User experience expert Debbie Levitt provided some saucy answers about an upcoming Visual Studio Live! presentation with an even saucier title: Fast Focus: WTF UX - UX Research and Design AMA.
Microsoft-owned GitHub announced the general availability of a revamped Projects that's intended to more fully integrate the project planning and development processes.
Some of the critical problems for any team working in an Agile way are managing the backlog of user stories, converting epics into stories, preventing scope creep, and -- most importantly -- picking the most valuable stories for the next sprint. Impact mapping provides a visual solution for all these issues.
Microsoft's Jay Schmelzer shared the story of Microsoft's multi-year transition to DevOps and continuous delivery during his keynote at Visual Studio Live! Chicago. It all started, he told attendees, with a groundswell of discontent within the product engineering teams.
- By John K. Waters
- 09/20/2018
The changes Microsoft had to make to transform from a traditional, waterfall-oriented software provider to an agile, cloud-based organization were part of a “very painful journey,” recalled Abel Wang, but one the company simply had to make.
- By John K. Waters
- 05/02/2018
Developers who use Visual Studio Team Services will start seeing some new Agile-focused features rolling out this week, with Mobile Work Item Forms and Delivery Plans among the highlights.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/02/2017
I don't believe in coding design tools. I've been programming for more than 30 years now (40 years if you go back to my first class in programming). I think in code. Code is my design language and procrastination is my friend.
In this Q&A, highly regarded developer and educator Scott Allen shares his thoughts on coding with C#.
The alternative to that simple error-handling combo is the Try...Catch, but it's not as simple as wrapping up your code with it.
Microsoft Teams is a new chat-based service that's part of Office 365, used for real-time conversation and collaboration among various team members connected to projects. It's also being incorporated into Visual Studio Team Services.
- By Michael Domingo
- 11/02/2016
Like magic, tuples make the impossible possible. Yep, we're talking here about one little corner in the Standard Template Library that will make it simple to return multiple values from a single function, without "out" parameters -- and it has other uses, too.
- By Kate Gregory
- 06/22/2016
Null pointer exceptions can get downright annoying, so who needs that?
- By Kate Gregory
- 06/08/2016
If you ever need to work with all of the properties in some object, you can use GetType and GetProperties to retrieve the object's PropertyInfo objects. After that you can do what you want. Here's an extension method that sets all those properties to their defaults, for example.
From Live! 360: A move to DevOps requires several key changes, including the idea that end product delivered to customers will have its imperfections. So, it's key that developers get in front of that with continuous app testing, debugging and delivery to keep the IT machine running smoothly.
Changes in licensing allows anyone with the basic CAL to get access to features that were available only to premium subscribers.
- By Michael Domingo
- 07/23/2015
Gartner, IDC chime in on why agile and more more strategic development needed to make mobile app development practices more successful.
The Visual Studio Online site is also experiencing growing pains.
Update 2 is not far behind, either.
How to get that all-important feedback needed to make a project successful.
Properly using agile software development practices requires skillful application of principles from both sides.