One of my favorite parts of this sample is a ASP.NET Membership implementation using SimpleDB as the backend.  Yes, simple concept/idea, but just pretty cool.

Grab the bits at: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=3592

Enjoy!

Since I spent quite a bit of time on this on this week, hope this saves you some time:
If you’re capturing IntelliTrace data from Microsoft Test Manager on IIS, make sure to run Microsoft Test Manager as Administrator.  MTM needs to be admin to reset IIS in order to capture data from IIS.  If you do not run MTM as Administrator, MTM will not provide an error and will not add the iTrace file to the test run.

Happy Friday!

After watching (http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html) Daniel Kahneman, I couldn’t help and wonder about how experience and memory impacts my world of Project Management and Business.

To summarize the talk (which I highly recommend you watch), we have two independent perspectives, the now (experience) and the past (memory), which we use as a measure for a series of feelings.  In other words, we feel stuff as a result of both: what is happening now and what happened in the past.  What complicates things is that we quickly forget what happened a few minutes ago and are left with the memory which is a subset of the actual event.

It may seem at first like this is splitting hairs, but when I started to think about this from the perspective of teams working together I saw a conflict that arises in business and projects.  Goals in projects are often written in the form of “when we’re done with this project we have (insert result here).”  These types of goals are written from the ‘memory’ perspective and are results or event oriented.  For example, the goal ‘Acquire 3 new customers this month’ says nothing about day 14 of the month and what needs to be done that day to succeed per the defined goal.  As Mike Cohn writes (http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/advantages-of-the-as-a-user-i-want-user-story-template) a user story in Agile Software Development is often in the form of “As a <type of user>, I want to <some goal> so that <some reason>”.  Both these models are great, they just don’t consider the experience perspective of getting to the result.

On the other hand, the experience perspective is very relevant to the person accomplishing the goal.  It’s what makes every day ‘fun’ and has a huge impact on how we spend our time.  I’m a huge believer that if something isn’t fun (or at least worth the effort), it’s probably not sustainable.

Kahneman doesn’t make any assertions as to the right amount of experience or memory.  He merely states that we should consider both.  In software projects, if we omit either of these perspectives we’re doomed.  If we’re not satisfying the business objectives or memory perspective, we lose the funding and the reason to solve interesting problems.  If we’re not satisfying the experience perspective, we lose the great people that are working on the project who care about interesting problems.

Agile solves this challenge by, on the memory side, defining user stories, and on the experience side, providing the time in a sprint/iteration to implement the functionality to enable a set of user stories.  This provides an operating model for the team to implement the user stories.  The solution architecture provides the operating environment for the user stories.  Both the operating model and the operating environment provide infrastructure for a better experience for the team which increases the probability of a successful project.

For more information on each of the engineering practice sections visit:

Build and Deploy Continuously
Branch Stratgically
Test Early and Often

Tonight there were ~700 people at this event.  If you had an audience of 700 people, what would you talk about?  It has to be simple, it has to be authentic, and it has to be surprising.  Sure, maybe that’s the formula I came up with after thinking for a minute.  One thing is for sure- after listening to someone talk for 5 minutes, a lot about that person’s life is pretty clear.  Now, I need to figure out what my talk will be about.  “The psychology of nerds negotiating with business types”?  I’ve lived this for a long time- you choose what side you think I have been on .

1. Can I install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2008 side by side?  Presumably, since I’m/you’re still working on some VS2008 projects.
2. Can I run Team Explorer 2008 and Team Explorer 2010 Beta 2 side by side?

The answer to the first question is “Yes.”  I’m doing it and it’s working just fine.  Not surprising since this scenario worked with the transition from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008.

The more exciting answer is the answer to the second question.  Not only can I run Team Explorer 2008 and Team Explorer 2010 Beta 2 side by side, but if I install the ‘Team Explorer 2008 Forward Compatibility Update (GDR)’ http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2009/10/19/compatibility-matrix-for-2010-beta-2-team-foundation-server-to-team-explorer-2008-and-2005.aspx#_Toc243567874 then my workspace works across Team Explorer 2010 Beta 2 and Team Explorer 2008.  It’s very exciting to see these kinds of details in the product.  Great work!

I titled this entry “Visual Studio 2010: TFS for Big and Small” because the 2005 and 2008 were great for larger teams, but I have met countless people at conferences and customers that believed TFS was too big of a jump for their team.  As a result they would decide to use no source control system (file system and email) or stick to SourceSafe.  Even small teams complained about the limits of SourceSafe and wished for something better.

Moving into the new world from SourceSafe is great, but what I believe is really exciting is the beginning of ALM for smaller teams, which is how ALM adoption usually starts.  From what I’ve seen the first step teams take is source control which is followed by builds.  Work Item Tracking is the engine that starts to bring in the extended team (i.e. implementing Agile Project Management/Scrum).

