So I'm back from India.  It was hot.  It was crowded. It was chaotic.  But it was fascinating to see how quickly the technology industries are transforming the country.  I met a lot of great people and I learned a lot about software practices, distributed development and even how to keep score in Cricket.

And now, as promised, I'm pleased to announce that we have the first preview of MSF Agile available.  As I said in a previous post, MSF Agile is one of our new methodologies.  These methodologies will be baked directly into the tool.  By selecting one, you will change the way the source control, work item tracking, reporting, and many other tool features work.  Of course, they are extensible and replaceable if you want to do something different.

Randy Miller, the principle designer of MSF Agile, is letting me crib his description:

Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) Agile is a scenario-driven, context-based, agile software development process for building and improving .NET and other object-oriented applications. MSF Agile directly incorporates practices for handling quality of service requirements such as performance and security. It is also context-based and uses a context-driven approach to determine how to operate the project. This approach helps create an adaptive process that overcomes the boundary conditions (such as project size and system criticality) of most agile software development processes while achieving the objectives set out in the vision of the project.

MSF Agile is highly customizable, scalable, and will be fully integrated with Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The tooling and processes will work together to provide a more productive user experience than the process or tooling could provide alone. This is because both tooling and processes are built using the same meta-model. In other words, MSF harvests proven guidance from inside and outside of Microsoft and provides a seamless experience with Visual Studio 2005 Team System for process automation and guidance within the software development life cycle.

And now (ta-da!) you can go get the zip file and look at what we have so far yourself.  Go to http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/directory.aspx and search for "msf". (Update: try http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/msfv4 - it should be publically available now). It's a zip file containing a collection of web pages.  Unzip into a convenient directory and start browsing around.  It's not quite complete yet and there will definitely be more changes as we go. 

I look forward to hearing from you.  The workspace provides a discussion area, or you can post your comments here.