Announced yesterday at Tech Ed was a set of new capabilities for Visual Studio that will address the area of team productivity. Running large projects is a complicated task. I’ve typically assigned roles to people on the dev team such as ‘build owner’, ‘source control owner’ etc. as well as set aside 2+ weeks at the start of development to get the environment setup, machines configured etc., build scripts written etc. Depending on the size of the project the ‘owners’ can be part time developers. But there is always some overhead associated with these activities. Whatever approach you take, clearly the area could do with better tool support. So it’s great to finally see this announcement.
Specifically the area that is likely to interest Architects and designers is the Distributed System Designer . I’ve shown the preview slides of this to people over the past few months as they’ve been available since the PDC last year. I’ve heard some people say they’d rather the link between the visual components and the underlying code was one-way rather than round-tripped or synched, or maybe make this configurable. I don’t agree given the context of MDA. What do you think?
Had some great conversation about the research behind this paper “Three Unexpected results in Open-Source Software Engineering” (Power Point only).
I know it’s been discussed in plenty of other forums such as here and here.
I tend to agree that item 2 is the most interesting. I see a link between this and the area of development team organisation I spoke about above. Large distributed dev teams require massive co-ordination in order to ensure the end product is well designed, reliable, maintainable etc. There must be some point at which it becomes uneconomic, with the overhead costs outweighing the benefits. Similarly this research suggests that the cost of the Open Source model is being paid for by the resultant code approaching a point where it won’t be maintainable.
Richard Stallman spoke in Dublin last night on the area of software patents. The session was packed and very well received. At the end some candidates for the European Parliament spoke. Two of them stated, in a matter of fact sort of way, that Microsoft was sponsoring the Irish Presidency of the EU. I can see the confusion possible on the official site but if you read the text you can see it’s not true.
The largest ever number of people from Ireland has registered for TechEd Europe with 50 of us going. If you haven’t heard, there is a dedicated Architects track this year. The discounted registration ends this Friday (28th May) so if you are considering going sign up before the end of the week. I’ll post details of a get together of Irish attendees during the conference soon.
Bill
