A week into 2007 already I thought I'd post a review of 2006 to give you an idea of the variety of life as a Platform Architect at Conchango.
In January I was assigned to Marlow in leafy Buckinghamshire with colleague and fellow workaholic Howard van Rooijen (who took on the dev lead role) to work on Infrastructure, build and deployment tasks using WiX and MSBuild for the HMV Digital jukebox service. Specifically, to migrate the project out of Microsoft where it had been running for the previous year and to take it "in house". To do this entailed a migration from Microsoft's internal source control and bug tracking systems into Team Foundation Server (TFS).
There was also fun whilst the server was built in place at HMV on their domain, and I transported it by car to TVP (Microsoft UK headquarters) so it could be migrated to. I carried the server in and out of TVP through the turnstiles in Building 2 and the migration ran on someones desk over a weekend ;) Of course, we only had TFS "Beta 3 Refresh" available to us at the time and so the migration was a bit flaky and was aborted at least twice.
I remember running the excellent tool Fiddler and after some analysis finding out that the web pages being served up from the live site were not being compressed correctly. In the end, page sizes were reduced by 85% just by setting a couple of metabase entries in IIS!
HMV was one of a number of customers to be using a beta version of the "Scrum for Team System" methodology plugin for Visual Studio Team System that we created. HMV's case study can be found here: http://www.conchango.com/Web/Public/Content/Clients/CaseStudyDetails.aspx?PageID=76
Scrum for Team System kept myself, Howard and Colin Bird our CTO extremely busy most evenings and weekends until we released version 1.0 at the end of March - coinciding with the release of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server 1.0 (my primary tasks were to create the installer using WiX, develop some of the features and keep all our build environments up to date with the latest software).
I was at HMV until mid-May and we had a number of successful releases. Then, my wife and I moved house, which was a bit chaotic to say the least... and the following week flew to Australia for 3 weeks of catching up with relatives in the north and south of the country before returning home via a couple of nights in Hong Kong - which is one amazing place to pick up gadgets.
2006 marked some significant interest in projects around new Vista technologies and specifically Windows Presentation Foundation (previously: Avalon). I was lucky enough to be on the beta programme for Vista since 2005 and on the Expression "Sparkle" CAB and have access to all the private builds, long before two renames later we know it as Expression Blend.
I was assigned to go to Redmond to work with the guys in the WPF team who were at the time helping the New York Times deliver their Times Reader product. (http://firstlook.nytimes.com/?category_name=Times%20Reader). The time spent in Redmond gave me an interesting insight into how the teams actually worked together at a time between July CTP and RC1 of Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0. I can't reveal too much about what I was working on there, but needless to say it was all exciting stuff and you may get to hear about it in a few months time ;) I remember watching the World Cup final in my hotel room whilst coding at the weekend!
Fortunately, I did manage to get some time to myself to do shopping and see the sights of Seattle whilst I was there!
The remainder of July and August disappeared in a cloud of career development sessions for the technology guys who we coach.
Then, in September I was called in to help out on one of our larger development projects (it had been running over a year) to ensure the right decisions were being made about the hosted deployment environment and that we hadn't forgotten anything (e.g. firewall rulesets, server lockdown/security policy decisions, load balancing rules, service account rules and permissions, etc.) Technologies were mainly SQL Server 2005, replication and Reporting Services, with .NET 2.0 and ClickOnce deployment thrown in for good measure so plenty to configure!
I enjoy being thrown in at the deep end in these sort of projects, although it can be stressful whilst you have you reverse engineer how all the bits in the system plug together and you end up spending every hour on it!
In October and November I was back in creative territory making demos for customers in WPF, drawing on my experiences of Redmond and my WPF learnings from earlier in the year and then helping the customer get setup with all they need to get started on the project itself.
At the end of November I was airlifted into another development project in our London office that was in the midst of deployment. Primary technologies were SQL Server 2005, Reporting Services, Commerce Server 2007 and Biztalk Server 2006 and saw me creating an automated deployment process, based loosely around MSBuild and the Microsoft SDC/SBF Framework build tasks (with a few of our own) as well as helping the hosting provider through the necessary firewall rulesets and deployment "mediation" I shall call it!
From what I’ve seen of 2007 so far, it is going to be a busy year! Best book those holidays now before it gets to December again!
Does this sound like your average day? Are you the go-to guy who is expected to know everything even if you haven’t seen the technology before? If so, then we probably want to hear from you. Get in contact via the contact form on my blog.