Dotmad.net

I have watching the new Team System vs. open source solutions war between Roy Osherove (in the left corner, TFS team) and Oren Eini (right corner, OSS team).

It all began with Oren writing a post about his dislike of VSTS because it’s not a “zero friction tool”. Roy responded by listing all the advantages of VSTS.
Oren’s reply was “Everything you can do I can do better (using OSS)”.
Roy’s answer was that as a whole package, VSTS is easier to work with and maintain than a range of OSS tools.
Oren next post turned to self-reflection, focusing on the fact VSTS doesn’t give him enough control (”tomorrow we’ll be taking over the world, Pinky!“) and the fact the gliches in VSTS make him miserable. Roy pointed out Oren is still using other, less-than-perfect tools.
Oren posted some more stuff on the matter but I think the original focus of the debate got a little lost on the way there.

I agree with Roy on the matter that as an entire package, VSTS is easier to work with. I had the “privilege” of integrating NUnit with the build in Team System, and I can personally testify it took much more than using the integrated tests in VSTS. As a one-stop-shop, Team System is very comfortable. (I have noticed many commenters listing their own OSS configuration neglected to list a task/bugs tools)
I worked with it using a Scrum (agile methodology) template, therefor the work item management and reporting, combined with check ins was the basis of our work - we simply couldn’t have done Scrum without it. (btw, does FogBugz have a Scrum template?)

As for control, Team System is more extensible than any previous Microsoft product I know of.
And as for “zero friction” - well, I have been reading Oren’s blog for a while, and I get the impression the man like his work environment to be perfect, and even tiny bugs/glitches annoy the hell out of him.
I have had things that annoyed me in VSTS, but never to a degree of seriously considering switching system because of them. I’m fine with “3% friction”.

And there is also the point of Jeremy Miller’s comment:
“I’ve heard pro-VSTS folks slam the OSS tools for being tinker toys and difficult to integrate (not in my experience, but it’s their story), but many of these same pro-VSTS folks sell consulting services to set up VSTS. If VSTS is so easy to get up and going, why are people able to make a living doing just that?“
Every organization need some tweaking, and VSTS is not so easy to setup, but a collection of OSS tools is not easier.
But my point is: One of the selling points for VSTS is the fact there are people like Roy, helping organizations move to TFS without losing developer-hours. There may be similar OSS advisory firms out there, but I never heard of them.

Update: You can read David Starr’s view here.

I have always had the impression those two groups had something in common - the older you get, the harder it is for you to find a job, unless you have gone into management.
Of course I hope to be proven wrong, but it seems I’m not the only one with this feeling.

First I ran into Benoit Lavigne’s post:
As I get older, I’m starting to look around and wonder: Is programming a young man’s game?

Which led me to Larry O’Brien post:
I have no doubt that it will be harder and harder for me to get work as a developer, no matter how current my coding skills stay. If I’m on the phone with a potential client and they ask about my experiences, I don’t say “Professional programmer for 27 years,” because I think that could very well trigger ageism; I say “I sold my first program when I was 16.”

You can also read the comments to Douglas Reilly’s posts from 2003 and 2005 (read the comments), hinting statistics showing the average age for software developers is 35, while for web developers it’s 29.

The Composite UI Application Block, created by Microsoft’s patterns & practices team, is a reusable, source code–based component based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.
It provides proven practices to build complex smart client user interfaces based on well known design patterns such as the Composite pattern, in which simple user interface parts can be combined to create complex solutions, but at the same time allowing these parts to be independently developed, tested, and deployed.
In other words, it separates UI related logic and the business logic behind it to separate classes, making it easier to test and refactor you BL code without touching the UI and the other way around.
As it turns out, there is a WIKI resource on the subject, called CABpedia.

I think Steve Mcconnell nailed the reason for friction between developers and non-technical managers:
“many programmers have found that the best way to ensure something works is to be hyper-conscious of all the ways it might break. For people who aren’t used to that orientation, it can seem pretty negative.
As you move up in an organization, top executives tend to be much more focused on possibilities than on problems, as well as being more concerned with the big picture than with pesky details.”

I read Nicholas Carr’s post, claiming work on open source is “collectively destructive”:
“Because skills in open source programming are increasingly necessary to enhance the potential career prospects of individual programmers, individual programmers have strong motivations to join in - and as more programmers join in, the incentive for each individual programmer to participate becomes ever stronger.
At the same time, the total amount of money that goes to programmers falls as open source is adopted by more companies. Individual programmers, in other words, have selfish motives to engage in collectively destructive behavior.”

In other words, developing tools that make development faster and cheaper is “collectively destructive”.
In days past writing a web site required a great skill, now every kid can do it, therefor the amount of money that goes to web site makers fell down. In the past you needed a guru to build drop-down menus, now everyone with minimal knowledge of VB can do it.
Just imagine the collective damage done by the people that came up with RAD tools or HTML editors - but those things had nothing to do with OSS.

I read about a new site called YoName, which is a search engine for people, meaning it only searches social networking sites, such as LinkedIn.
As any curious person, I tried searching myself there, by my name and by my mail address.

I was shocked to find this mail from the site: “YO. Someone is searching for you on yoName.com”
The content of the message notified me I was searched, advertised the site, and had this text:
“This is a one-time email sent to you from yoName.com. Someone searched for your email address using yoName and while yoName is a free service, it’s also anonymous. To unsubscribe from future emails from yoName, click here.“

Unsubscribe? but I never subscribed, I just entered a search!

Receiving unsolicited advertisement (spam) from the site just because someone else searched your mail address is bad enough.
But now I know my mail is in their database:
I tried entering the search again, and got no further mails, meaning they checked the search result against a database of previous searches.
Seems to me this site is just waiting for a spammer to crack it and retrieve all the mails.

Kannan Sundararajan wrote a post showing how to create work items report in Asp.Net.