The Montreal .NET Community (formelly the GUVSM) has redone itself.

There is a new name and a new website in order to reflect the common interests that the community has in .net related technologies. There will be special interests groups for .Net, Team System, Sql and architecture. What's new though is that Francois and I will be pushing a new concept in the .net group called @Lunch.

@Lunch is basically an open session, once a month, where a subject will examined in a more informal way. It is modeled on the way Alt.NET and opens spaces work and will surely provoke a few interesting discussions. One of the things we will promote is to determine the subject of the next meeting, during the last few minutes of the meeting occuring. What an "Agile" way of learning what's most important. The first @Lunch is scheduled for September 24th and will be moderated by Francois, speaking on extension methods.

I suggest you visit the calendar, and find which sessions interest you the most. You can even subscribe to the calendar through a RSS feed; what a nice touch !

The last thing for this post is an upcoming Umbrella talk; we will be presenting our session called "Top 10 Umbrellas" at the .Net group of the Montreal .Net Community on October 20th. If you're interested in what it is, or how it can help you, we suggest you come by and listen what we have to say.

nVentive helped a group at the Canada DND (Department of National Defense) by producing an audit for a internal project that related to the techniques, methodologies and technologies use by that team.

nVentive will be working on a small mandate with Microsoft's PnP (Patterns & Practices).

Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group is a natural fit with nVentive's Coaching and Guidance approach. In future conferences and talks, we will be able to demonstrate the newest ideas we are developing together.

nVentive was selected as a Microsoft Vendor this week. This will allow us to work with Microsoft on a variety of projects in the future in order to help bridge the gap between the developers and the technology makers.

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.