New Books on Team System

I picked up some books on Team System. Trying to catch up on Microsoft's Offering. Really looking at what it offers versus the Opensource Tools we used at Micron. These are the ones I picked up.

1. Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials: Building Successful Technology Solutions. I am curious about MSF vs. RUP or the IEEE standard.
2. Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System. Had to pick up the final version of this since Richard wrote it.
3. Software Engineering With Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
4. Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Richard recommended this one and Martin wrote it. How can I go wrong :-).

I will do some studying on these after I finish the MSDN presentation on Oct 4th and while I am working on my Certs

Some recommendations on Linked In

Really good people I Have recommended on linked in. If you ever get a chance to work with them, you will not regret it.

1. Matt Johnson: I met Matt my first day on the Job at Micron. We began discussing the new features of VB 5 for creating objects. Neither one of us was really that sure what they were and why we wanted to start using them, but we tore into the design and analysis with a vengeance. From that first day I realized what a gifted individual Matt was for designing computer systems and applications. Over the next 10 years he proved that time and again. I have always felt he was one of the best mentors and team mates I have every had the privilege of working with.
2. Bob Rampy: Bob was my immediate boss at Bull. We met during a benchmark in Phoenix in 1991. He suggested if I ever wanted to leave DC and come to Phoenix to work with his team I would not regret it. I took him up on it and joined his team in Phoenix in 1992 and I never regretted it. I had never worked for a big computer vendor before and certainly not with customers directly. Bob taught me a tremendous amount about working with people and respecting them for what their abilities and strengths are. I would like to think everything I learned about team work and mentoring people I learned from Bob. He is a truly exceptional individual.
3. Alan Pearson: When I first met Alan he was team lead for one of the central teams at Micron. He later transitioned to become a project manager. As a project manager, Alan showed his communication and organizational skills were exceptional. I have seen several developers and leads transition to become project managers. Most of them failed miserably. Alan proved that it could be done and done well. His attention to detail and communication skills made him one of the best project managers at Micron to work with. I would definitely work with Alan again and would enjoy being on any project where he was the project manager.

Times, they are a changing.

My friend Dan Cambron has left Micron to take on a job at HP. Sounds like a really cool job doing emulation of HP Printers. My other buddy Andrew Hanson has just taken off too, Both guys are very good senior architect types. I wish them well in thier new positions.

I am definitely going to try to stay in touch but it gets harder when you get busy. I was shocked to see it had been over 10 years since I last talked to Grady. If nothing else leaving Micron has caused me to look up some of my old friends and make me want to stay connected with my current crowd.

Now if I could just figure out where Tom Klotz went to. I guess I will have to go to the opening of the Tiki bar at Pax River and see if I can find him...

WCF Book

I picked up a new book on Windows Communication Foundation Friday. i wanted some extra material for my talk. I am thinking about putting together some examples and putting the project up on either codeplex or google projects.

CodePlex would be cool because it is a Team Foundation Server. Google would be cool because it is subversion and easier to deal with for those who do not have the Client stuff for TFS.

I will have to think about it...

NETDUG Meeting and Software Patterns

I attended the NETDUG Meeting on Thurs. Sept. 20th. It is always a good meeting. I went to this one specifically to pick up my presentation materials for the MSDN event on Oct. 4th. In addition they had a INETA speaker there and I wanted to hear what he had to say about MVP patterns and ASP.NET.

The talk was titled Separation of Code and UI with MVP, by Scott Cate. Scott is a very dynamic speaker and I enjoyed some of the talk but once he really got into the discussion of Model Viewer Presenter I got bored and left to talk to the Microsoft reps. My problem with MVP is I learned it as MVC in my smalltalk days. Now most material on MVC/P is old hat. I agree with Scott however, you have to keep talking about it. Some developers never learned it.

I find myself going back to the tools more and more. Good tools support good practices and promote use of patterns. Poor tools do not. Fowler has always had some good discussion of patterns and some good documentation but it is hard to visualize software patterns until you get a good clean code example. This goes against what most pattern authors are trying to achieve since it brings implementation issues into what is purely a architecture discussion.

