P&P Summit Day Three: Keynote - Future of P&P

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The keynote today was on the Future of Patterns and Practices. Rick Maguire gave the presentation and is the head of the Patterns and Practices group. Mark’s main point is that the P&P group exists for the customers. They want to turn out good guidance so that our solutions are better designed and work well.

His talk starts out talking about why P&P came into being. There was a gap between the MS groups churning out the platform/documentation and the end customers (us) in actually using those technologies. By providing guidance with tools and source code they could decrease that gap.

The P&P group utilizes the idea of Customer Connected Engineering. This can be described that P&P tries to identify scenarios where customers are having issues with the platform. They provide guidance and code to help solve these issues. They gather community input about those solutions and then that information is then driven into the next version of the platform. I think the System.Configuration namespace changes is a good example of this (may not be a real example, but it at least seems like it). While we are waiting for these solutions to make it into the platform the P&P group is providing us with the fillers to overcome them with today’s technology. Good description of the group in my opinion.

Looking ahead P&P wants to provide Guided Solutions Development across the Lifecycle. They want to bring this type of guidance into the tools we already use, such as the guidance toolkits they are starting to provide. They will need to strengthen their investments into solution and asset architecture. I think the software factories are the realization of these vision and they will only get better (I hope). The P&P team is also absorbing owning the MSF process. This should be interesting given that P&P is a very agile based group. They also want to continue to have customer connection and innovation. All of these steps are a roadmap to get P&P group to help provide guidance not only on how to code something, but also how to run the lifecycle for the development process, and then provide tools to support those guidelines.

 It looks like they want to do the following in the first half in 07:

  • Web Client Software Factory
  • Services Software Factory for WCF
  • Design for Operations
  • MSF Updates

Second half

  • Client Architecture guide
  • Smart Client Software Factory V2
  • Services Software Factory for Orcas
  • .Net 3.0 Architecture guide
  • Enterprise Library TNG
  • Guidance Explorer
  • MSF Updates

Finally he asked us to get involved and provide feedback to the P&P group about what they are doing. There are lots of communities out there to give feedback on. They have plenty of things to download and try out, such as the Guidance Toolkits, etc.