Welcome to GeekNoise. My name is Peter Provost and I am a Program Manager for Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition. Before joining Visual Studio, I was a developer and the development manager at Microsoft patterns & practices, where we made cool things like Enterprise Library and a whole bunch of other useful guidance. Before coming to Microsoft, I spent 15 years as a consultant in Denver, CO where I worked on web, e-commerce, custom application development and agile coaching projects for a variety of customers.

I've been developing computer software since I was a kid. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember typing in Apple Basic programs from magazines. Debugging the typing typos on our Apple II+ was where I learned to really see a program in my head. Soon enough I was writing my own programs and games in Basic and later Forth, Pascal and a number of other languages.

We got our first PC when I was in high school and while it took me a bit of time to get used to it, I did. While spending too much time on various BBS systems and playing new games like Gato, I taught myself to program in C. By the time I discovered C++ I was already playing around with Windows programming making old-school SDK style windows apps (ala Petzold).

Since then (late 80s), I've been pretty exclusively a Windows programmer, although there have certainly been explorations into UNIX (college), Linux (home) and other things like BeOS and Palm. I'm a huge fan of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Lua and ECMAScript, but most of my professional work has been done in C/C++ and C#.

Around 2000, I discovered Extreme Programming (aka XP) and the world of agile software development. There weren't many coaches or classes at the time, just Ward Cunningham's C2 Wiki and a few other sites like Ron Jeffries's XProgramming.com. Later that year Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change came out and along with The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master became my bible for a few years. Since then, I've been coaching and leading agile teams using a variety of agile methods. Now that I'm at Microsoft, I continue to try to infect the teams with which I interact with the agile bug. I've been pleasantly surprised by the uptake of agile at Microsoft and in particular in VSTS.

Over the years, I've done a lot of public speaking at conferences and industry events. You may have bumped into me at any one of these:

• Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (aka PDC)
• Microsoft Tech Ed
• patterns & practices Summit
• Agile Conference
• Regional DevDays Events

Most of the content here is on my blog, but I also plan to bring up a wiki soon. My family are all pretty active bloggers too, and you can find links to them as well.

Enjoy!

--Peter