Workshop - Optimizing the Software Development Lifecycle with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

The plan for me in Lebanon was to teach 2, week long, Optimizing the Software Development Lifecycle with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System workshops. And then consult directly with some of the companies that came to the workshops - I'd spend a week with these companies either later in the year, June/July.

Setting up a workshop for something you've not taught before in another country is surprisingly difficult. I have the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) instructor manual for the Course (2631), and everyone I've spoken with at IESC headquarters in Washington and the people here in Beirut have been very helpful and enthusiastic and whilst the first day of the workshop was difficult, it's mostly gone very well.

I had a problem with the workshop setup. I had not set up the workshop before and underestimated how difficult it was going to be. So my first couple of days in Beirut were long ones. I had to install and activate 30 virtual machines, which might take maybe a day on good hardware. But I was doing it on my laptop (which had been taken apart at customs and kept giving me minor electic shocks!) and activating them via Microsoft in England so it took much longer than expected.

I also didn't communicate well enough prior to my arrival that the workshop required hardware with quite high specifications. So the first day of the first workshop we had some disappointed participants as their machines and the servers were very slow. But this problem was very quickly dealt with by the local IESC guys (Mahmoud and Mohsen). They worked very quickly to convince the Training Centre to upgrade their machines which they did that afternoon and the workshop worked very well from then on.

I won't repeat what we covered in the workshop as the content on the Microsoft site using the link above is fairly comprehensive. But it's a 3 day course and we had a 5 day workshop so we spread the content over 5 days and added an introductory day and a Q&A and review session for the Friday.

The 2631a workshop is broken into 6 sessions - 2 per day (Tuesday to Thursday).

• Unit 1 - Introduction to Visual Studio Team System
• Unit 2 - Setting up an Application Development Project
• Unit 3 - Designing an Application
• Unit 4 - Building an Application
• Unit 5 - Stabilizing an Application
• Unit 6 - Deploying an Application

The Monday of each workshop week was an overview session for the stake holders and the Friday was a QA and review session day for the participants.