Agile : Failing is a good thing!

I've had this discussion a couple of times over the last number of years, and people tend to not believe me when I say that in the Agile world, we want to fail!
For emphasis I will repeat that : In the Agile world we want to fail

Let that sink in a bit…

OK, now that you think I am full of it and must not have a clue as to what I'm speaking about, lets continue.

Waterfall or Structured methodologies / processes
Let's take the example of a waterfall approach. We analyse the work, get to development and finally deliver the functionality. The only problem is that this could take anywhere from months to years to get the first working software out there.. And now the customer or client can look at it and decide that this is not what they wanted in the first place or the business has changed making it irrelevant.

Here are some very interesting numbers on failing software...
The Standish group released some stats last year stating that "Only 9% of projects in large companies were successful." and that "The most projects, 37.1%, were impaired and subsequently cancelled (Resolution Type 3) in medium companies, compared to 29.5% in large companies and 21.6% in small companies."

With this high rate of failure, how can it possibly be good? Well it is not! Failure is never good, but it is inevitable. What we do however strive for is to mitigate the losses that are incurred due to the failure.
How do we do this?

Fail fast fail often…

Agile methodologies / processes
In contrast to the structured "long running" processed described above, in agile we get working software into the hands of customers, business or clients as soon as possible. They can then interrogate it and communicate where the problems (if any) are and what needs to be done differently or how to fix it. We can then"pivot" to fix the issues, change the focus or scrap unnecessary functionality to continue delivering business value.
The difference here is that if we do "fail", we lose an iteration's worth of work, which should be 2 - 3 weeks. Compare this to the months or years that a structured process could take...

Another difference is that we can then learn from the mistake, make an adjustment and continue delivering value. In structured processes the monolith has been developed and you may very well be too far down the path to make the required changes or fix the issues.

In a nutshell:

Failure is not good, but it is inevitable. Things are changing too rapidly for us to start with a plan and be able to deliver relevant software months/years later.

We need to deliver small chunks of work that can be interrogated and evaluated, gather that feedback and communication and adjust what and how we do things to mitigate the risk and exposure of the failures or losses!

4 Years of TFS and ALM…

In August 2014 Team Foundation Consulting celebrated its 4^th anniversary. As the only consultancy in SA focussed solely on ALM it certainly puts us in a unique position as we really service a very specific target market.

I will be the first to admit that when it all started in 2010, TFS was not as well received as it is 4 years on. Clients were apprehensive having consistent problems with Visual Source Safe and then trying to install TFS 2005 and TFS 2008. TFS 2010 slowly had clients coming around as they were finally able to get what they expected out of TFS. TFS 2012 and 2013 have made my job much, much easier.

The value that can be derived from the new versions of TFS are clear. The integration with Git, the value add of Release Management and the adoption of a much shortened release cycle for updates has seen TFS rise to the occasion…and without saying anything I can tell you that some of the VS talks and projects that we are doing at the ALM Rangers makes me really excited to see how TFS will evolve a year or 2 down the line!

To keep it short, I decided to share with you my 4 lists of 4 for our 4^th anniversary;

My 4 favourite moments so far…

1. Starting the ALM days SA event
2. Seeing the demand for our services growing year on year
3. This is a personal one but becoming a Visual Studio ALM Ranger has long been an ambition of mine… so glad to be a part of this passionate community since 2013
4. Presenting at local events…I still love to engage with those who actually use the toolset every day, even if it is just for source control

4 things I did not expect when I started Team Foundation Consulting…

1. Some of you think I work for Microsoft!
   While I do partner with MS SA to bring you so many ALM events each year, I neither “sell” their products nor am I employed by them. I am what you may call independent and free to share my own thoughts and opinions (as I occasionally tend to do…)
2. The demand for TFS training in South Africa was unexpected
   I thought consulting would be at the core of the business, but it is our on-site training that has the most demand
3. After hours and weekend upgrades
   Not all clients can have the luxury of a test environment or being able to shut down production during office hours… upgrades happen after hours – it’s a fact.
4. TFS is being used in a wide variety of industries…
   You may think that most of my clients are dev houses, but these days it seems everyone has a dev department and many of them are using TFS to manage their work. Apart from the companies who develop solutions, some of the industries I’ve done business with include; mining, banking and financial /insurance provider, law, recycling, health, government, retail systems, call centres, logistics, entertainment, aerospace/arms, food stuffs, FMCG, fashion houses, clothing and textile, vehicle tracking, tourism, online booking systems, education tertiary, credit bureaus…to mention a few.

