On Monday, Erik recorded his third Visual Studio Talk Show, the french podcast with Mario Cardinal and Guy Barrette. The subject was suppose to the Entity Framework, but after having attended the PnP Summit, the subject was changed to "Being Done".

The podcast is great, and shows a great discussion between the agile camp, and the more traditional waterfall processes.

You can download the podcast at http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com/Archives/075-26mai2008-ErikRenaud.html and while your there, you should check out the other, past podcasts, we are sure you will like them.

At DevTeach and the PnP Summit, there were talks on how to use instrumentation within your applications and use it to monitor the health of it throughout it's lifecycle.

At one of our past contracts, we had a problem where our users were not taking the time to test the system correctly. We then resorted to reuse the instrumentation module to track how often the individual functions of the application were used.

At first, it was only about helping them focus on the tests, or rather where they had not tested. But after a few months, it all changed; it actually became a measure of how useful the software was and what parts were being adopted.

It's motivated two things :

1. When comes a time to prioritize backlog items, we can use these metrics to make sure we do things that are of the highest value for the customer, in parts of the system that we know have high traffic.
2. Every time we add something to the system, we have metrics that can help us remove something else from the system. This allows the system to constantly stay the same relative size and not carry any "dead weight" into the future.

I'm not sure if Usage Coverage is a good term for these ideas, but for sure, I will be using them in future projects also.

Amazing how he got it right.

This guy is busy like 10 of us and still, he's able to appreciate a piece of code I wouldn't dare taking less than 2 hours explaining the value of.

Here's what he had to say about Umbrella:

It is exceedingly broad and includes literally hundreds of new methods and helpers. However, I don't think you're expected to "learn" Umbrella as they hope you'll stumble into it...in a good way. It's like the concept of The Pit of Success. There's little easier than just falling, and the idea is that if you've designed an API correctly folks will just fall into success.

This should probably go on our home page as the project description.

Thanks Scott!

2 weeks ago, Francois and I were attending the Patterns and Practices Summit conference that was held in Quebec City.

Let me say that the presentations were really nice, and I would not hesitate to go again. This was a unique chance to have go out and meet some great minds in our industry and challenge some of nVentive's ideas with them.

This is the list of all of the sessions and the ones that particularly struck us (in no particular order) :

• Decrease Coupling and Raise Cohesion - Mario Cardinal
• Designing for Operations - David Aiken
• Empirical Evidence of Agile Methods - Grigori Melnik
• Evolving Client Architecture - Billy Hollis
• Future of patterns & practices - Don Smith
• KeyNote (Internals of the VS.NET team) - Brian Harry

We'll be integrating a few of the ideas we learned in these sessions into our teams, and we'll let blog on them as we see success out of them.

For all those of you who asked about our session material, it is now available for download.

You'll have to login to your devteach account in order to be able to download the material. If the link doesn't work, go directly to the Schedule page, find our AOP + Unity session and you should be able to click on the Material link.

The .zip file contains both the material for the Validation + Security session and the AOP + Unity session.

A couple of days ago, Francois and I came back from Toronto after the DevTeach 2008 conference in Toronto. Wow was it nice, we met a lot of nice people and had the chance to debate a few of nVentive's ideas. The sessions where we spoke came out very good, and we hope that everybody was able to take something home, that they can use at their workplaces.

DevTeach will occur again in Montreal before the end of the year, although I can't confirm any of the details just yet and we hope that we will be speaking again, giving us a chance to share ideas with the great Montreal developer community.

The list of sessions was very exhaustive and here are some that marked us:

• Home-grown Production System Monitoring and Report - Owen Rogers
• Behavior-Driven Development Installed - David Laribee
• How to Make Scrum Really Work - Joel Semeniuk
• The Next Leap: Software Factories and DSL - Kevin McNeish
• Planned Agility?! - David Laribee
• Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages - Ted Neward
• Busy .NET Developer's Guide to F# - Ted Neward
• Writing Domain Specific Languages in Boo - Oren Eini
• Understanding Efficient User Interface Design - Markus Egger
• Strategic Domain-Driven Design - David Laribee
• DDDD, Unshackle Your Domain - Greg Young

Now although we did meet a lot of people, these are the ones with whom we had the biggest discussions on agile and architecture :

• Mario Cardinal
• Oren Eini
• Justin Lee
• Ted Neward
• Scott Bellware
• David Laribee
• Greg Young
• James Kovacs

In the coming weeks, we'll probably blog on a few of the ideas we learned and transmit that knowledge to you.