Canberra VSTS User Group – October Meeting

0810 – 0830: VSTS Breakfast

Share a bite to eat with the Canberra VSTS group. Bring your VSTS queries and triumphs and share them!
Quiz your peers on how they are getting the most out of VSTS, and maybe pick up some ideas you can take to work with you.

0830 – 0930 : Session – Using TFS in High Performance Teams

Tatham Oddie – Senior Consultant at Readify, Technical Lead at graysonline.com and an ASP.NET MVP presents a session on his experiences with working in a high performance team with TFS. In his own words…

The redevelopment of graysonline.com, Australia’s largest e-commerce site, was a relatively typical IT project; short deadlines, massively changing scope, and a high level of resource churn. Come along to this month’s Canberra VSTS Breakfast to hear how TFS made the delivery of this project possible.

We’ll discuss the development processes we used, how we extended TFS to enable these processes and the myriad of lessons we learnt along the way. Some of the things we’ll cover are:

• Empowering developers & testers to work together
  • TFS deployer
  • Environment pooling
• Decoupling deployments from sprints
  • Branch strategies
  • Rapid & Regular delivery
  • Flickr: “10 deployments a day”
• Work Management
  • What we customised and why
  • The life of a Product Backlog Item

This is a session not to be missed! Register now at http://cvstsoct09.eventbrite.com/

What’s happening with the Canberra VSTS User Group?

It’s been a little while since we kicked things off again, and it must almost appear as if nothings happening! Rest assured, I’m working hard on locking in more presenters to continue the successful start we had with Anthony back in July. The next session was due to fall during the week of Tech Ed, so I’ve suspended for a month to avoid a numbers drain on the Tech Ed crowd.

The details of the October session should be up soon – I’m just finalising the little things for hopefully what will be another fantastic session. Stay tuned to canberravsts.org for more info as I publish it!

Canberra VSTS User Group – Call for Speakers!

A short time ago I was talking to a friend of mine Sean Ferguson about VS2010 and some of the things I talked about at Code Camp. During the talk we spoke about how it’s a real shame that the Canberra VSTS User Group was no longer in action. After I went home that night I decided I’d get in contact with a few people and investigate what it would take to get it off the ground again. A couple of months and a fair few emails and a website later and I’m putting out a call for speakers to get content for the re-launch of the group!

Who am I looking for?

If you’ve done something interesting with VSTS, fixed a tricky issue or just have some ideas around how to get things done with any of the parts of the VSTS product suite then I’d love to hear from you.

What’s the format?

I’m looking at either formal presentations or community discussion facilitation. If you’ve got something that fits into either of these categories – make sure you contact me!

I’ve never presented before…

No problems! First time presenters are more than welcome – and are in fact, encouraged. I’m happy to help out with content and presentation reviews, and put you in touch with people with years of presentation experience if you’re after advice. The best advice I ever got was to jump in. Presentation is an extremely rewarding endeavor both personally and professionally.

How can you contact me?

There’s a couple of ways to get in contact with me. You could head over to the canberravsts.org website and use the contact form, leave a comment on this blog or contact me directly via email.