The pre-lunch session was given by Wayne Allen from Corillian, the same company that Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell work for. The talk was about continuous integration, or the idea that your code is constantly being compiled, tested and perhaps deployed so that you know when you have problems faster.
Unfortunately for Wayne his keyboard locked up and had some technical difficulty.
The first thing he states is you can do continuous integration even if you aren’t an agile shop.
This talk was given by Peter Provost and Michael Puleio. They spoke about how the P&P team does their Agile development process. They ran the presentation like they would a project. Pretty neat concept. They asked us what they want, then created 10 minute iterations on providing those expectations.
They stated that iteration zero for an agile project is usually getting an idea of the overall goal and vision of the project.
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.