#2782

Extreme Blogging

“If blogging is good then we’ll blog every day.”

My boss⁵, Soma, has a blog. I work for Eric Carter as part of the Visual Studio Tools for Office Team at Microsoft, they have blogs as do a stack of other people on VSTO. See… everyone has a blog. Because blogs are good.

In fact its amazing Microsoft is about to ship the next release of Visual Studio considering all the time people spend blogging. That sounds bad. But when you blog you have to think about stuff first, so blogging means thinking…

“Thinking is clearly good, so we should think all the time.”

My father used to say “think before you speak”. You can’t write cogently about stuff without thinking about it first. So blogging and thinking are supporting practices.

“Communication is important, we should communicate as frequently as possible”

Transparency… Communicate with customers and partners. When people stop talking to each other things can go bad. Blogging is communication so blogging is good.

(apologies to Kent Beck but you get the idea)

So what can you expect to find here in the next few months.

The VSTO Frameworks Team’s Splendid Adventures with Scrum

We’re half way through our first sprint. Things seem to be going pretty well. I’ll write about how we got this far and were we’re trying to go next week.

My Agile Vacation – Belize

Why “agile”? because as usual its not a package deal. Not a lot of Big Up Front Design on this one. Here’s a “Product Backlog” for the ten days between now and getting on plane…

1. Architectural spike (check really Belize exists and people really go there) – Done.
2. Buy flights – Done.
3. Get shots – Done.
4. Book a hotel for the first night or two – Pending.
5. Read guidebook on the plane.

VSTO Show and Tell

I’m responsible for a couple of interesting features in VSTO. So I’ll be blogging some of the things I learnt along the way about C#, interop and a lot of other stuff.

What Alpine Climbing and Software Development have in Common

Or… more to the point what I’ve learnt about one while doing the other.