The Althoff Chronicles

This week Monday and Tuesday I'm spending some time at the Chicago Microsoft Technology Center with AngelaB and a lot of other great expert on TFS/VS 2010. We're working on upgrading TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. I have to say it’s much easier than I even imagined! MSFT was attempting to make the installation so easy that you don't have to read the installation documentation and they have succeeded! Everything is very intuitive. We even brought in our own process template and that was migrated w/o a problem.   Things I’m loving about TFS 2010: Hierarchical Work item types Administration Console Simplified DB model that makes projects much more portable Easy Upgrade/Import from 2008/2005 When it releases, it’s going to be part of the MSDN license Although TFS 2010 is still in beta, the head architect and I have decided that we'll be upgrading to TFS 2010 next week.

This week is my iteration 0 for the project I’m on. It’s the first project that I’m going to be the lead architect on. This is something that I’ve always wanted to do, so it’s very exciting for me to get my first taste. I have some great people around me and some mentors that I know I can go to for some help when (not if) I need it. The project is a redesign of a client’s public website. The current website is written in Cold fusion and has a shopping cart functionality that is achieved using Comergent. We’ll be redesigning the site using ASP.NET. We’ll be leveraging the functionality of Commerce server 2009 for the shopping cart functionally as well as interfacing with SAP for billing/shipping/product information. On top of that the client is using Interwoven as a Content Management system. We’ll have to build a custom DB that Interwoven can write to and that our Website will query to get non product related information. My biggest problem so far is trying to fit the Agile/SCRUM ...