Overall, after reviewing all the PDC 2008 gadgets, tools, software, frameworks, and all that jazz, I'm content. Not particularly wowed or overly enthralled, but content with the results.
There is however one piece that I can't help but feel I should learn a LOT more about. That is Visual Studio Team Server. The reason being, is that there are just too many awesome features that enhance productivity in awe inspiring ways. However, I'm not retracting all of my current complaints about the bugs and failures of VSTS 08. Over the next few weeks I'll probably be working on getting a local copy of VSTS running so that I can experiment with these features, and figure out what the work around are for these other issues. Stay tuned for this, however I hold no promise yet, just the plan to do this.
Also check out The Future of Unit Testing PDC 2008 Video also. This is another area were I'm somewhat interested. I've never been truly impressed by Microsoft's Unit Test Framework, but am very happy with the fact that they've gone forward with pushing unit testing.
Last note related, sort of, to the PDC 2008 slew of events. Google had announced Open ID support around the time Microsoft did. However there is a major catch, Google Forked OpenID. This, in summary, sucks. I'm not real happy about Google doing this. It's possibly going to push me back toward the services that Microsoft offers. Still, Google has a huge lead in services and capabilities, maturity of APIs, and other such things, but I'm thinking Microsoft will be coming up fast and furious.
On another note, there are a number of other blogs that have come to my attention that are great reads. If you intend to keep up with technology of the Microsoft Stack these are must reads. Here are two that I've taken to.
- Stephanie Saad's Weblog – Stephanie has some great reads, not super frequent, but good entries about how Microsoft dog foods the VSTS product. Pretty interesting stuff.
- Peter Provost – Peter covers a lot of stuff, including why he hates the term "Unit Testing" because it creates too many arguments (debates, whatever). He has a great approach to things, check it out.
You definitely need to buy me some beers and pick my brain about all of the team system sessions I attended at PDC 🙂
And you can’t pick on Google too much… they’re doing more with OpenID than you are here 🙂
Hahahaa. Yeah, you’re right about my OpenID efforts. The REALLY sad part is the OpenID libraries and other .NET pieces I need specifically for THIS blog are downloaded and sitting IN my subversion repository waiting for implementation. I’ve been truly bummed that I haven’t gotten to it yet.
We definitely need to do lunch and discuss. I just got some positive news about TFS here at work too, so hopefully I’ll have some positive posts on the topic soon.