Channel 9 Brian Harry Interview

Brian Harry was recently interviewed about his career and the evolution of Team System.  Mr. Harry is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, an original developer of Visual Source Safe, and currently leads the development team that creates Team System.  His popular blog is a favorite of mine and is full of great advice for anyone using VSTS.

Although this interview is about an hour long, it is chock full of great information including these irrelevant nuggets:

1. In a typical day of software development at Microsoft, 3 merges of over 1,000,000 code lines may occur simultaneously on the same code base.  Wow.  Seriously, wow.
2. A build of Windows can take up to 24 hours.
3. Source Safe was originally developed by 2 guys in 1993 and later acquired by Microsoft.
4. Microsoft built an entire development team around a person they believed in rather than letting him quit when he decided to move back to the east coast.  Cool.
5. VSTS is a truly open and extensible platform.  No one believes it the first time they hear it.

This interview is a great look into the culture of Microsoft and the state of our industry.