Upgrading Visual Studio 2010

I have been running Visual Studio 2010 as my main development studio on my development computer since the RC was released. I need to upgrade that to the RTM, but first I need to remove it. Microsoft have done a lot of work to make this easy, and it works. Its as easy as uninstalling […]

Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010

I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session. Credit: I want to give special thanks to Aaron Bjork from […]

Guidance – Branching for each Sprint

There are a lot of developers using version control these days, but a feature of version control called branching is very poorly understood and remains unused by most developers in favour of Labels. Most developers think that branching is hard and complicated. Its not! What is hard and complicated is a bad branching strategy. Just […]

Who broke the build?

I recently sent round a list of broken builds at SSW and asked for them to be fixed or deleted if they are not being used. My colleague Peter came back with a couple of questions which I love as it tells me that at least one person reads my email I think first we […]

Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?

When creating projects one of the only ways that you have of proving that it works and is a viable solution is to build it. This is easy when you only have one developer and that developer will be the only one using a solution. But what if you have 2 developers? How do you […]

Do you know that every user story should have an owner?

When you are building complicated software and working with customers it is always nice for them to have some idea on who to speak to about a particular story during a sprint. Update 14th April 2010 Rule added to Rules to better Scrum with TFS In order to achieve this one of the Team takes […]

Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 2 – For the record

At SSW we have always done Agile. Recently we have started doing Scrum and we have nearly completed our first Sprint ever using Scrum. As you probably guessed from my previous post, it looks like it is going to be a “Failed Sprint”, but the Scrum Team (This includes the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner) […]

Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 – The failed Sprint

I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint […]

MVVM for Dummies

I think that I have found one of the best articles on MVVM that I have ever read: http://jmorrill.hjtcentral.com/Home/tabid/428/EntryId/432/MVVM-for-Tarded-Folks-Like-Me-or-MVVM-and-What-it-Means-to-Me.aspx This article sums up what is in MVVM and what is outside of MVVM. Note, when I and most other people say MVVM, they really mean MVVM, Commanding, Dependency Injection + any other Patterns you need […]