Friday, November 28, 2008

Teamprise Remote Accelerator

(This post is geared primarily towards Visual Studio developers who use Team Foundation Server)

Rarely do you see me sing praise for products out there, but in this case, I felt I have to write about a product that has already increased our team's productivity and its ROI is continuing as our projects are getting larger in scope and source code size.

The product is called Remote Accelerator, by Teamprise. It acts as a local version control proxy for Team Foundation Server - its main functionality is to increase access speed to version control data for remote developers, and boy! does it do it well!

You can read more info (and some benchmarking data) about Remote Accelerator, but if your team uses Team Foundation Server and
you're a code developer who likes to work from home or from remote locations, run, don't walk to purchase this product. For $99, it's a steal!

Friday, November 21, 2008

A piece of history... with some future!

It was nice to be in London for a couple days (although my body isn't getting any younger, so these quick turnaround trips are a bit more tiring lately).

The reason for my visit was dual:

- A visit to the Brooklands museum, where the first one of the Britain-built Concordes (G-BBDG) is resting comfortably at home, to talk to some of the wonderful people there who spend their volunteering hours helping preserve history (and ensure that our Concorde-X product is going according to spec, while we were able to snap some more detailed photos for the FSX and ESP versions).

- The Microsoft ESP conference in London, where my role was dual: As MVP, to sync up with the team and as Flight Sim Labs lead, to meet some very interesting people and ensure our collaborative efforts are ongoing. I was pleased to also be introduced to some excellent and very intelligent people as well who I had not met before, who I expect will be making a big difference in the near future for flight simming as well.