We help teams get productive, cut waste, and deliver great software.

Scrum Training & Coaching

Want to be more Agile? Looking for an Agile transformation? Need Scrum training or someone to help your Scrum teams improve their game? We can help. We offer three different Scrum courses. We also can embed with your teams to help them develop their Agile & Scrum "muscle memory".

Ever get the feeling that one or more of your teams just isn't "clicking" and kind of needs a therapist? Do you suspect there's a general malaise in your development organization? We can help with that, too.

More

Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio ALM, & DevOps Consulting

Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio ALM (VS ALM) can help your teams communicate more efficiently and be more productive. It can also help you with your ALM and DevOps automation concerns through automated builds, automated Release Management, automated testing, and more. We've been doing this for years and we can help.
More

Development & QA Best Practices

Software development doesn't have to be painful and software testing doesn't have to be a magical black box. We can help your developers learn and adopt the skills to help them to build high-quality, maintainable code. We can help your QA testers plan and manage their work to help ensure quality in your final product.

We'll help everyone learn to work together so that quality becomes something you think about every day rather than something you think about at the last second.

More
Posts / View All

  • VSLive Redmond 2017: Unit Testing for Mere Mortals Slides & Code

    I just wrapped up my talk at VSLive Redmond 2017 — “Unit Testing & Test-Driven Development (TDD) for Mere Mortals”.  Thanks to all the attendees for the great questions. As promised, here are my slides and code samples. Unit Testing & Test-Driven Development (TDD) for Mere Mortals Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD) arguably mean […]

  •

    VSLive Redmond 2017: Entity Framework Core for Enterprise Applications

    I just wrapped up doing my new Entity Framework Core for Enterprise Applications talk at VSLive Redmond 2017.  I had a lot more content that I could have ever possibly covered in 75 minutes.  As promised, here are the slides and EF Core code samples for that talk. Entity Framework for Enterprise Applications What do […]

  •

    Another workaround for the EF Core FileLoadException / DiagnosticSource problem

    Have you tried doing a “dotnet ef migrations” or “dotnet ef database update” command for Entity Framework Core and gotten this error? System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource, Version=4.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’. The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040) File name: ‘System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource, Version=4.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’ at […]

  •

    VSLive Austin 2017: Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master

    As promised, here are the slides from the Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master talk at VSLive Austin 2017. Here’s the abstract: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you probably don’t have any real power. […]

  •

    VSLive Austin 2017: Entity Framework Core for Enterprise Applications

    I just wrapped up doing my new Entity Framework Core for Enterprise Applications talk at VSLive Austin 2017.  I had a lot more content that I could have ever possibly covered in 75 minutes.  As promised, here are the slides and EF Core code samples for that talk. Entity Framework for Enterprise Applications What do […]

  •

    Walkthrough: Use a Package from a Private NuGet Server in VS2017 & TFS2017 Build

    In my last post, I showed you how to set up a private NuGet server in TFS2017 and publish a NuGet package to it from a build.  But how do you reference and use that package in another solution and/or another build?  Well, keep reading and you’ll find out. I’m going to do this in […]

  •

    Walkthrough: Publish to Private NuGet Server from TFS2017 Build

    NuGet is for package management is great.  Refer to some package from your Visual Studio projects and you can easily include those binaries in your project.  And if you’re got some library that you want to share with the world, you can publish a NuGet package and everyone can use your stuff. But what if […]

  •

    “DevOps with ASP.NET Core, EF Core, & TFS2017”: Slides & Code

    [Updated 3/23/2017 — If you saw this talk at DevBoston or Code Camp Boston, it’s the same slides and code at NYC .NET.] I spoke at the NYC .NET Developers user group last night and gave my new “DevOps with ASP.NET Core, EF Core, & TFS2017” talk. DevOps is all about software delivery.  Create an […]

  •

    Deploy Entity Framework Core Migrations from a DLL

    [Updated 3/29/2017 — Added a bash version of this script for deploying EF Core Migrations from Linux.] Entity Framework Migrations let you deploy incremental updates to a target database.  With Entity Framework Core (EF Core) this is done from the command line by going to the directory that contains your Entity Framework entity and migration code, […]

  •

    A Non-Terrible Workaround for the Dreaded EF Core Migration FileLoadException Diagnostics Problem

    In my Entity Framework Core Migrations walkthrough, I showed a workaround for an exception when you add a migration.  If you ran “dotnet ef migrations add” on a netcoreapp1.1 project, you’d get the following exception. System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource, Version=4.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51’. The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the […]

  •

    TFS Build / Release Configuration Utilities: Edit app.config, web.config, appsettings.json, and XML

    When you’re working automated builds and automated releases, you frequently need to edit configuration files like app.config, web.config, and appsettings.json. Well, I wrote a command line utility to do this and I figured I’d share.  I’ve got a version that is an .exe that can be used on a Windows build agent and I’ve got a version that’s written […]

  •

    “How do I update my TFS2017 build agents?”

    I got a question recently asking how to make sure that your on-premise Team Foundation Server 2017 build agents are up to date.  If you’ve installed a bunch of build agents over time, you’ll notice that when you go to download the bits, that the version number sometimes changes.  They generally stay up to date […]