New Team System Stuff - 2004-09-16
Why Unit Testing?
While writing up my blog post yesterday, I had this item from Jim Arnold queued up for posting. I originally flagged it because at first glance I saw that it was on Team System's unit testing feature. After reading through it and seeing that Jim raised a lot of concerns about this feature, I figured I wasn't the best person to respond to his concerns. Fortunately, I have great people like Jason Anderson I can pester. He wrote up a great post that answers a lot of the questions people have been asking and tries to address Jim's concerns.
Agile Use Cases
This evening I attended a free after-hours seminar presented by Dr. Dan Rawsthorne of Net Objectives called, Agile Use Cases.
This seminar introduces use case based requirements analysis, including the use of the Ever Unfolding Story for refining use cases into more detailed requirements.
You can find the seminar notes up on the Events page of their site. I enjoyed it, and it got me thinking about some new ways to approach documentation planning. I attended this seminar last year, which I really enjoyed: Comparing RUP, XP, and Scrum: Mixing a Process Cocktail for Your Team.
Today's Ask Burton FAQ
Another Name
I posted about some naming decisions a few days ago. Today's new name is courtesy of Brian Harry:
- Team Foundation Version Control - the feature area formerly known as Hatteras.
Team System in the News
Microsoft is using Team System to respond to two realities. The first reality is that the average developer isn’t just sitting in a cube typing out conditional statements. The average developer performs such tasks as application analysis and design before the implementation phase, and unit testing, just to name a few. The second reality is that the core developer isn’t the only one using Visual Studio 2005. When a project is in development, other development team members need to use Visual Studio 2005 to get a good look at the project.
The Ever-Expanding Enterprise Library
The patterns & practices team has added more preliminary content (Cryptography and Configuration documentation & an updated draft of the Security documentation) to the Enterprise Library GotDotNet Workspace.
Enterprise Library is a major new release of the patterns & practices Application Blocks, which are reusable software components designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Enterprise Library 1.0 will include blocks for Data Access, Exception Handling, Caching, Configuration, Logging & Instrumentation, Security and Cryptography, in a single integrated download.
- By way of Ted Neward's post on TheServerSide.net
Amazing Numbers
Several people have already pointed to this eWeek article on a recent Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by The Middleware Company that demonstrate how Visual Studio .NET tops IBM WebSphere. While there are a lot of amazing numbers in that article (development time, adoption rate, etc.), these are the numbers that caught my attention:
The comparison not only involved productivity and performance, but also cost. According to the study, the Microsoft results are based on a system running Visual Studio .Net running on Windows Server 2003 and costing $19,294. The IBM results are based on a system running WebSphere Network Deployment edition running on Red Hat Linux and costing $253,996.