Tag | ALM Posts
Our team at AJI Software has been hard at work over the past year on certifications and projects that has allowed us to reach Gold Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program. We have focused on providing services that not only assist in custom software development, but process analysis and mentoring. I definitely want to thank each one of our team members for all their work. We are currently the only Microsoft Gold ALM Partner for a 500 mile radius around Kansas City. If you or your team is ...
Today I received an email from Microsoft stating that: Dear Jakob Ehn, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Studio ALM technical communities during the past year. This is incredibles news and I really want to thank both the people at Microsoft who nominated me and ...
This post is continued HERE. Looking for the VS 2010 extensions ? Go to extensions for VS 2010. Looking for links to the test adapters, go to this blog post. UPDATE Apr 12th 2013: Updates: Code Contracts, Code Contract Editor Extensions, T4 Toolbox UPDATE Apr 4th 2013: Updates: Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 ,TFS 2012 with Update 2, and Productivity Power Tools 2012UPDATE Apr 2th 2013: Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP 4, added T4 Toolbox, Code Contract Editor Extensions, updated Visual Studio Tools for ...
One of my favorite Code Camps, and not only because it’s only an hour or so away, but because it’s Orlando, Florida! session name: Metro Design Language - WP7 & Windows "8" speaker:Nikita Polyakov level:100 description:Metro Design Language key concepts and ideas around Metro design as it is used in Windows Phone, Windows "8", and even XBOX. We will take a look at different templates available for each platform.ANDname: Intro to Dynamic Prototyping w/ SketchFlow speaker: Nikita Polyakov level: ...
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This past week was just massive in the amount of Betas, evaluations, review guides and educational material that were released. We saw Windows 8 come out in a Customer Preview, the same for Windows 8 Server. There are plenty of things to go over and review, but that is a number of posts coming. If you have been using the TFS Preview, then you pretty much had an idea what you would be looking for in TFS coming out and of course the announcement of TFS Express was exciting. Anyhow, here are a couple ...
From Brian Keller: “I’m very pleased to announce the availability of the Visual Studio 11 Beta ALM Virtual Machine along with 6 hands-on-labs / demo scripts. This marks an exciting milestone in our journey towards RTM. You can now roll up your sleeves and start learning about the many capabilities we announced at TechEd North America last year and have been talking about in greater detail since then. You can download and install the beta of Visual Studio 11 (and Team Foundation Server 11, .NET Framework ...
I've been reflecting on some of the occasions over the years where I have had to step into projects and get them back on track. I've had these kind of situations in different fashions such as a customer I work with has asked me to move to another project because they were having problems or a new client who has contacted me specifically because they have ran into difficulties on their project and need some help. I tend to find that these kind of projects fall into two types. The first is where the ...
I’ll be running a Team Foundation Server 2010 Deep Dive class twice this spring in Stockholm at our friends at Cornerstone. The class is 4 days and we will be “diving deep” into all aspects of TFS 2010, including: Deployment Administration Source Control Check-in Policies Branching strategies Work Items Office integration Reporting Customization Team Build Working with build definitions Developing Custom Activities Automatic deployment Test Management Microsoft Test Manager Creating and running manual ...
Scribe - Test Scribe is a documentation power tool designed to construct documents directly from TFS for test plan and test run artefacts for the purpose of discussion, reporting etc. Scribe only works with Microsoft Test Manager, so if you needed to generate documentation for TFS Builds, what options do you have? You could potentially modify the Build Process template to generate report documentation as the build is executed or you could use the TFS data warehouse to extract data to create rich ...
With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting… ...
January 2012 will go down as one of the most memorable months! What a fantastic way to start the year, received an email from Microsoft telling me that I have been presented with the Microsoft MVP Award in the Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management Competency for 2012. Dear Tarun Arora, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise ...
Greetings, this is my first geeks with blogs posting. so forgive me if it looks so sloppy. Purpose: To calculate additional shipping fees for a shopping cart full of items based on product name in Magento 1.4. We will assume the same shipping rate for all services here. Most items in our store are the same size and weight, except for a few items that are a little larger. We will identify those large items by name and add some amount onto them. First we shall start off with a free open source Magento ...
