posted on Thursday, July 01, 2004 12:41 PM
by
roydictus
TechEd Talk
Another day at Tech-Ed, so another day of having to choose between a bunch of interesting sessions.
I started the day co-presenting DEV 350, "Visual Studio: Programming Business Tier Logic" with my colleague Jurgen Postelmans for about 700 people. I must admit I wasn't too happy with the presentation, because it didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped or planned, but everyone I talked to afterward thought it was an interesting session, so what do I know? The presentation and its code will soon be posted on U2U's site. I'll keep you posted.
David Gristwood presented "21 Rules of Thumb -- How Microsoft Develops its Software", originally by the legendary Jim McCarthy. A great topic and well-presented (follow the link to get to a condensed version of the contents).
Unfortunately, I missed Alan Kipman's "Visual Studio 2005: Managing the Enterprise Build Process with MSBuild". I would have loved to go to that... MSBuild is very similar to NAnt, which I'm currently using to do automated builds. Basically, both tools break up the build process into a series of units called targets (subroutines, really), which are composed of single steps such as checking out code, or compiling it, or running unit tests. Such single steps are called tasks and you could compare them to method calls. Tasks can be parameterized, and you can add functionality to the build system by developing custom tasks in .Net. I'll come back to automated builds ad nauseam later.