What is the most effective way to measure a software development team’s productivity? On an Agile software team, where we are ultimately delivering value in the form of functional software, how can this be accurately measured? This was the area of discussion the other night at the MN Scrum Experiences user group. It was quickly [...]
I have been analyzing and estimating some Silverlight 4 and WPF projects recently, and will periodically get asked the question of what size of application is appropriate for utilizing the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. This is a great question, as adding any pattern will add a layer of complexity to a software project. If [...]
I attended the Windows Phone 7 Boot Camp hosted by Microsoft’s Jeff Brand in Minneapolis the other day. The event provided a good overview of the Windows Phone 7 platform, and the opportunity for some hands on development with the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools and Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone Beta. You can [...]
The Productivity Power Tools Extension for Visual Studio (VS) 2010 (for VS versions Professional and up) provides a number of excellent developer tools that can improve your efficiency developing software. I will review some of the main features and other tips and tricks of this extension to Visual Studio 2010 here. Visual Studio is a [...]
Using Shelvesets in Microsoft Team Foundation Server can be a valuable and time saving technique. But leveraging and managing Shelvesets can get cumbersome. I recently had to extract changes from a Shelveset in one branch of code to another. How can this be done quickly and effectively? In this post, I’ll walk through how you [...]