This week our project team has been impacted by some connectivity problems to backend systems that we are integrating with. Connectivity has always been an issue because the components we required to communicate with the backend weren't available, so in order to get this done we created dummy objects to simulate the backend. That was very successful but we are now at the point that all that remains to be done is the actual integration.

Strangely this situation doesn't come up too often because you can usually find other features to be adding to the software within a particular iteration. We are now slipping time at a 1:1 ratio and there isn't much we can do about it but find ways to spend the time productively.

I'm working with Joseph Cooney on this project and so today we decided to book a room and projector and cover a few topics with the team presentation style that we think are going to be useful moving forward. It wasn't complex stuff, but necessary background for upcoming iterations. The topics covered included:

  • .NET Role-based Security
  • The web-services stack - under the covers.
  • WSE 2.0 Overview
  • Component-based Development and Extender Providers

My machine also had Whidbey BETA 1 installed so we showed off a few of the new features, and in doing that its already apparent how if we were working with Whidbey today our productivity would be significantly improved. Not bad for a 15-minute demo.

So almost by accident we have had our first internal user group meeting - it just ran long by a few hours.