Following the world wide Visual Studio 2010 launch (12th April), we had the honor to receive Dave Mendlen to share how to improve software development lifecycle using Visual Studio 2010 with the 30’ish audience – our selected customers and partners. Just so you know, Dave Mendlen is the Senior Director of Developer Marketing and also a keynote speaker at Visual Studio 2010 launch event held at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Dave was kind enough to detour to Singapore after his KL keynote session just to be with us for mere 24 hours before heading back home.
Dave Mendlen started his career in Microsoft as the lead product planner on .NET and Visual Studio. Prior to his current role, he also served as the speech writer for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He was previously the Director of Web Services & also Director of Windows Product Management.
He kicked off the lively session by sharing what happy development teams have in common and unhappy teams are unique on its own, just like how Leo Tolstoy describes happy and unhappy families in Anna Karenina. As most of you would agree, resulting in tight schedule and little budget due to underestimating the project scope, not being able to reproduce the weird bugs which testers have reported, and mismatch design and implementation, etc. can sure make everyone in the team unhappy in one way or another. I learned from his sharing that we have added a lot of new features in Visual Studio 2010 to address these pain points which we encounter day-to-day. Dave helped the audience understand how the architecture designers can help ensure that the implementation conforms to the intended design, how Team Foundation Server dashboard provides clear visibility of the project at a glance, how Test Manager 2010 eliminate “no-repro” bugs in his hour-long interactive conversation.
Here, you can find the slides used in his presentation.
[slideshare id=3799990&doc=visualstudio2010alm-100421033913-phpapp01]
Dave also passionately shared how the engineering and marketing teams had worked together to come up with the best ever release of Visual Studio and also the bold and brilliant move made in changing the product name as well as simplifying the product SKUs. Will you believe we used Visual Studio 2010 to develop Visual Studio 2010? Dave shared the statistics, database size, work item counts, and source code files, etc., of our internal Team Foundation Server, which is used by DevDiv – “Developer Division in Microsoft”. This surprised the audience, especially on how we “dogfood” our products to ensure that they are ready for the customers.
He wrapped up the session talking about our ALM partners who build extensions for both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server
As soon as the floor is open for Q&A, Dave was overwhelmed with questions and feedback from the excited crowd with regards to Team Foundation Server capacity planning, Windows Phone development platform, and Visual SourceSafe migration, etc. I am glad to see how the participants maximized the limited Q&A time allocated. To sum it up, it was really a great event where all of us have learnt something about improving software development lifecycle using Microsoft developer tools. I would like to thank all the participants who turned up and made this such a terrific event!
For me, the most amazing part of the sharing session is to see Microsoft’s senior executive using Visual Studio 2010 to debug and test a web application as he demonstrates the exciting new features. It somehow assures me that Visual Studio 2010 is indeed user-friendly! Remember “Dave can code, so can you!”
For more photos of the event check out the slideshow below:
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