Bug or Feature? © 2012 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved. I was born in a time and place where avant-garde accountants used a handle-powered adding machines, old-fashioned ones still used pencil and paper, and all used their heads. As a child I did most of my calculations mentally and reverted to paper and pencil only for the really tough ones. As a young statistician I did most of my calculations on an Electro-mechanical calculator which had the ability to do the sum of x while computing the ...
Agility needs to get onto the next level – that´s what I tried to explain in my previous articles. After a reality check – what´s missing from Agile practice? –, and some general musings about how a next level of Agility could look like, here now some very tangible suggestions. Crank up the frequency Current Agile practice is suffering from too little attention to Acceptance. To change this, very, very clear Acceptance dates need to be set. Acceptance can only get into a real pulling mode, if dates ...
I’ve heard people mention, a few times, how they would like for Microsoft to provide a blank template for ASP.NET MVC. The request seems strange because this is something that anyone can do themselves. This isn’t just creating an MVC project and deleting all the items, which I would agree is tedious. Rather, you can create a custom template of any type for reuse and sharing. This blog post shows how to create a custom project template, using the need for a blank MVC template as the use case. Creating ...
I just finished reading new book on Microsoft BizTalk 2010 written by BizTalk colleagues Kent Weare, Richard Seroter, Thiago Almeida, Sergei Moukhnitski, and Carl Darski. There are many good books that explore core BizTalk features for beginners, intermediate, and advanced developers. This one stands out by the fact that it covers relatively less documented aspect of BizTalk development – integrating with different line of business applications. The subject is vast and diverse so attempt to fit it ...
The main way that Twitter provides feeds is through JSON. Unfortunately the version of the .NET Framework that is on the phone does not include the System.Runtime.Serializatio... namespace. Rather than trying to brute force the JSON feed I have been looking into using the Newtonsoft JSON.NET library. The first thing that I ran into with JSON.NET is that the documentation is severely tilted to the serialization side with almost no mention of deserialization. This would have been my preferred approach ...
Let´s get real about software development: It´s never going to be a quietly flowing river. Never. And that´s why the current approaches to software development like XP, Scrum, and Kanban will always cause pain. Their basic assumption is you should be able to isolate a team for a while to work on features. Leave it alone during an iteration or a sprint to complete a set of features, or at least sit still until the current feature is done. Certainly that´s what we all want as developers: being able ...
Highlighting a Managed Application As you search (Google is better, because Bing lacks BANG!!) for existing solutions for SharePoint Central Admin tasks You are usually instructed to highlight one app or another, or one web app or another. Nobody tells you how to achieve this task, but on occasion you scratch your head in puzzlement. You click on the app and some window opens, but you actually wanted the ribbon. Scratch your head no longer! Here is what needs to be done. Just click on the line under ...
In this blog post I’ll be walking you through the process of customizing the TFS 2011 Scrum 2.0 Process Template to add a new work item type, introducing new work item queries, modifying existing queries, adding new reports, etc. To give you a bit of context, at the 2011 ALM Summit Anu Bharadwaj presented a talk on Exploratory Testing highlighting how the Team @ Microsoft took advantage of MTM 2011 to test various VS ALM products in the “fun” way by organizing “Testing Tours.” To dive deep in to ...
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; ...
Build 2011 announced the September release of the Windows Azure Service Bus. For those of you who have just tuned in, the WA Service Bus is part of the AppFabric middleware that enables almost seamless connectivity between applications that are restricted to limited connectivity options by their firewall or custom security protocols. By leveraging the service bus one can build distributed applications on cloud or hybrid solutions featuring on-premise and cloud apps while maintaining the worthwhile ...
Let me clarify what I mean by “3 role” environment. When looking at the division of roles with products, solutions or environments, it has been very normal to break it down into IT Pros (Admins), Developers and End Users. And many approach SharePoint in the same style. Does it fit? Sure. Is it the most effective approach? HECK NO! Let’s look at it piece by piece. Now the question is where do we start? We need to redefine this. In all cases leaving it as IT Pros, Developers and End Users is too broad. ...
We are almost at the start of the new year. The group is currently on our December break from presentations but we are looking to return full steam in January. The Chicago Information Technology Architects Group is community driven and as such we are looking for speakers and topics to keep our community thriving. If you have a topic that you would like to present or know someone who has a topic that they love to talk about in the IT Architecture space please contact me through this blog. del.icio.us ...
