My First Blog Post!
Sorry for the lame title to this entry, but that seems to be standard operating procedure for new blogs. Anyway, welcome, and allow me to introduce myself:
Who I Am
My name is Mike Wade, and I have been a Microsoft employee for over 6 years. I received my bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, and then my Masters from the University of Wisconsin. Whilst at UW, I taught a couple of introductory programming courses, where the language of choice was Java.
I have been married for 2 years to my lovely wife Susan, and together we have a beautiful 9 month old son, named Rooney.
I don't have one of those new-fangled web cameras, or whatever the kids are calling them nowadays. But I have attached a picture that I drew up of myself. It is disappointingly accurate.
Who I Work For
I am a developer with the Deployment team. We are the team that enables the generation of installers for applications built by Visual Studio.
The Deployment team is contained within the VB product organization. Why? Other product units like to make things complicated and powerful, whereas VB likes to keep things simple and effective. And this is the model we want for our installers.
So, what exactly does the Deployment team do? We own (most) Setup and Deployment projects, as well as (ClickOnce) Publishing behavior from managed project types (VB, C#, and I think one other). Used by both of these is the Generic Bootstrapper, which works to make sure that all of prerequisites of your application will be installed on your customer's computer prior to running your application.
The Deployment team does not own: Visual Studio Install; The .NET Framework installer (dotnetfx.exe); smart Device Cab projects; ClickOnce install engine.
Why I have a Blog
There are a couple of new technologies and practices that I find interesting and want to tie back to deployment. Foremost amongst these are MSBuild, Extreme Programming, and Test driven Development. I plan to use this blog to chronicle my experiences working with these things. I won't be doing anything earth shattering, and in fact will probably be doing things several of you have done before. Which is why this blog is titled as it is.
