Motivation
Like most interesting ideas, TFSToGo came to me at 2:00 in the morning while I was only half awake. It was the week of a major release and I wanted to make sure that my team would arrive at work with a successful build to work with. I was sure that some member of the global team of developers and testers was probably already walking in the door halfway around the world. So I reached over to my iPhone and started scanning emails.
TFS is great at sending out tons and tons of notifications about all sorts of things from check-ins, to work items, to build failures. Long ago I set up outlook rules to fire these into separate folders so it was relatively easy to sort through. However, since I have several dozen builds going at any time it takes a while and some squinting without my glasses to determine if any particular build was ok.
A few days later I had a working prototype which I used for a while and spent a few nights and weekend hours over the ensuing 3 months abstracting it to work more generally.
Acknowledgments
For those of you who follow Infragistics closely you may have noticed that the icons in TFSToGo are from several NetAdvantage Icon packs. I also want to thank our resident TFS MVP for helping Infragistics to heavily exploit TFS's many features to smooth out our development process. If we were still using a custom build environment this app would probably not have been possible, and even if it was it would certainly be much more difficult.
I also want to thank my wife and children who gave me some extra coding time on the weekend in relative peace:)
About The Developer: Joseph K. Croney
As Director of Product Development at Infragistics I lead a worldwide team of engineers that deliver cutting edge software components for Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, SharePoint, JSF, TestAdvantage, and ASP.NET. If you have not checked out the toolset I highly recommend you do so as it can save you countless days of coding functionality which we offer with a simple property.
I spent a number of years working for Microsoft in Redmond as a Program Manager in the MSN, Mobility, and Developer divisions. Some of the more notable products I spent time leading feature teams on include MSN HomeAdvisor, the Mobile Internet Toolkit, and ASP.NET.
When my wife, Laura, and I got a bit tired of the rainy Seattle weather I left Microsoft moved to St Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and founded Calabash Technologies, a Technology start-up which successfully built and introduced a revolutionary handheld GPS Tour Guide. Being loyal to my Microsoft heritage it was all built on a Pocket PC with the .NET Compact Framework (and a tone of p-invokes).
While in St. Croix, I also found some time to share my passion for Computer Science with the next generation of technology leaders as an Advanced Placement Computer Science teacher. I even was able to put J# into use and my students quickly became Visual Studio junkies. I also fully enjoyed the Caribbean lifestyle of St. Croix and fell in love with cruising aboard my 40ft Endeavour Ketch aptly named "Offline" even though I installed a large Wi-Fi antenna on the mizzen. I also kept up with flying small planes and spending as much time outdoors as possible.
When Apple came out with the iPhone I had no choice but to abandon Windows Mobile as an utter failure and began playing with the platform. Even though Apple got it right with the device and overall end user experience I was quickly frustrated with the archaic Objective-C language and non-intuitive development tools. However, once I got over the initial hump of missing the .NET framework and embraced ridiculously long method names things started to go smoothly. I got me feet wet developing a quick app for my younger brother's business Artcards.cc which gives art enthusiast in NYC and San Francisco mobile access to a complete list of every art event and show.
Every now and then I decide to get some time on stage and have spoken at a wide range of events including Microsoft PDC, ASP.NET Connections, Microsoft TechEd, and the College Board’s National Convention.
Outside of spending way too much time in front of the computer I love to be with my wife Laura and two children Joey & Annabelle.
Feel free to drop me a line at joe@croney.net.