 9 blog for the video based on our Drop 6 and Drop 7.

What’s in Drop 7?

What’s in Drop 6?

Please subscribe to this RSS feed if you don't want to miss a beat.

Happy Watching!

I voted. Have you?

Influence the features that makes it into the next version of Enterprise Library  v5.0. Grigori Melnik has posted the tentative product backlog with the initial estimates for your feedback.

 

Take this survey and tell us what you would like to see included in Enterprise Library v5.0.

Happy Voting!

VB Quick Starts and How-Tos for Prism v2.0

As promised, we are delighted to release quickstarts, How-Tos and HOLs in Visual Basic for Prism v2.0.

You can download it from here.

What is in this download?

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications. It will help you design and build enterprise-level composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.
This download includes QuickStarts, the Composite Application Library (only provided in C#), and documentation. This download is provided to help the Visual Basic developer use the Composite Application Library. The documentation includes:

• Visual Basic Content for Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009.chm: The QuickStarts, Hands-On Labs, and How-to Topics in Visual Basic.
• Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009.chm: Complete documentation in C#.
• Composite Application Library Reference February 2009.chm: Library reference API.

If you have VS configured to “VB Development settings”, you probably already saw this in the headline.

Happy coding!

2 more reasons to attend p&p summit…

Brian Harry and Douglas Purdy

That’s right. Brian and Doug are now joining the p&p summit as keynoters. Here is the complete line up of keynote speakers:

Martin Fowler, Scott Guthrie, Brian Harry, David Campbell, Wolfram Schulte, & Douglas Purdy

As I mentioned in my last post, registration for the summit is now open.

patterns & practices Summit 2009 is now open for registration.

p&p Summit 2009 will be held in Microsoft Conference Center, Redmond, Washington between Oct 12th and 16th 2009. Mark your calendars and register now to take advantage of the early bird price.

Keynote presentations by:
Martin Fowler, Scott Guthrie, David Campbell, & Wolfram Schulte

Here is the session schedule from the last year’s conference. What topics do you like to see covered in this year’s conference? Post topic suggestions in the blog comments.

See you in October!

p&p Software Factories, GAT/GAX and Visual Studio 2010

My p&p colleague Don Smith posted a blog with our high level plans for Software Factories and GAT/GAX for Visual Studion 2010. Check it out here. The key message here is that we at p&p are committed to refreshing the software factories and GAT/GAX for Visual Studio 2010. As Don says in his post, help us understand the most important scenarios for you. Post a comment to this blog or Don's or send me an email at ajoydotkrishnamoorthyatmicrosoftdotcom.

Guidance for building WPF and Silverlight Applications

Happy building WPF and Silverlight applications!