Switch.On.Switch.Off

For the past two months, I've been working on several short-term engagements and it is really exhausting. The first engagement was on customizing a MOSS portal using Office SharePoint Designer. Being an idiot in web design, it was trully a challenge for me. I'm glad that I managed to pull it off with a presentable look-and-feel after teaming up with the customer's graphics designer. I only enjoyed the webpart development, the UI portion was really a pain for me.

The second engagement was also on MOSS but it is about building a complex workflow solution using Visual Studio and InfoPath forms. This is very interesting as I have always wanted to build something realistic with my workflow knowledge. In the end, we have got an eleven forms workflow that cycles through the process defined by the customer. It was awesome and internally, I call it the Mother-of-all-Workflows. I think I will continue to invest time in learning up workflows development.

The final engagement ended yesterday. As usual, I felt sad leaving the customer. In my line of work, it is as though I'm joining a new company and quiting every month (or weeks) or so. It's like my work gets resetted every now and then. This engagement was something I had always looked forward to - a Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) engagement. Finally, I get to utilize my software development and project management knowledge.

It was great to be in a development environment again - developers checking-in checking-out code, resolving defects, deploying their solutions etc. I felt so excited when they deploy their application to production - for a moment, I really thought that I was one of them and I cheered for them. But then, my role is to actually assist the project manager and the team to realise the capabilities of VSTS in their environment. (So I don't really take part in the coding, not even peeking at their architecture).

Instead of making it a 15 days "Talk-fest", I have decided to help the customer out with some more practical (and process) work that could help bring more value into their environment. Through the process, I have pick-up some skills in WorkItem customizations and Build Automation, and learned more about VSTS's strengths and limitations. The toughest part was to get everyone to understand the Software Configuration Management (SCM) process flow since there were so many regulations and compliance policies to adhere to.

Things are often more complex in a real-life environment. The process to manage parallel development alone is enough to make everyone go insane. But luckily, Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) could handle most of the branching, merging, shelving and conflict resolution issues.

Anyway, the engagement is over and next week, I will be conducting a series of workshops on .NET 2.0 and VSTE for Software Developers for another customer. All these "context switching" is really driving me crazy. I'm looking forward to a year-end break which my manager has yet to approve (I think).