Jeff Beehler wows them at SDNUG (and Sydney still has some honest folks left)

Last Wednesday Jeff did a talk at SDNUG about managing the TFS project and dog-fooding TFS along the way.  Unlike all the other TFS talks Jeff did across Australia like the one in Canberra, Chuck offered us the option of getting Jeff to speak on the team dynamics of building TFS as opposed to TFS the product.  I love these talks, and quickly agreed with Chuck that this would be a much better talk.  If you are interested in TFS as a product, there are dozens of webcasts and articles that are available to educate and entertain.  Hearing Jeff speak on the process on building TFS was a unique experience - though he will be covering a lot of the material in an upcoming blog post.

Jeff's talk was great, and sold the product much better than a feature-set run down ala Prashant Sridharan.  While Prashant's demos are silky-smooth and show the product in all its glory, hearing Jeff talk passionately about why and how they did certain things in the product was much more compelling viewing.  Obviously having a product manager spruiking the virtues of the product to the unconverted makes sense, but in a user-group setting, having Program Managers talk about the product to the converted makes much more sense.  (For a good run-down on the differences between the two roles at Microsoft, check out this post by my old friend and yours, John Montgomery (who was gracious enough to give me permission to include performance figures in my book)).

As an aside to demonstrate there are still good folks left in the world, one of the attendees at the meeting lost his wallet on the train into the city for the meeting.  The wallet turned up in his letterbox yesterday with no return address or note, but the contents intact.