TechEd 2007 – Barcelona here I come (maybe)

I’ve been to TechEd the past two years, once to Rotterdam and once to Barcelona. And I must admit I liked it very much on both occasions. Good technical content and the ability to talk to several MVP’s and Microsoft employees made this so much interesting than attending e.g. DevDays. So I was looking forward to attend TechEd this year too. I suppose it came as no surprise at all that Murphy showed up and only one team member was allowed to go while two applied for the trip.

And then, out of the blue, when I least expected it, Microsoft Belux offered a free ticket leaving only travel and expenses to be paid by my employer. So today I filed my request once again, hoping my manager will approve it this time. Only time will tell… Thx for offering Microsoft Belux!

Update 4/9/07

mission accomplished, cya in barca

Developer Machine Upgrade

Our .Net developer count went up from about 3 people in the beginning of 2006 to about 40 people at this very moment. The result of this is that few of them have the exact same PC configuration on their desks. Most of them have Pentium 4 machines but CPU speed ranges from 1.8Ghz up to 2.8Ghz and memory ranges between 512Mb and 2Gb. Don’t even get me started on hard disk capacity and speed J.

It’s been a while since we first asked operations to get everybody on par and it seems it is going to happen now very soon. I’ve seen the new babies and while it’s not the cream of the crop I think they will make a huge difference. While most of the new machines in our company are supplied by Dell it looks like we will get HP dc7700 Small Form Factor machines, specs can be found at HP’s website. We will basically all get a Core 2 Duo machine (I think 1.8Ghz) with 2Gb of ram and a fast Serial ATA 3Gbs hard disk. On top of this I will try to get approval for excluding Visual Studio, the MSDN library and our workspaces from Virus Scanning. This should make our developers fly…

The master plan is to do a pilot with 6 machines and convert the lot of them (>60 PC’s) in a few days. I wonder how this will turn out.

Note to myself: make sure you are on top of the list! J

Mac or PC?

 

Watch the vid or pay a visit to Ralinx’s Blog 

First Post

It took me quite some time before I decided to start up a blog of my own. Plagued by a lot of FUD concerning topics I would cover, impact of written statements visible to anybody walking the surface of this earth (not to mention colleagues), etc… made me somewhat reluctant to kickstart this effort. I’m still not sure what to cover and what not but I hope that all of this will fall into it’s place as soon as I just get started. I suppose spilling some information about who I am and what I do is somewhat obligatory in a first post, so here goes…

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.

Some of my collegues have nice blogs about the technical aspects of what we’re doing, you can find them in my blog roll. The only thing left to say is: ‘Happy reading and if I bore you too much, stop visiting this site J)