Patterns and Practices Summit 2008 - Day 2
1. Keynote - Kent Beck : - This guy is the father of XP programming. The talk he gave was about the philosopy behind problem solving, and a few key techniques we can use to tackle problems.
They were. a) Have the guts to make the LEAP sometimes. b) Somtimes its critical to SIMPLIFY c) Sometimes it's usefull to REWRITE the system in paralell to maintaining the system. d) It's always important to REFACTOR.
2. Architecture without big design - Peter Provost: This was an introduction into Architect Explorer which will be released with VS 2010. Download the VS 2010 CTP while you are at it and give it a whirl.
Also there is a C# application called RAWR for World of warcraft players thats worth investigating. This was the application Peter Provost used in his Architecture Explorer demo. I need to get a copy of World of Warcraft for myself when I return! :)
3. Distributed Agile - Ade Miller : This guy spoke about how the Patterns and Practices team manages distributed team members. The final conclusion is that its very difficult and should be avoided if possible. NOTE: My take on team members bieng allowed to "work from home" should only occur in extreme circumstances.
4. TFS at Microsoft - Stephanie Saad : This woman gave us insight as to how Microsoft uses TFS. It was good to see that Microsoft also go through some of the pain points that we do.
5. Agile Development - Gabe Brown : Two of the Agile evangelists at Micorosft gave insight into strategies which they use to bring out quality software. They ALWAYS keep the Enterprise Library in a shippable state, and force each feature through "Quality Gates". This is a brilliant strategy.
I'll be compiling an email about this strategy to my work colleagues when I get back.
6. Acceptance testing - Grigori Melnik : This was about strategies for testing software in an Agile environment. Powerfull strategies for any Software develoment house.
7. Building Manageable applications - Alex Homer: This is one of my favourite speakers and I stayed late to chat to him personally aftwards.
He spoke about Health Monitoring Instrumentation Strategies, and the tools out there. I managed to extract some usefull ideas here for monitoring service applications. Dependency injection is a key building block here in terms of making your health/performance monitoring functionality extensible.
Cheers for now.