DSL Factory Utilities

Lately, my team has been doing quite a bit of work using the DSL Toolkit. It has been quite a grind, but we've developed some pretty cool abilities.

Now I find that we weren't the only ones struggling and that help is on the way for the guys who start on this path next. Thanks for coming to the party guys!

The dslfactory community posted some great stuff on codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/DslFactoryUtilities

If you are working with the DSL Toolkit even a little, you should check this out.

Microsoft eScrum

It was a quiet release, but Microsoft released a new offering in the Agile space built on Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Here is what the release says:

eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help.

You can download it here.

Looks like things are heating up!

Sharing Agile

In the spirit of sharing, today's post is some reading suggestions for all you agile developers out there. If you are serious about becoming more agile in your development, here are some books you should absorb:

	Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn
	Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
	Agile and Iterative Development by Craig Larman
	Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres

When you've finished with that, shoot me an email and we'll move on to real-world examples.

Gears of War

This is not a post about video games.

First it was Docs & Spreadsheets, now Google is once again cooking up some interesting things that reach beyond the search universe . Check out http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ for an overview of their latest offering.

It's a great concept, if late to the party. In their case, that might not matter. We saw this before with Java, we see it currently with Ajax and we'll see it again tomorrow with another challenger. Everyone wants a piece of the desktop pie and there will be no end of challengers.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the PC is the end-all, be-all, but I recognize clearly that corporations want stable, feature-rich, controlled applications that can be delivered by inexpensive resources. Many of the initiatives in the last few years have forgotten that businesses run by different rules than individuals. What you put up with and is important to you personally is not acceptable and irrelevant to a business. In many cases, the very things you desire for yourself are things that businesses are willing to spend money to ensure you can't have.

In any case, I think this new conglomeration of half-baked technologies has true potential and will be a significant force if it can gain even a small foothold.