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:

1. Kanban in a complex administrative world (Sofie)
2. Kanban for support of development teams (Sven)
3. Kitchen Kanban - Cooking 13 different plates for 1600 people with Kanban (Peter)
4. Kanban is better than Scrum because... (Open discussion)

Afterwards we had a small break out session with following topics:

1. Discuss the result of the Open Discussion
2. Presentation of the Kanban Game
3. Evaluation: What did we learn today?

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.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the beta release of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone”.  This is an eclipse plug from Teamprise (acquired in November 2009).  Read the whole article on Brian harry's blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/03/04/microsoft-visual-studio-team-explorer-2010.aspx

Some announcements about VS2010:

1. MS Visual Studio Test Elements 2010 will be renamed to MS Visual Studio Test Professional 2010
2. MS Test and Lab Manager will be renamed to MS Test Manager 2010
3. MS Visual Studio Team Lab  Management 2010 will be renamed to MS Visual Studio Lab Management 2010
4. Pricing details for VS2010 are release

All this info and a bit more background info can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2010/01/26/it-s-official-vs-2010-branding-pricing.aspx.

From now on you can follow @Visug on Twitter.  All updates, news and more will also be announced here.

And for those who are interrested: As promotion of their twitter account, they give away a free ticket to the TechDays 2010 (Belgium) away to one of the followers.