4 sad ways TFS gets used in large companies…

1. Installed and being looked at wondering “what now?”…sad
2. 1 team out of 12 …very sad
3. Source control only …too sad
4. As a pilot project that was never completed…crying now…

4 ways TFS and VS is better now than it ever has been…

1. Features features features
2. Usability
3. Customisability
4. Reporting Mechanisms (keeping management happy)

Thank you to all my clients for their support throughout the years, I'm excited about the future!

What does TFS cost?

Ever been given the run-around on what it actually costs to have TFS running?
Let’s see if I can break it down.

Note: I’m using retail prices for these examples, so this is the ABSOLUTE maximum that you would pay. There are a couple of licensing agreements that could see you paying a great deal less.

We all know that you get a TFS Server license and CAL when you have an MSDN subscription, right? So if you license your developers with MSDN subscriptions you have the right to install TFS and each developer with an MSDN subscription is allowed to access TFS. If you do not have MSDN subscriptions or have a “Partner Action pack” then you would need to purchase a $499 Server license and a $499 CAL per person accessing TFS unless they fall into an exempt list (discussed a bit later)

What the TFS Server license includes is obviously the ability to install and run TFS and it grants “limited rights” licenses to use:

• SQL Standard
• SCVMM if you have any of the following subscriptions
  • Ultimate
  • Premium or
  • Test Professional 

The “limited rights” means that you are only allowed to use SQL for TFS and SCVMM for Lab Management. If it is going to be used for anything else, you need to license it separately and obviously if you already have SQL or SCVMM licensed you can use those.

So now you have TFS and some of the components, but you need to install it on an operating system which will need to be licensed separately. If this is going to be a production server (basically the definition of “production” is that there are big problems if you lose it), the OS licensing is NOT covered by MSDN, you would need a separate server license ( About $882 for Windows 2012 Std ).

So we have TFS and we can install it on a server. Here is the tricky part…regardless of the fact that Windows 2012 is a per-processor license, you still need a Windows Server CAL ( $199 for a 5 CAL pack) for anyone who is going to connect to TFS (whether they are exempt from a TFS CAL or not)

So we end up with something like this:

TFS CAL Exceptions

As mentioned earlier, there are a couple of exceptions with the requirement of a TFS CAL. You do NOT need a TFS CAL when (snipped from the VS 2012 licensing white paper):

• Entering work items through any interface, and viewing and editing work items you created. This enables users to enter and edit their own work items of any type.
• Accessing Team Foundation Server reports. Any read-only data that comes from the Team Foundation Server SQL data warehouse or is surfaced through SQL Server Analysis Services would be a report, but custom reports could also be written to call into Team Foundation Server APIs and could also join that data with other data sources.
• Accessing Team Foundation Server using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. This enables operations staff to take operational issues encountered in production and raise them as issues to the development team, automatically creating a work item in Team Foundation Server.
• Accessing Team Foundation Server using the Feedback Client for TFS. This allows the user to provide Feedback about an application into Team Foundation Server.
• Viewing static data that has been manually distributed outside of Team Foundation Server.
• Up to two devices or users that only access Team Foundation Server to perform system administration, such as creating Team Projects or Project Collections.

TFS Express

Microsoft has also brought out TFS Express which runs on SQL Express and is limited to Version Control, Work Item Management and Build. TFS Express does not provide any of the reporting capabilities or allow for SharePoint integration.

It does however allow up to 5 users without the requirement for a CAL, only the 6th person and up will require a CAL. So this makes a good starting platform for smaller teams. The OS still needs to be licensed though.

Levels of CAL

It also needs to be noted that there are “levels” of CAL’s when looking at TFS. To use the Backlog and Sprint Planning Tools and the Request and Manage Feedback features you need to have either a VS Ultimate or Premium MSDN or a Test Professional MSDN subscription.

Summary

So let’s take a simple scenario. You are 5 developers with MSDN subscriptions. To run TFS in a production environment the costs look like this:

TFS	$0 (covered my MSDN)
TFS CAL	$0 (covered my MSDN)
Windows Server	$882
Windows Server CAL	$199
Total:	$1081

If you do not have MSDN subscriptions the picture would look like this:

TFS	$499
TFS CAL	$2495 ($499 * 5)
Windows Server	$882
Windows Server CAL	$199
Total:	$4075

I hope this clears up some of the questions that I get posed fairly often.