I mention that ALM adoption is usually started at the small team level because it’s either started from smaller teams within bigger teams (pilot projects or early adopters who push the team) or just generally smaller teams (<10 people).  Becoming familiar with TFS is incredibly important to wrapping your mind around it.  Install TFS Basic on your client machine and use it for some of your projects.  Remember, small teams grow quickly with successful projects!

For example, most projects which deliver value to customers end up lasting some amount of time.  Over that time, lots of bugs are found and hopefully fixed before they impact the customer.  Team Foundation Server (TFS) Work Item Tracking (WIT) helps manage the state of each of these bugs.  These Bugs (capital B, the work items) have a state model definition which allows team members move the bugs through states (ie. active, fixed, fixed ready, fixed verified, etc…).  Similar to Bugs, there are other artifact types that need to be managed throughout the project- for example, user stories, requirements, and risks with their own defined state model.  This state model for a work item type allows the team to query for work items which are in a particular state.  This is super powerful both at the detailed and time-aggregate level (ie. cumulative flow diagrams which show number of work items over a date range).

Michel Perfetti has posted a very useful work item control (http://tfsworkflowcontrol.codeplex.com/) which shows a visualization of work item state transitions over time.  This is a very good example of how visualization of the dimensions managed by VSTS can help software teams.

Another example of a visualization is the branch management in VSTS 2010 Beta 1 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405662%28VS.100%29.aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465202%28VS.100%29.aspx).

It’s very exciting to start seeing more of these visualizations that bubble-up the power of the integration provided by VSTS!  I expect to see more in the future.

I wrote a step-by-step walk through (with screenshots) which shows how to use the Year 2000 Census Public Data Set in the context of AWS services (Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)).  The following are the scenarios which show the use of Public Data Sets to solve some business problems:

1. Simple Census Parser - Using Amazon EC2, Visual Studio 2008, and C# to parse data from the Year 2000 Census public data set.  The parsed census data is used to hydrate .NET objects which are then serialized to an XML file.  This scenario shows how easy it is to load, parse, and manipulate data in a Public Data Set.
2. Census Excel Viewer – Using Amazon EC2, Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office, C#, and Excel 2007 to create an Excel 2007 add-in which parses through the Year 2000 Census Public Data Set (using a library created in the Simple Census Parser) and creates Excel sheets with formatted census data.  This scenario shows how to enable business users (familiar with Excel 2007) to easily interact with a Public Data Set from within Amazon EC2.
3. Simple Census Parser to Amazon SimpleDB – An extension of the Simple Census Parser which serializes the data into Amazon SimpleDB.  This scenario shows how a Public Data Set can be exposed as structured data using Amazon SimpleDB.
4. Census Excel Viewer from Amazon SimpleDB – An extension of the Census Excel Viewer which loads the census data from Amazon SimpleDB (instead of from the Amazon EC2 PDS volume).  This component takes advantage of the Simple Census Parser to Amazon SimpleDB code which structures, organizes, and exposes the census data via the Amazon SimpleDB web services.  This scenario shows how Public Data Set data can be consumed by business users (inside Excel 2007 running on any machine with access to Amazon SimpleDB) by exposing the structured data using Amazon SimpleDB.
5. Parallel Query Processor using Amazon EC2 and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) – A national restaurant/bar chain which has a presence in the top five US markets is investigating the next five markets to which they will expand.  This company is looking for an easy way to access and process the large data set which is the US Census in order to determine the top 10 US cities/regions with the highest number of people between the age of 20 and 34.  Using Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, and two C# WinForms applications (Query Manager and Query Processor) to implement a parallel query processor implemented using a map-reduce type architecture, this business can easily access the census data, scale to the hardware requirements for this specific query, and parallelize the processing which will help them make the decision quicker while using less resources.  The Query Manager application uses Amazon SQS to map (or break down the components of the census data which will be processed by the Query Processor).  The Query Processor (which can be run on a number of Amazon EC2 instances) is instructed by the Amazon SQS queue to process a subset of the query and report back to the Query Manager, again using Amazon SQS.

Send me a message if you have done some exciting integration with your data and Amazon Public Data Sets or if you have some ideas about how this type of data integration could be interesting to your business.

See the post at http://blogs.msdn.com/dstfs/archive/2009/05/15/installing-tfs-2010-on-windows-server-2008-r2-rc.aspx for the details of how to get around it. There are a couple of steps to fix it. The solution worked like a charm.

I have now created my first Team Project and I like a few things already:
1. Project Collections – Great features for organizing and working with Team Projects in a group.
2. Team Foundation Administration Console – Centralized place to manage all things TFS.
3. Workflow based Team Builds – Very neat and appropriate use of Windows Workflow Foundation. This will make customizing builds very interesting (lots of possbilities for customizations/extensions).

More to come