I have had versions of all of this stuff installed for some months now. Stuff you ask… this stuff:

• Expressions Blend
• Visual Studio Orcas (and .net 3.5 friends)
• Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP
• Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF
• ReSharper 3.0 EAP

All of these things - individually are nice and fine-ish. They all crash and flop – but they are somewhat OK. Now that I am trying to really do productive work using multiple of these together – I am agahst at the pain in the (*&#$ that I am having with these darn tools!!!! All I can say is that I cannot wait for a single IDE that I can use to make WPF based desktop apps.

• Resharper efforts – abandoned in Orcas (hard to work without it I must admit!). Too many flops – ‘nuf said. This is hard for me as I am a die hard fan! Working for the most part in VS2k5+Cider.
• Orcas – does not play nice – crashes while working a good bit. I will say the designer seems more stable than the Cider (VS2k5 Addins) stuff. The best part is really the nice designer, which I cannot get to play with Infragistics, but is lovely for the “base stuff”
• VS2k5 Cider Addins – designer flops hard – often - painfully, but I am still using it lots
• Blend – happy to say – relatively stable, using mostly with Infragistics stuff – both play nicely. I am NOT happy that the code editing has to take place – elsewhere, I cannot get a good flow here yet (I guess again – i am lost without ReSharper ). NO XAML Intellisense ????
• Infragistics stuff – nice in general. Not too many flops that I can attribute to some IGistics-ism. Once designing in Blend, and editing it more in VS2k5+Cider works

Again – it all works - more or less, it is just not like normal work yet. My current mode is still – style in blend where I can (using some inline XML Data Source stuff to make it look like something). Edit in VS2k5+Cider (Resharper works for the most part), back ‘n forth. Orcas is basically out of the loop – except stand alone “play”.

Thus far – that is my story – may it improve soon!

-Chris

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I am happy to be going to a Certified Scrum Product Owner Course this week in Boston. Having done the scrum thing for a number of years now, I am looking forward to speaking with and thanking the 2 people giving the course Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn.

Ken Schwaber is one of the folks to really started scrum. Without Ken’s writings and efforts – many more of my projects would have been less successful. Scrum has been a key part of my software belief system for some ~4 years now.

Mike Cohn on the other hand has had a profound impact on how I have been doing “requirements”, software planning and estimation. I look at Mike’s work as a sort of 2nd generation of stuff on top of scrum. Mike’s work in using user stories as the product backlog has been instrumental in how I view “requirements”/ feature management – product backlog development. This set of work has built upon the initial “scrum stuff” in a way that has really helped deliver software.

This particular course is focused on the product owner role. I have been spending lots of time “getting together meaningful product backlogs” for all of the teams moving to scrum at my current firm. It is an interesting effort and challenge. I am also trying to coordinated stuff between multiple product backlogs, deal with lots of “technical focused teams”, “infrastructure teams” etc. In a big firm – there is a lot going on! It seems this course is right in the space I need some extra guidance. I think I am aware of all of the writing, newsgroups etc – and these resources have been extremely valueable in going about my business. I have all of the “textbook answers” – now – where the rubber meets the road in daily life – any extra guidance would be great.

-Chris

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