References:

• Visual Studio 2012 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper (October 2012)
• Microsoft Product Use Rights October 2012
• Microsoft Store
• Windows 2012 Server licensing & pricing FAQ

FREE Visual Studio ALM preview! - CAPE TOWN

Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2012 is here, and during the months of November and December Team Foundation Consulting will be offering your company a FREE 1 hour ALM session.
These sessions will cover some of the new features available in TFS and VS 2012 and aspects of ALM.

All sessions will be presented at your premises, and availability is limited.
To book or enquire about a session please email info(at)teamfoundation(dot)co(dot)za or contact us via our contact page.

Note: Min 5 attendees required for sessions.

JHB - sessions will be made available in January/February 2013 - email us if you are interested and we will advise you when the sessions become available.

Cape Town Software Week

The coming week (13 – 19 October) will be a busy week in Cape Town.
Starting on 13th with Software Week then ending with Microsoft TechDays on the 19th.
Cape Town Software week is going to be a very interesting week, covering everything from skill mentoring through to business and industry insights, really something that is a “must attend”.
I’ll be involved in some of the technical and skill mentoring sessions over the weekend..
see you there..

The truth about having your own business…

“A business can be likened to a ‘jealous lover’ in that it will demand most of your time, it requires significant commitment,
sacrifice and passion, and it will interfere with most of your plans”
- Denvor Phokaners

Process and the tool

Microsoft has a very competent ALM story that is being backed up by the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM “suite”. Don’t take my opinion for it though; Microsoft must be doing something right in this space to be one of the leaders in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Application Life Cycle Management, June 2012”.

One thing I can point out in the diagram is that Microsoft is not the only player in the ALM space; there are a fair number of people with varying degrees of success battling it out.

The thing you should be aware of is that the tool itself is not the be all and end all of a “proper” application life cycle. I have come across a number of companies that are looking for a “tool” to solve a process problem.

The company feels pain in the way that they are doing things and then starts looking for a tool that will “solve” the problems. When the tool does not fulfil the need 100% they start looking at the next one (in some cases they have literally been looking for years).

The problem is that in all likelihood they will never be able to find the “right” tool, regardless of how complete a story the tool caters for, or how competent or proven the tool may be.

“Then what should we do?”

Glad you asked.
Firstly, take a deep hard look at your current process, highlighting the problems. It is important to be honest with yourself in this step. You will base your plan of action on the outcome of this step. (You may consider doing an ALM assessment that may give you some clarity on your situation or level of maturity https://www.microsoft.com/assess/almassessment/default.aspx ).

Next, find people that have had similar problems, or look at best practices that are being adopted and how they may solve your problems.

Next you need to make some hard decisions.
How are you going to change to relieve the problems? Something needs to give; some decisions need to be made. You cannot expect to follow the same process and somehow the problems will reduce or disappear (as Albert Einstein once said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"). The best development team can only do so much; the rest is up to the process that governs the day to day and week to week actions.

Finally you can start looking at the toolset that will support the process, taking note of the following (just to name a few) aspects:

• How do the various aspects of ALM integrate with each other?
  Do you have a single up to date and accurate “high level” view into the various aspects without needing to dedicate a person or resources to compile these reports or statistics?
• What value can you derive from the tool?
  Does it provide you a rich functionality with regards to reporting, accessibility, integration and/or usability?
• How well integrated is it in your day to day activities?
  Is it available when and where you need it to be with as little as possible context switching between applications or environments?

In conclusion, it is important to note the following:

• You cannot solve a process problem with a tool
• The tool needs to support and automate your process, bringing together information from every aspect of your project!

 

In need of process, ALM or Team Foundation Server adoption guidance?
Give us a shout!

It is good to be busy.. or is it?

As you may have noticed I started and run my own business.
(I’m sure that this must be a parents worst nightmare.)
“Mom, dad… I have quit my job and I’m going into business on my own.”
I can just image them thinking to themselves “aarrggghh – should probably clear out his old room…”

Two years later and I’m struggling to keep up with the work load, every time my parents ask “how are things going?” and I reply “very busy”. Then the inevitable reply comes (with a hint of relief no doubt) “that is good”.

