This year, the 8th edition of the XP Days Benelux takes place on November 25-26th 2010. The location is Kapellerput in Heeze (The Netherlands).
Together with my colleague Peter Doomen, I'm selected as a speaker. The session we are going to deliver is the Frog Factory. Read more about this session here and here.
All the info about the XpDays can be found here.
Mattias Skarin aka Crisp posted a nice small article with a case study about a team that is transformed from Scrum to Kanban. He also put a few things he learned from this process, but also mentioned that they still have a way to go.
So if you are interested in this, read it here: http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin/2010/04/27/1272362964756.html
An old colleague of me, Gill Cleeren (Together with Kevin Dockx) wrote his first book. It's a book about Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook.
Over 80 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven business applications in Silverlight.
Find all the book info and how to order it here: http://www.snowball.be/2010/04/26/My+Book+Released+Silverlight+4+Data+And+Services+Cookbook.aspx
Gill, Congrats with your first book.
The April RTM version of the TFS2010 Power tools are released. Find a detailed description here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/04/26/tfs-2010-power-tools-have-released.aspx
Yesterday evening, my work hosted an event for the Belgium Agile Usergroup. The main stream of this is evening was "Using Kanban Beyond Software Development". Together with 2 colleagues (Peter Doomen and Sofie) I was one of the presenters.
There were 3 presentations and one open space:
Afterwards we had a small break out session with following topics:
In total, we had 4 time slots (of 20 minutes). Each presentator has given his presentation twice in one of the timeslots, so he could follow one of the other sessions.
It was a no slide presentation, but we made one A0 poster for each presenter. Here's my poster
As promised in my previous post about the Kanban Experience, now all the info about the game with played.
You can find everything on the blog of colleague Peter Doomen. In this article he explained the game and offers everything as a free download (read the rules for downloading it). So go here and enjoy: http://www.aboriginemundi.com/index.php/2010/04/the-frog-factory-a-kanban-experience-game/.
If you have feedback to the game, you can always contact me or Peter. So we hope you enjoy it and can give us some great feedback.
You want to know everything about compatibility with TFS2010and all the Team Explorer versions, well read this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/pages/compat-matrix-for-2010-rtm-team-foundation-server-to-team-explorer-2008-and-2005.aspx
Yep, finally it's there. The new VS2010 and .Net 4.0. Yesterday was the lauch event of it. And if you're a MS subscriber, then you can download it now from your subscribtion. So go there, login, download and install it and enjoy this great new release.
You can still see the launch event if you have missed it, just go here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/watch-it-live.
For more info go to Scott Guthrie's blog and read this article: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/12/visual-studio-2010-and-net-4-released.aspx.
Also, txs to my friend Kris van der Mast, here's a link for e free eBook about VS2010: http://blog.krisvandermast.com/ct.ashx?id=9e36e215-e443-442d-8427-6140ba274408&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.microsoft.com%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fdisplaylang%3den%26FamilyID%3d12a6de81-c633-4f2c-a35f-cea6fe772712.
The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It's a book that will help professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010.
Yesterday, I gave a two hour introduction about Kanban together with a colleague of me (Peter Doomen). We had a group of 9 people, not only IT people, but also a few from the business itself.
The introduction to Kanban was in a game format: The Frog Factory. During and after this game there was time to do some groups discussions. At the end we gave a short theoretical overview about Kanban.
During the discussions, it was clear that the problems they had during the game, were a good reflection of what they encountered during there daily job.
More about the game and a few pictures later.
A nice article about Kanban for managers. Read it here: http://www.kanbandistilled.com/
MVP, Jeff Levinson, has created a nice Work item visualization tool (first version). This tool turns work item relationschip information into some nice DGML graphs. These graphs can be viewed in the new architecture visualization tools.
You can find this great tool at codeplex: http://visualization.codeplex.com/. So go there, download it, use it, etst it and give feedback :-) to improve the tool.