...and says there's "a new PAG" (patterns & practices) group. It's quite strange - nothing is new but I can't contradict him. I guess we are good at reinventing ourselves as a team...

  • Year 1 we did infrastructure – configure your switch and firewall and storage and stuff like that in what is now MSA
  • Year 2 I started .NET guidance with some books and articles and started working on the app blocks DAAB 1.0, anyone?
  • Year 3 Saw the next big wave of app blocks DAAB, UIP, CMAB, Updater, etc – and things like Shadowfax.. it was a year full of hard work getting the group's charter solidified in the company
  • Year 4 was about integration, growth and enabling others more – the patternshare wiki, enterprise library, GAT tooling...
  • Year 5 is about consolidating tools & frameworks around scenarios and exploring p&p as rapid customer-centric engineering capability for MS, and becoming a hub of patterns and Agile goodness
  • What will year 6 be? what do you think? Models? WinFX? New scenarios? Working with community differently? Content as a service and VS.NET as the client?

For more of a candid perspective on the history and philosophy of patterns & practices you can see patterns & practices Inside Out on Channel9 .. although very few people care about this article, I'm glad we wrote it. It gives me a link to point to in introspective blog posts like these.