A Teamprise Look Back at 2008

"So, Ed, do you have a blog?"

Ouch. That's a question I didn't want to have to answer, since I haven't put up a post since last July, over six months ago. So this is that blog post where I apologize and make some vague assertions that I've been really busy since then.

To be fair, I have been really busy: let's not forget that Teamprise is a startup. And while we're not the sort of startup where the developers have sleeping bags¹ under their desks and the owners crack the whips, let's make no bones about the fact that there are times when you're working frantically to hit your deadlines and you let the less important things slip. Like writing in this blog.

And although I'm apologizing, we're both probably happier that I'm not blogging when I'm in the midst of the writing lots of code or this would actually end up as a cross between twitter and a trainwreck. I can see it now:

Day 42: It turns out that xstream 1.1.3 is totally incompatible with the IBM JRE that ships with RAD 7.5. Fascinating, huh?

So keeping a little quietude on the blog front lets me get some perspective on what I'm working on, and I can write about the bigger picture instead of whatever tiny hunk of code has pissed me off that day. And the bigger picture is that 2008 has been a whirlwind of development at Teamprise:

Teamprise Client Suite 3.0 - 3.1.3
Client Suite 3.0 was released in March to complement Team Foundation Server 2008, and it included a lot of new features, big performance enhancements, and lots of little improvements². You can read more about 3.0 on Martin Woodward's blog, and more about 3.1 on mine.

Teamprise Remote Accelerator
I snuck away from working on Client Suite for a few months in the fall and focused on this handy application that provides developers a big speed boost when they're remote from their Team Foundation Server. This was an internal tool that we "productized" and released at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October. I'll write more about it soon -- I really should have blogged about it back then, but instead I jumped right into...

Teamprise Client Suite 3.2
We haven't released it yet, but I'm including 3.2 on our year-end retrospective since we've put a lot of effort into its development this year³. As with all the point releases, it's a free upgrade for existing 3.0 customers (or customers who have purchased maintenance), and we think you'll be very happy with it. We're really excited about 3.2, and I'll be writing more about it soon.

So that's my excuse, and while I feel like a guy who's turning in his homework late, there should be some potentially interesting stuff coming up.