Tech Ed 06 Day 3

I attended BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions until 10:00 last night.  I accidentally attended one on developing on virtual machines, which was actually informative, if unexpected.  Next was a very useful session on MSF, where the moderator directed me to David Anderson’s Blog for more information.  He also suggested that I Google for “Agile CMMI”. 

The final session was on migrating to Team Foundation Server and was moderated by Jean-Luc David.  It turns out that Jean-Luc spoke at the Atlanta Code Camp also.  It is odd that we missed each other there.  There was some lively discussion about branching procedures in this BOF.  I enjoyed it completely, and was reassured that we are adopting TFS in a recommended manner at my employer.

I made it to the jam session last night, and didn’t get back to my room until 1:30, but I’m feeling fit this morning and ready to take in more tech goodness.

++Alan

[Update] My first session on “Applying Version Control, Work Item Tracking and Team Build to Your Software Development Project” with Brian Harry, was a big disappointment.  I was expecting some prescriptive guidance for integrating these tools into an existing project.  Instead, I sat through the same presentation I saw last year at Tech Ed.  This introductory/marketing style session are tiresome.  The companion session this afternoon promises to dig into customizing the system.  We shall see, I suppose.

At lunch I finally hooked up with Randy Miller.  We had tried to get together yesterday, but he had a conference call run way late.  Randy was very interested in the issues my company is having in resolving the impedence mismatch between the CMMI KPAs and the MSF process guidance.  He took careful notes, and thanked me frequently for providing detailed feedback.  He promised to put me in touch with David Anderson, who owns the CMMI template in TFS.  Randy assured me that David would be interested in following our progress and assisting us with any problems.  This is why I came to Tech Ed!