It’s been awhile – and Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 is Released!

It has really been a LONG time since I’ve posted here. In my defense, I’ve spent the last year blogging about my dogs and their fight with cancer (See http://nikkitherott.tripawds.com and http://buddytherott.tripawds.com for more info). We lost Buddy a few weeks back, and Nikki seems to have beat it for now, so we’re a getting back to normal in a lot of ways.

A number of things has happened in my professional life since the last post (Which incidentally, I’m still not happy about, and have since had the need to replace my HP Tablet. Guess which brand I DID NOT buy?) and here they are in no particular order:

• My product, “EMC Ionix Configuration Analytics Manager”, was sold to VMWare, along with all of the former Configuresoft assets, including a number of my team members. My Product Manager, a couple of key architects and myself stayed behind at EMC and are now working to define a new Business Intelligence Product that is currently being called, “EMC Ionix Infrastructure Insight" or I3..  More on this in future posts, because it’s been an extremely exciting time and we’re really having some fun delving into the depths of the Storage Resource Management (SRM) domain.
• Due to the fact that the building we had occupied is now the property of VMWare, my team and I have relocated to a new office just a bit Southwest of where we were. My new office has a much better view of Pikes Peak, and given that I mostly work East Coast hours these days, I’m in the office early enough to enjoy the deer and other wildlife that roam through the grounds before most folks get in.
• I was re-awarded the Microsoft MVP Award (They have retired the “Visual Studio Team System” name, so now I’m a “Visual Studio ALM MVP”) for another year. As I told my lead, I didn’t really deserve it, but they gave it to me, so I’m dedicated to earning it this year.
• I was able to speak at a number of Visual Studio launch events, most notably the “.NET Forever” event in Stockholm, Sweden. (Thanks Tibi!)
• EMC announced the acquisition of Greenplum, Inc. If you haven’t heard about Greenplum, you might want to read up on them. This is definitely a major game changer in the world of Cloud Computing. I really can’t say much at this point about the acquisition, but don’t be surprised if you start seeing a lot more “Massively Scalable Data Warehouse” type posts here in the future.
• This may be the first year since the mid 90’s that I have not flown enough to maintain top-tier status on my airline of choice (American Airlines). I’m not yet sure how I feel about this.

Anyway, I think that’s enough of that.

On to the real reason behind this post.

Today marks an important day for developers who practice agile development. Microsoft has release version 1.0 of the Visual Studio Scrum template and guidance. The reason that this is an exciting and important announcement is that Microsoft has finally seen fit to release a template that can be used with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server out of the box! (This is a point of debate for many people I know, but I’ve always seen the existing MSF guidance as a starting point that must be customized. Now we have a solution that is good to go from the first install!).

This template was developed from the start by Microsoft, who engaged with some very well-known heavy hitters in the scrum community. This means that the template and guidance provided is not something that won’t hold up to real world development, but rather has been vetted by those who live and breathe Scrum on a daily basis.

Check it out! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aaronbjork/archive/2010/07/19/announcing-microsoft-visual-studio-scrum-1-0.aspx