Brian Harry's Blog
Everything you want to know about Azure DevOps and Farming
Latest posts
SOX Compliance with Team System
I frequently get asked about how Team System can help with SOX compliance. Unfortunately, the answer is not simple. SOX relates to the management of transactions t hat affect assets and is undertaken with the help of a qualified appraiser who defines a risk management framework for your business. Some of the risks man very well involve your software development activities and as Team System helps manage many of those assets, it can certainly play a role in helping you with your SOX compliance plans. A few month ago we commissioned a white paper to be written and I'm happy to say that it has now ...
Update from the farm
I finally went pretty much completely dark. The first 2 or 3 weeks of doing email every morning and evening finally passed and I've been focusing 100% on the farm. It's pretty much a 12 hour day 7 days a week. It's been tiring but it's been fun. The list of things I've gotten accomplished is long so I won't try to list everything but I'll highlight some stuff... After the orchard, I started work on the pastures. I spread about 11,500 pounds of 17-17-17 fertilizer across about 45 acres. The 50 tons of chicken litter was delivered about a week ago and I just finished spreading it...
End of week #2 on the farm
Since so many of you expressed a willingness to listen to me ramble about my sabbatical on the farm, I figured I would (at least a bit) :) Yesterday was the end of my second week. The start got delayed a bit from what I was originally planning due to stuff I had to tie up at work. My first big task has been to plant my orchard. It's about 2.5 acres and includes a wide variety of fruit trees: 96 apple, 18 peach, 10 pear, 10 plum, 18 fig, 5 persimmon, 12 pawpaw (a little know native American fruit), 126 blueberry. I estimated it to be a 2 week task. As with software nothing quite happens a...
End of week #2 on the farm
Since so many of you expressed a willingness to listen to me ramble about my sabbatical on the farm, I figured I would (at least a bit) :) Yesterday was the end of my second week. The start got delayed a bit from what I was originally planning due to stuff I had to tie up at work. My first big task has been to plant my orchard. It's about 2.5 acres and includes a wide variety of fruit trees: 96 apple, 18 peach, 10 pear, 10 plum, 18 fig, 5 persimmon, 12 pawpaw (a little know native American fruit), 126 blueberry. I estimated it to be a 2 week task. As with software nothing quite happens a...
ProjectParty for TFS <-> Project Server integration
Our team recently reviewed a 3rd party tool called ProjectParty from OranTech. We were impressed with the completeness and apparent quality of the solution. It does a good job of supporting both top down planning through Project Server and bottom up reporting. The ProjectParty connector supports high level EPM planning to be done in Project Server. The tasks are then replicated to TFS and can be viewed/updated inside VS or other TFS clients. Those updates are sent back to Project Server and can participate in the EPM approval workflow. In addition the tool supports resource synchronization...
Going dim for a while
I don't think you are going to be seeing a ton of blog content from me for a while. I've been at Microsoft over 13 years now. 6 years ago I earned a "sabbatical" under a program that was in place at that time. A sabbatical is a 2 month "leave". It's basically an extended vacation. We'll I've finally decided to take it and have been preparing for it for the past several weeks. As with so many projects it's been slipping a bit, but I'm starting it this week. Being the workaholic that I am, I expect I'll troll email occasionally, pop into the office every once in a while...
A Great Deck on TFS and Distributed Development
Bill Essary did a fantastic talk this week on how TFS works in a distributed environment. This talk shows how the various TFS components communicate. It gives guidance on how these communication paths put constraints on the network topology. It explains how these constraints can be applied in a distributed development environment. It also includes some great links at the end for further reading. I've attached a copy of the deck to this blog post. Brian Distributed Deployment Design Guidance with TFS 2008.pptx
First Team System Conference April 22th – 24th in Munich
Everything is prepared for the first Team System Conference in Munich, Germany. The conference offers an opportunity to learn about the breadth of the Visual Studio Team System ALM solution, addressing beginners as well as experts. Customer case studies from well-known companies like ABB, Siemens, Munich Re, Commerzbank … are a focus as well as high level expert talks from Team System “gurus” like Neno Loje and Ognijen Bajic. Keynotes from Ivar Jacobson and Sam Guckenheimer (Group Product Planner VSTS) round off this conference and will make it a great Team System experience. Br...
Database Professional Power Tools released
A new version of the Database Professional Power tools has just been released. This version is now compatible with VS/VSTS 2008 and contains a slew of new features. Check it out... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=73ba5038-8e37-4c8e-812b-db14ede2c354&displaylang=en And here's some docs on it: http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/b/8/fb8d1c0d-c0c4-4004-ab86-12396b2a3ee3/Power Tools 2008.doc Here's a summary of the features in this release · Command line SQL Static Code Analysis execution through MSBuild, this was the...