One thing I fear that they are missing is that there are in fact various different types of “busy”. I have tried to explain it before, but I think I’ll just send them to this post in the future..

Lets break down busy. In my opinion, there are a different levels of busy and where some are good others are down right bad.

1) Busy with things that pay you “decent” money

This is a good busy. This is you doing work and being paid for it at a decent rate. If you are not doing work under this category in any way, form or shape you could effectively be losing money. You should spend most of the time busy with this type of work or with activities that will induce more work under this category.

2)  Busy with things that merely pay

Yes, this does differ from number 1. As with anybody that is still finding their space and niche, you tend to take on “other work” that you do not charge the “full” rates for. This could include long term jobs, (in my case) maintenance work (something like retainer) or just plain work you cannot justify charging the full rate for.

Don't get me wrong, this type of work is important when things are slow, when you do not have any other income in the month this could be a “life saver”.
However, when this work starts getting to the volumes that the “initial allocation time” starts increasing uncontrollably, problems start occurring.
You spend more time on this than being focused on either performing or hunting down those “decent” income jobs, effectively losing potential revenue!

3) Busy with things that do not pay……..yet

This is a difficult one. These things you need to do to ensure future revenue. In my case these activities would include for example doing presentations at events or going to see clients to discuss or chat about their problems or even writing blogs. This is a good place to promote myself and my business in terms of who I am and what I can do, basically marketing.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph this is a difficult one in that it takes a fair amount of time, yet you do not have direct returns.
Without it however, you probably will not have any “returns”.
This is something that you do “need” to do, and in my case probably after hours and over weekends (if you are not busy with something in one of the other categories).

4) Low/no income and very low/no real gain

Unfortunately this is a nasty one. Think of those “quick” projects that just kept on going forever, without payment and with scope creep through the roof. Promises that payment will come if you deliver x,y and z, but on delivery it is not good enough and the requirements have changed etc. etc. etc.

You have made commitments and there is no easy way out of this. Every moment that you are spending on this one you are losing out on any of the other categories.
Other than to just walk away I do not really know how else to handle these.
Obviously things like reputational risk come into play, just in general leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

 

I think these (or a combination of these) cover the main point of being “busy”. So next time someone says they are busy, ask them is it a “good busy” or a “not so good busy”.

 

Words of wisdom…

Some words of wisdom that have become apparent to me in my ventures…

1. Until you’ve been an employer, you cannot consider yourself to be a good employee
2. Unless you’ve been awake at 2am worrying about how to run a business, in my opinion you can’t presume to know how a business runs

Welcome 2012

WOW. I woke up and realised that we have officially started 2012.
Now if this is our last year on earth or not, I wish everyone a prosperous and fulfilling year ahead.
Some of the things that I’ll be looking forward to this year:

• Windows 8
• TFS & Visual Studio vNext
• C# 5
• Delving deeper into WP7
• And then scratching around Silverlight 5 as well

Have a good one!
Now to remember to put down 2012 instead of 2011!

Working for yourself…

I have been working for myself for over a year now and looking back I have concluded the following:

1. A pay check is the easiest (legal) money you'll ever make
2. I have never in my life worked so hard for so little
3. I am by far the worst boss I have ever had

Working for yourself is not easy, and is definitely not everybody's “cup of tea”.

Would I consider changing ?
Hhhmmm…..

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….

A new year…

Somehow, somewhere we have entered into a new year and 2010 has drawn to a close!

After all the hype and expectation of 2010 I think a lot of people are a bit disappointed and/or let down, especially with the “global financial crisis” and the SA 2010 soccer world cup not delivering all that was promised and expected for the local economy.

For Team Foundation Consulting I must admit, it is has been going a bit better than I expected. It is about 6 months down the line and I was surprised at the interest that we were getting during the end of the year – a period  I though would be pretty dead for a young business like this, and then in January things are also starting to look good.

None-the-less it is now time to bed down how to grow this business in 2011 into a viable operation. And first on my list of things is still to “spread the word” and create awareness. At the moment we are looking at some online advertising options (more on that in another post).

There is also still a lot that needs to be done with regards to standardising past and existing engagements with a bunch of ideas that I have, into formal outlines and marketable “products”. I do find that in some cases it is easier to give people a standard, yet relevant “product” as apposed to asking them to “compose” one that will suit them. This should also enable me to start advertising approximate costs on the site, which should make people more inclined to contact us if they have an idea of what the charges could be.

