Agile Development Methods
Just ran across this excellent annotated slide deck from Howard van Rooijen.
The Value of Agile Methods
I like the Scrum ideas of 4 week milestones with production-quality results. On my team at Microsoft, we used the (not uncommon) approach of mini-milestones, of 6 weeks, if i remember correctly. Biting off small enough chunks gives the team enough feedback that the architectural is (or isn't) working, as well as providing a good morale booster to see the code actually working.
I hadn't seen the sendMSN utility before - that's a great addition to any team's build utilities.
Unit testing, refactoring, continuous integration are all becoming tools of every agile developer's trade, so no surprises there. All good stuff.
When moving to v3.0 of our platform, I began to use CodeSmith for code generation also. What a great tool. All the CRUD SQL sprocs are now auto-generated, with the template of choice, and then we can tweak from there. But since i've also moved to a domain-driven design, and smaller-scale object repositories, I can whip out a new persisted object class, complete with repository, and SQL CRUD procedures in less than an hour.
Obviously a lot of this can be targeted Visual Studio Team System (unit testing, code coverage, FxCop, profiling). I never could get the December CTP running reliably, so hopefully the March CTP and Beta 2 will be a much better test-bed. Even for a small ISV like ourselves, having these tools in place can be a great boon to productivity.