About Me

My name is Peter Bauwens (which you probably gathered from the URL you used to get here J), I’ll be hitting 40 in about 2 years from now (my young fellow team members keep reminding me of this) and I’ve been working for the IT departement of the same financial institution for almost 17 years now. Been maried for 16, got 4 children (ages 15,13,10,3) and don’t own a company car. God, putting this in writing really makes me feel like a dinosaur…. So far for the bad news, let’s get to the goodies. During those 17 years I’ve been able to work with some nice and cutting edge technology. I managed to stay away from big iron, the obligatory programming languages on it, the restrictions and regulations accompanying them and so forth and so on…. Instead I got to play with Borland’s C++ Builder, several Delphi versions, Visual Basic (shame on me) and Visual Studio 2005 (C#). The first decade of my career I designed/built applications for online banking targeted at retail clientele. We started out with a fat client application which had an installed user base of about 70.000, and ended with a web based application with about 150.000 active user accounts. In the mean while we also managed to build and maintain online banking applications for the corporate segment.  During this period I moved from development to technical design and over to project lead so I’ve got some experience with all aspects of software development. About five years ago I moved to a team that builds applications for internal use only. I went back to actually developing software once again. We had a very good time playing around with framework development, code generation, …  At then end of 2005 we finally convinced management to invest in Visual Studio Team System and Agile Development. So the last 2 years I’ve been very busy introducing both in our organization. Because we started out at the end of 2005 using the Beta of Team Foundation Server I think I can say for once in my career we were part of the Early Adopters instead of the Late Majority J Along with our first .Net applications we managed to design and build a software factory which is currently used to build each and every .Net apllication in our company. Which is 14 of them in the past year and a half , ranging from small ones of approximately 70 manweeks to a big one of about 600 manweeks.  Since I haven’t been playing around with development tools lately this blog won’t be technical in nature. I suppose you can expect some insights on the configuration, usage and deployment of Team System. We’ve got people in Belgium, Czech Republic and India using the same Team Foundation Server and working on the same projects so probably I’ll do some stuff on distributed development and virtual teams as well.