I’m sure that this will be an interesting year for us, especially with the end of mainstream support for Visual Source Safe in sight and Team Foundation Server being the logical upgrade.

So to everybody that may be reading this, I wish you all the best in the new year!!!

See you around!

Is competition bad?

 

Being a very young, niche service provider in South Africa, I’m very concerned about competition. I heard about a fairly well known American company doing TFS and Visual Studio consulting and training, busy establishing a presence in South Africa: you know that sinking sensation that a person gets?!

Not long after this I was speaking to Paul Hacker who hosts TFS, and noticed that there was yet another company that has just started hosting TFS in the States. I forwarded him the details and we got to chatting around the subject of competition.

Between our discussion and reflecting on my actions after I heard about the competition coming into this country, I have concluded that:

Competition is not always that bad.

Sure it gives you less of a market and it means that you need to start working even harder for business, but primarily I think you should take a step back and re-evaluate yourself, your market proposition and your target market.

You could decide to redesign your offering to be more applicable, or have a more focussed approach to your existing market, or even address those tasks that you had on your backlog that suddenly becomes top priority because your competitor is doing it..

Either way you would need to streamline your business and have a more focussed vision, ensuring an environment where the “customer wins” .

Another option is to consider an alliance or partnership of sorts. One of my friends who runs his own successful business told me that “A competitor is not always a competitor”. You could leverage each other and learn from each other to enhance your own portfolio and strengthen your own brand.

Even though I’m still very wary of competition, that sinking feeling has subsided. I have redesigned my offerings, focussing on, and better structuring areas that were a bit neglected. All in all I think creating a more holistic offering.

BTW: I actually met and had a chat with the president of “the competition” and it turns out he is not such a bad person after all

GoogleBot is thy friend

When starting the site I was considering using a couple of forms of paid advertising (such as Google AdWords) to gain visibility for the site. After playing around a bit with words and phrases (AdWords have a nice (free) feature that you can actually have a look and “estimate” potential impressions and costs) it turned out to be a bit pricey for what we were trying to accomplish. The next step was to put in effort to get the site noticed and recognised by google and organically obtain a high rank on searches.

One of the approaches is to use google’s webmaster tools to give google a “deeper” insight into the site.

Step one is to expose a “robots.txt” on your site to “hide” areas that you want to hide and to give googlebot the go ahead to check out everything else.

Step two, point google in the direction of a decent site map. The problem I faced with this is that google is not too happy with any format for this site map. After some trial and error I eventually found that the plain text version worked perfectly (go here to generate a quick version to start off with).

So now that google can see into your site we revised a lot of wording to emphasise words and phrases that we would like to be found on. You might have noticed “Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server” being repeated on the various pages a couple of times.

Now finally we tried to get other sites linking to Team Foundation once again in an attempt to get the “web presence” increased. So we looked around at the popular business listing sites and started listing on the free, no-catch sites we could find.

All this has brought us to be top of the list when searching on google in South Africa for phrases such as “TFS consulting”. All this without spending a cent!

Update

Well it has been a while, so I thought I would give a general update on what has happened so far. Unfortunately I have to say … not much.

I’ve made some progress with the licensing side of things; I’ve broken through the Microsoft guards and procedures to have access to the volume licensed software now.  The problem is that as a ‘hoster’ you need to have a Service Provider Licensing Agreement in place.

Check. Got that.

The next step is to give Microsoft their money, you need to report monthly usage so that they can bill accordingly (you pay for the actual usage, which you again (hopefully) bill the clients for). This should be done on the SPLA essentials “site”. 

This is where most of the registration pain has originated thus far. One and a half months later I still have not been able to get access to this site (even though this is what initiated the process of getting onto the spla and volume licensing agreements in the first place). I seem to be stuck in a : “I don’t have access; No our systems show you have access; but I don’t have access; but our systems show etc.  etc. etc..” communication cycle with the various levels of support around this issue.

Besides me consuming vast amounts of pricey bandwidth trying to get through MS support, I’ve been digging up old acquaintances and everybody that I have had some amicable interactions with to see if I can at least get the word out and in the process find some leads. Things are going slow (as expected) and I have no solid leads as yet, but still going strong.

Woes...

