Recently Ewald Hofman and I presented two sessions at the Microsoft Application Platform Conference. Gerard van der Pol envisaged an ALM Showcase track in which all phases of a development project would be presented. 

Yesterday and today we repeated this concept in a slightly different form. Together with Marcel, Edward, Hassan, Clemens, Rob, Rene and Gerard we had a lot of fun doing the interactive sessions.

11:10 - Planning the Showcase Application

13:30 - Modeling the Showcase Application

15:05 - Developing the Showcase Application

16:30 - Building the Showcase Application

09:15 - Planning, Design and Developing the Showcase Application (Recap Day 1)

10:50 - Using Version Control

13:15 - Selecting an Optimal Branch and Merge Strategy

14:50 - Performance testing

16:15 - Testing the Showcase Application

The most important part was to co-present the sessions: so there is a presenter and a code monkey who does the demos and presents where necessary. I think this made the sessions more attractive to the audience since there was continuous presenting and demos. Hopefully the audience enjoyed it too.

And it was an honor to share an agenda and speakers room with Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Hanselman!

On March 13 there is an Application Platform Optimization conference in the Netherlands. Clemens, Marcel and I will talk about Visual Studio Team System 2010 in the development track on testing, architecture and work item tracking respectively. The other tracks are data management/business intelligence and SOA/business process. The conference day before will be focused on the same topics but is intended for managers and technical decision makers. Even though the agenda is not complete yet, it looks to be a promising event with presentations by:

• Kevin Ashby - Enterprise Platform Modernization, Microsoft
• Ofer Ashkenazi - Sr. Technical Product Manager, Microsoft
• Sam Guckenheimer - Group Product Planner Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft

New versions of my favorite products are being released later this year: BizTalk 2009 and Visual Studio Team System 2010. Obviously I am very excited to see interesting Microsoft speakers make it to the conference. If you can not wait to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010 below are a few links where you can get to know the product a little more:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9/ 
http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/

Later next month I am presenting at Software Developer Network event. That talk will be on the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 which I discussed in a recent post.

Good news: Today Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio Team System, previously known as "Rosario", will be called VSTS 2010. Some good information can be found on in Somasegar's post and in the official press release. In short the message is that Application Lifecycle Management will be taken to the next level to better facilitate architects, testers and project managers, but also new audiences such as application maintenance people. I am sure you know that Microsoft are very open in developing new products and receiving feedback, so you can already enjoy an early "Rosario" build, which is downloadable as a VPC. A new version is expected shortly, which would make sense since the most interesting conferences of all is about to kick-off in 4 weeks...

The Professional Developer Conference was last held in Los Angeles three years ago. Then Microsoft announced The LINQ Project, WinFX including workflow foundation and presentation foundation and the designer toolset we all know now as the Expression suite. This PDC is all about the cloud and Live, which sounds very promising.

"Developers at Dutch Insurance Firm Boost Productivity with New Monitoring System

With 22,000 employees and a turnover of €12 billion in 2005, Achmea is the largest insurance company in the Netherlands. It wanted to increase the responsiveness of its IT department by improving the transparency of development projects. Partnering with Avanade and Microsoft, Achmea successfully implemented Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System, which provides administrators with access to detailed, accurate information across multiple systems. Projects can now be tracked from beginning to end, making it easier to maximise efficiencies in the development process. And with Visual Studio 2005 Team System, the company’s 200 developers have increased productivity."

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000562