In the 2nd Code Clone result it’s pointing out a block of code that is duplicated across 5 different screens. TLDR: Refactored the code out to a abstract ViewModel base class. Also identified a bunch of other obvious code that belonged in the base class and deleted a TON of duplicate code in the process (over 4% of Rawr’s total code!). Net Lines Of Code Deleted: 4625 (!!!) Each character class has a separate screen allowing the user to input stats for their character and then it performs some character-specific ...
Today is the first day of my fourth year at IdentityMine. I can hardly believe how fast it went, and how exciting the trip has been so far. In the past three years, I have had the chance to work on exciting technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation (which is still very much active, and even more exciting since we now have the possibility to add Kinect interactions to any WPF application!), Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 (for which we have a lot of work right now), Microsoft Surface (for which ...
So I was tasked with looking at converting 10 million tracks from mp3 320k to AAC and also Converting from mp3 320k to mp3 128k After a bit of hunting around the tool you need to use is FFMPEG Download x64 WindowsAlso for the best results get the Nero AACEncoder Download Now the command line STEP 1(From Flac)ffmpeg -i input.flac -f wav - | neroAacEnc -ignorelength -q 0.5 -if - -of output.m4aor (From mp3)ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -f wav - | neroAacEnc -ignorelength -q 0.5 -if - -of output.m4aNow the output.m4a ...
(DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We ...
Was working @ home and then arrived nice and early on Monday armed with all this good stuff I did on the weekend. Login,Headphones On, Check Mail and make cup of tea. Goto load up Solution I was working on the weekend@ home What the !!!... If you edit the unloaded Project you will find something like this For some Murphys rule reason even after hitting VS2010 with SP 1 my work box has lost MVC3 so thats why {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FF... is unknown This site has a list of the VS system guids ...
The last few days at the shop have been reminiscent of a marathon of Pawn Stars. Quite a few people have come in wanting to trade for store credit. Most of them have left disappointed. We did pick up a few things here and there (which hopefully I can sell.) The problem, in a nutshell, is that people get it in their head that a (YuGiOh) card is worth X amount because they looked it up 2-3 years a...go, or someone told them it was valuable... then they play it in their deck for a year without sleeves, ...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates ...
So I thought I would change the name of my machine so that the other devs can find the TFS server easily. TFS 2005 would use the cool cmd line util tfsadminutil.....alas he is now gone HERE Are the steps to complete Edit the web.config and is usually located on default install C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\web.config <add key="applicationDatabase" value="Data Source=JUSTIN\SQLI01;Initial Catalog=Tfs_Configuration;I... Security=True;" ...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Three Consecutive numbers When I was young and handsome (OK, OK, just young), my father used to challenge us with riddles and tricks involving Logic, Math and general knowledge. Most of the time, at least after reaching the ripe age of 10, I would see thru his tricks in no time. This one is a bit more subtle. I had to think about it for close to an hour and then when I had the ‘AHA!’ effect, I could not understand why it had taken me so long. So here it ...
It’s no secret that daylight savings time can wreak havoc on systems that rely heavily on dates. The system I work on is centered around recording dates and times, so naturally my co-workers and I have seen our fair share of date-related bugs. From time to time, however, we come across something that we haven’t seen before. A few weeks ago the following error message started showing up in our logs: “The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward, ...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Calculated Fields and some of their Idiosyncrasies Did you try to write a calculate field formula directly into the screen? Good Luck – You’ll need it! Calculated Fields are a sophisticated OOB feature of SharePoint, so you could think that they are best left to the end users – at least to the power users. But they reach their limits before the “Professionals “do, and the tough ones come back to us anyway. Back to business; the simpler the formula, the ...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Naming Documents (or is it “Document, Naming”?) Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name ...
GoodToGo :) Best XML Editor is Altova XMLSpy 2011 http://www.torrenthound.com... For whatever reason Piratebay has trojans and other nasties..Search in torrent.eu for Altova XMLSpy Enterprise Edition SP1 2011 v13.0.1.0 Also if you like the product purchase it in a Commercial Enviroment Any well structured/complex XML can be parsed @ the speed of light using XPATH querys and not ...
Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll ...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Adventures with JavaScript rendered in IE 8, Chrome 15, and Firefox 8.0 I have written a little monogram about the advantages of Math and wrote a few JavaScript applications to demonstrate them. I was a bit careless and used elements on the page in my JavaScript without using any of the GetElementsByXXXX methods to identify them. Say I had a text box named tbSeqNum into which I entered a number to be used in a computation. In my code I simply referred ...
The latest version of the AppFabric ServiceBus now has support for queues and topics. Today I will show you a bit about using queues and also talk about some of the best practices in using them. If you are just getting started, you can check out this site for more info on Windows Azure. One of the 1st things I thought if when Azure was announced back when was how we handle fault tolerance. Web sites hosted in Azure are no much of an issue unless they are using SQL Azure and then you must account ...
So in my previous posts I showed you how I used EDMX to quickly build my business objects within XPO and XAF. But how do you test whether your business objects are actually doing what you want and verify that your business logic is correct? Well I was reading my monthly MSDN magazine last last year and came across an article about using SpecFlow and WatiN to build BDD tests. So why not use these same techniques to write SpecFlow style scripts and have them generate EasyTest scripts for use with XAF. ...
We are excited to share great news and updates regarding the West Palm Beach .Net User Group. Our upcoming meeting will feature Joe Healy from Microsoft as speaker for the November 29th, 2011 6:30 PM meeting. He will be covering the Kinect SDK and answering all our questions regarding the latest Windows Phone 7 Release. We will be also raffling many valuable items as part of our usual free raffle and hope each of our members leaves with a freebie. We are also honored to share that we will be hosting ...
Performance testing is almost always conducted to address one or more risks related to expense, opportunity costs, continuity, and/or corporate reputation. But not everyone thinks their application requires investment in performance testing. We presented few of our clients who were heavily focussed on functional requirements but did not care too much about the Non-functional requirements with a short questionnaire, User’s will be happy if the website loaded in <= ___ seconds. How many extra seconds ...
Two months ago, almost to the day, I opened Big Robot Games. This is my 4th game store (the 3rd actual Brick & Mortar store, in the 4th physical location.) I opened my first store in 1999. It was called Roanoke Hobbies and was located in Roanoke, VA. I partnered up with a buddy from the Navy to open it. It was a really small space, in a terrible location, but the rent was dirt cheap. Even then, we built up a pretty loyal group of regulars and friends. We carried all the traditional fare: Games ...
So, I love how hindsight is 20/20. I love when I carefully (okay sorta carefully) write code, step through it in the debugger, check values, properly catch errors and dispose of objects and you STILL have some stupid error that humbles me a little. Yeah, welcome to my world. In fact I almost didn’t post this blog because I felt pretty foolish, but I figured if I made the mistake maybe someone else did too and I’m all about looking like an idiot if it helps someone else succeed. This is also the part ...
For good or bad, Microsoft’s Entity Framework (EF) has become one of the most widely used ORM tools out there. While some may state that it's not among the better ones (or that it's not even a real ORM), it’s definitely the most convenient one: its Visual Studio integration and consequently its integration with the MS SQL Server database is unparalleled. This is especially relevant to people who haven’t used the concept of object-relational mapping before - there's almost no initial learning curve ...
Once you have configured your online preview, then you can proceed to connect to it using Visual Studio 2010. In order to get Live ID authentication working and such, there is an update you need to apply. This is something that can be accessed through the Administration page, and then clicking on download software. Clicking on that link will take you to the Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog. From this page, you will be able to download the needed component to connect and authenticate ...
A while back read a book called the “pragmatic programmer”. Great book and I highly recommend – A section in the book was titled “Power Editing” and a suggestion they made was to have one editor. The motivation being that it is better to know one editor very well, and use it for all editing tasks: code, documentations, memos, etc. I buy into this concept – up to this point I work primarily in Visual Studio and do any other text editing in notepad or programmers notepad and while I have been able ...
Just recently I bumped into a very nasty bug that I had been unfortunate enough to conjure. Alignment of memory has never been my primary concern when working on the PC. As a typical C++ programmer you often don’t have to think about such things. On the PC this is usually “almost never” (when not optimizing, that is) and in a managed environment this truly should become “never”. On ARM, however, “never” becomes “almost never” again. Having your memory aligned means storing values of different sizes ...