Well my transcript has been “found”. There was some issue when the exam was written that caused it not to be uploaded. So at least Microsoft is going to have it uploaded in the “the September run”. Luckily September is just around the corner, so let’s give them this much. After all, it only took a month… (Am I too nice to be able to run a business?)

Whilst we are on the subject of corporate Microsoft, to be able to be recognized as a SPLA reseller, you need to register on the SPLA essentials site. No problem, nice “Sign up” link and everything. That was almost 3 weeks ago. I have had numerous emails confirming activations and registrations of all sorts, and within this correspondence there are links to do further activations etc. Like a rabbit hole, just going in deeper and deeper with no final “here you go you are now registered and able to start selling”! I really think there should be a review of the flow of this registration and activation, really un-intuitive and error prone (As I’ve mentioned before). So this is another bottle neck I’m trying to circumnavigate.

On the brighter side, I received another job offer yesterday that after MUCH deliberation I declined. The company is a large retail chain in South Africa and it seems that they are now trying to go Agile. This would have been a very exciting position, had it not been for my delusion of having my own business. What makes this a positive is that they run TFS. They are busy upgrading to Visual Studio 2010 and then TFS will be next in line for an upgrade. A friend of mine that works there mentioned how the TFS instance came to be and by the sounds of it, they are in need of someone like me!

I was initially worried that although I have a brilliant idea, the paying client base in this country may not be able to support a service such as this. This gives me a little bit of hope! I now need to bide my time and then see if I can get myself in there.

Build a business one client at a time.

Cold Calling...

I made my first (of many I’m sure) cold calls today. You don’t often think that giving someone a call could be so nerve-wrecking. I got the lead form a friend of mine, saying that this company is basically using TFS for only source control (what a shame...). So I got this guy’s details (the Enterprise Architect), and did as much research on him as I could find. Then did the cold call prep.

You look at all possible scenarios, questions and answers that could rear its head in this call. You prepare a script, giving as much info in as few words and as clearly as possible.

Then the call...

I must admit the person was a lot more down to earth that I was expecting. He was polite and sounded very approachable. But BANG... the one scenario you did not prepare for. Panic sets in and you start darting around your script to try and find a quick question / solution / something to the response. Then after what seemed to be hours and as much seemingly pointless questions as I could stomach, it was over.

They’re actually getting rid of TFS due to a corporate policy to use open source tools.

In retrospect I should have realised the “corporate policy” card is usually something that is pulled because there was a problem somewhere or something did not work, or even just to get rid of the person on the other side (me in this case). I can think of a bunch of questions I should have asked – the biggest one obviously is what went wrong with TFS. Even in this I could have offered my services in moving from TFS to svn at the very least.

So a person lives and learns. I hope the next one will go better; at least I have some other scenario to plan for now.

SLA registration nightmares

I've been seinding our the new site to a couple of people / friends for some feedback and input. Maybe see if they can start generating some leads.

In addition to this I tried to register on Microsoft's SPLA essentials site. Was that a mission!! I had to go through the "sign up" about 7 times before it was happy to let me through (even just to tell me that the application was recieved and it will take about 3 - 8 business days to process). The registration process gave me the YSOD about 4 of those times. For the rest, it would just hang and do nothing to the point that I lost patience. I tried to send a comment to tell "them" that an error had occured and lo and behold yet another error occured on submission on the contact screen.

Quite ironically the site was deployed with the debug libraries. So I can see that is was developed using ASP.Net MVC and from the full stack trace of the error. I have to admit, not something I would not expect from Microsoft. I could deduce who potentially compiled it and that he obviously referenced the source code for MVC directly as apposed to referencing libraries..

ouch...

Team Foundation Consulting

Formally introducing Team Foundation Consulting.

Hhhmm - taking a chance here aren't we..

We were going back and forth looking for good fitting names, but alas, turns out Microsoft was taken :).

The business model is being build around Microsoft's Team Foundation Server 2010 as I'm sure you are aware of by now. I liked the Team Foundation (actually a suggestion from my wife that is completely non IT) as I believe that TFS can be the foundation of a cohesive, managed and productive team. Having a look at the Microsoft Trademarks it does appear that Team Foundation or anything to that effect is in fact not trademarked or registered. I hope that this is not going to cause a problem, then again any publicity is good publicity.

We feel that it is a fitting name and speaks to the point that encompasses what we are trying to acomplish : building awareness around Team Foundation Server 2010 as a component of a well intergrated and productive unit, be it as a part of software developement or not.