A couple weeks ago I started a new and exciting chapter of my career.  After 8 great years at Farm Credit Services of America as a developer and lead developer, I took a new job as a solution consultant with a small, yet proven and experienced consultanting company called Deliveron Consulting Services.   I have no complaints about FCSAmerica and appreciate all of the oportunities that I received while I was there.  It was a great place to work and leaving was one of the hardest decisions I have had to make. I'm going to miss working with all of the great people I have gotten to know.  I felt this was the right opporturnity at the right time for me.  I'm excited to leverage all of my experiences in Team Foundation Server, CSLA.NET, code generation, configuration management, Agile, Biztalk, etc along with the leadership skills in a new environment.  In fact, I have already begun helping one of our clients convert a projects to TFS.  I'm also utilizing Team Deploy to automate their build and deploy process.  I am excited to work with more companies on implementing or improving their implementation of Team Foundation Server.

So this begins a new chapter and I am excited!

Mike

If you are like me and couldn't make it to PDC this year, all of the sessions are going to be made available on Channel 9.  I'm excited for a lot of new features in VSTS 2010.  Windows Azure looks cool too.  It will be interesting to see what and how they price it.

https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx

Mike

Last night I just published my first CodePlex (or any open source project)!  It is called Team Deploy.  This is a collection of custom MSBUILD tasks for deploying applications from Team Foundation Server to a test PCs and servers.  I developed this awhile ago for my work and several of our teams are using these extensively to do daily updates of our internally built applications.   It has been very helpful for us for a number of reasons:

• Anyone on our team can kick off the Build and Deploy build type in TFS (Not just me doing the builds anymore!)
• We can use the same MSI to deploy to all are environments.  Great for configuration management.
• The tasks available allow for killing processes, uninstalling MSIs, stopping/starting windows services, deleting files, and installing MSIs.  See the CodePlex site for more details.

There is not a lot of magic in the background on these, the real magic is actually done with PSTools.  PSTools is a collection of some really handy free utilities by sysinternals (that was bought by Microsoft).  Even if you don't download and try Team Deploy, you should try out PSTools.  Eventually it would be nice to replace the PSTools functionality and bake it into the tasks, but for now, it works fine.

Try it out and let me know if you have any suggestions.
http://www.codeplex.com/teamdeploy

Deploy Smart Not Hard!

Mike

Welcome to my blog.  I plan to blog about a lot of things but most of them will have to do with ways to quickly solve business problems and not worry about redundant code and standard technical plumbing.  I will write about my experiences with code generation tools, business object frameworks, and libraries and how they help in an agile development environment.

I am currently the lead developer on a project team developing two smart client applications.  We have used several key tools to help speed development and spend more time solving business problems instad the technical ones.  We use Rocky Lhotka's CSLA.NET for our buisness object framework.  We have created CodeSmith templates to generate our business objects based on table schema.  I will get in to more details in future posts.

Mike