I’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging front recently, its almost as if I have gone dark, only looking up to get critical things done. During the day I’ve been doing the normal things, cutting code, mentoring making the odd decision here and there and scaring Darren with my stories of tree swinging killer robots (its OK, only I am insane, he backs away slowly everytime I bring it up).

Anyway, during the evenings I’ve been mostly pre-occupied with getting across Visual Studio Team System and its capabilities. One of my specialities at Readify is build automation using tools like NAnt and Draco.NET to help teams improve their general development practices – so its fairly logical that Team System would interest me greatly.

Its fairly safe to say that most of the guys at Readify have top notch development skills in .NET and then have various specialities based on their backgrounds and personal interests. The problem is, because we tend to get into technologies fairly early its hard to find ways for us to get a leg up on things just around the corner – so the only thing we can do is allocate a block of time with some rough goals and dive right in.

I personally had a week or so set aside to investigate VSTS in the first part of this year and I was having trouble finding the time amongst my training, mentoring and consulting schedule so I made the decision to attempt to do it in the evenings after work, the drawback being that I would need to extend the time it took out to about two weeks. So the boss hired three workstations for me and had them delivered to my house. Those machines were picked up this morning so now I have alot my real-estate on my desk and I’m left digesting all that I have learned.

I’m looking forward to sharing that with you guys out there in the blogosphere over the next week or so – but for now – its just good to be back, I’ve got 4,900 unread blog entries to catch up on, I can’t believe I missed the whole VB6 petition thing when it exploded!