I believe in some case it makes it clearer. I will post a few patterns and their implementations that I have found helpful over the next few months.

Windows Live Writer

I have switched away from the blogger interface and am using windows live writer to write my blogs entries now, Very nice.

One thing that does bug me though, none of the windows live betas will run on my 64 bit Vista box. What's up with that?

Incredible People

In my 25 years in the software industry I have met a lot of really sharp people and some not so sharp :-). So since I have been layed off from Micron and focused on getting my health straight I have been using LinkedIn to try to get back in touch with the people I have known. That brings me to thinking about the really stellar ones on the list. Some of these are:

• Joe de Witt at Micron. Joe is a Incredibly sharp architect and business man. He has that rare ability to find the technically correct answer that is also the best solution for the business. He is also one of the most socially conscious men I know. He has a passion for doing what is right. Joe can teach you how to be a better person by example alone.
• Grady Bryant at VeriSign. Without a doubt one of the smartest people I have ever met. I have watched Grady rewrite entire TCP/IP stacks in weeks while keeping his cool around a screaming client. If you have ever had the privilege of working with him you know what I mean. No surprise that he is the VP of R&D at VeriSign.
• Dan Cambron. Dan taught me more about Object Oriented programming in two years then anyone else I have known. I must admit I thought I knew what I was doing. He showed me I still had a lot to learn and then proceeded to be one of the best mentors I have ever had. Truly a exceptional software engineer and architect..
• Herb LaFond. Herb is beyond a doubt one of those rare individuals who is a born leader. He balances a strong technical skill set with a incredible set of people skills. He is one of the best project managers I have ever seen, He taught me more about how a good process can improve software quality in two years then I have learned in the last 25. Anyone of his team members will tell you the same.
• Doug Lawson. I first met Doug when he came to Micron to talk about some of the products his company has sold us. In too many meetings with vendors you will meet a technical guy that just does not have the depth you need. That is not the case with Doug. I have talked with about everything from Development Processes to BTB to network protocols for PLC's. It got so bad that the sales guy for the account started limiting our discussions so they could actually cover the business that brought them to town. Doug is truly an exceptional individual that I am proud to know.

This is just a small list of the exceptional individuals I have met professionally. In my 47 years I have also had a list of friends (which all of these definitely count as) that have been just as great Susan LaFond, Robin Callahan, Deb Lafond, John and Helene Myers, Kim and Kevin Labrum, Jerome Pioux, Tim Blaylock, Colin Robertson and others to numerous to mention.

Sometimes you just have to be amazed at how great your life can be.

Windows Communication Foundation

I will be doing some studying and blogging on WCF over the next few weeks in addition to working on my MCPD. Should make for interesting times.

My Google Library

One of the things I like about gmail is it's mini rss feed across the top. I find a lot of useful links there almost constantly, One that scrolled by today was a link to the official google blog for google library.

Now anyone who knows me knows I have an extensive book collection. One of the problems I have always had is cataloging all of them. I have come up with various things through the years but none that I have been very happy with. The Google Library provides some interesting possibilities.

For example I just picked up these three books today

• Deploying .net Applications With Msbuild And Clickonce
• MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536)
• NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-solution Approach

And I was able to turn them around and Catalog them right away.

However all is not glory and some of my books are not in there, although you can get close. For example I am old so I actually have a copy of the System V Interface Definition, issue 2 published in 1986. The ISBN on it is not unique (isn't that the whole point of an ISBN?) However Google only knows about the volume published in 1991. So I have added a couple of labels to let me know that the edition I have is actually the 1986 addition. Not perfect, but workable.

The Same trick can work for my Easton Press Books. Although not perfect, it gives an interesting way to tackle some of my cataloging needs. Now the question is that better then writing an application to use the amazon web services?

Either way, here is a link to my google library