DevDays 2011 Cape Town

DevDays 2011 Cape Town drew to a close yesterday evening.

I presented one of the community session slots and decided to upload the presentation for those who could not attend.

Enjoy…

5 Misconceptions around
TFS and Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio vNext

For those of you that do not keep up to date with what is happening around the world, TechEd North America is currently in progress.

Being a technology junky I generally enjoy events such as TechEd and MiX(especially our American counterparts). This is the time that Microsoft starts introducing stuff they have been working on since the last event, or gives us a glimpse into what they are working towards in the next wave of product releases.

This time, once again, TechEd is hardly off the ground and the excitement has already started to set in.  As part of the keynote Jason Zanders gave some insight into what is coming in Visual Studio ALM vNext.

I must admit, from a brief glimpse, there are some very exciting things heading our way! I really like the revamp of the TFS Web (TSWA) and the new functionality around planning and capturing feedback. I would however like to see more around the work that they have been doing with TFS on Azure.

In Visual Studio the unit test integration hooks for 3rd party frameworks looks interesting and the new “Team Navigator” has potential.

Oh man.. we’re just starting to get the hang of VS & TFS 2010 and we are already looking to the next version with anticipation…
Hi, my name is Niel, and I’m a technology junkie

TFS as an open platform?!

Brian Harry has previously mentioned his intent for TFS to be an open platform. To date the architecture supports this very nicely, from the wide range of integrated applications and clients to providing developers with a very rich .Net API.

Then Microsoft took over Teamprise’s Client Suite rebranding it to Team Explorer Everywhere (TEE).
For those that have not yet heard about TEE, it is basically Team Explorer for Mac, Linux and some Unix flavours (yes… even Windows). One of its components is an Eclipse plugin, giving (primarily java developers) basically the same experience that we are familiar with inside Visual Studio.

Yesterday Microsoft once again upped the ante by providing a java SDK for TFS.

This extension to different development environments, and the work that Microsoft has put in on the Hosting story and is putting in to get TFS on Azure means that you can have the benefits of TFS, without the need to actually run any Windows based servers locally! How neat is that!

Now what I would really be interested in is how much demand there is for this, and what is Microsoft doing to “sell” TFS to non Microsoft dev environments? Locally TFS and Visual Studio is being evangelised via the main stream events such as DevDays and Tech Ed, but what should we be doing to get the message out to people that do not attend these events?

But enough business, where did I put that old Java book of mine….

Dev4Devs Cape Town

Dev4Devs was held on Saturday, what an awesome event!

Well done to my fellow presenters for giving us very interesting (yet brief) insight into some topics that lie close to their hearts, and a big thanks to Dave Russell from Microsoft for setting it up and hosting the event here in Cape Town. 

I believe Dev4Devs is a platform for people who have a passion for what they do, and would like to share it with “the world”. You’ll experience what it means to present to like-minded people allowing just enough time to give you a “taste” for what presenting is all about. I would really encourage people to give it a go. Dave has promised that this would definitely not be the last time that this event is held in Cape Town.

We each had a 20 minute slot to talk about, or “present” on a topic of our choice which is challenging, but part of the fun! And of coarse, if by some highly unlikely event you get bored with the current topic, the next one is literally around the corner

Thanks to all that attended, hope to see you at the next one…

For now though, the next event to look forward to is DevDays, see you there!!