Thursday, May 18, 2006

Welcome to MarshalByRefObject

Ah, the welcome post. It's a strategically critical post where we outline who we are and why we are doing this.

As to the why, it's pretty simple really. We hope to share some of the things we've learned, and will learn, with the community at large to give back for all the times we have been helped by others. Either that or, as one of our contributors likes to say, become world famous through our blog so that we can demand incredibly high salaries.

Now that we have that cleared up, who are we?

We're a group of software developers that are working with Visual Studio 2005 Team System Developer edition. We have a mix of Win32 C++, managed C++ and C# code (there's the odd bit of VB, but we don't like to talk about that :). One of our current (and, I'm sure, ongoing) projects is customisation of our internal Team Foundation Server (for which the hardware is almost here). We will be creating migration apps (for PVCS and TRACK data), applets that are triggered by TFS events, custom build scripts, Work Items, etc. Essentially, we will be touching pretty much every area of the TFS server in order to better fit our internal processes. We hope to share some of our triumphs (and failures too) with you.

Our "real" jobs are working in product development for a training solutions company. Our products are custom built for our clients with lifecycles that are often one or two years long. Sometimes they are a mix of hardware and software, sometimes just software. Most of our products are "variations on a theme" so we do have the concept of a "product line" (even though every version is custom).

Why the title "MarshalByRefObject"?
  1. Because we took a vote and that was the winning entry?
  2. Because Marshall is a contributor?
  3. Because .NET Remoting is seriously cool?

The answer, my friends, is all of the above (although we won't admit to #2 as we don't want anyone's head to swell :).

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