Tag | ALM Posts
*Moved to: Learning more about Visual Studio 2008Well, that's me well and truly back from my holidays, a nice relaxing couple of weeks spent at home with my family. As a kind of New Years present, Microsoft has released a free learning initiative for those of you that are or will be using Visual Studio 2008. I am taking it myself as a way to make sure that I have not missed anything :)Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
Ever felt like it would be cool to upload photos straight from Photo Gallery? Well I definitely have. I almost downloaded Google's Picasa 3 just to be able to do this. The upload tool that's provided on Facebook.com always fails on me, so creating albums in Facebook was just too much of a pain to mess with. Fortunately Will Duff, a developer intern this past summer at Microsoft created a plug-ins for both Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. Awesome news!!! Here's the info: Do you share photos on Facebook? ...
As you may know, I do mostly WinForms development at my current position. Altogether, I do have an affinity for WinForms development over web development, mostly because simple websites were easy to make when I was young, but making a windows application was something I didn't do until much later on. Well, WindowsClient.net is a great Microsoft resource for those interested specifically in smart client applications, and the even better news is that the bulk of the videos for WinForms in particular ...
Well, wifey called me (and the world) to task, so I figured I should step up. I'll admit, I was being one of the debbie downers reflecting on everything that I didn't get done this past year. So, well here it is, some reflections on things that I did well and accomplished in 2008. It' all about the family and I made sure I focused on that. My wife and I had a great year. I mean, a REALLY REALLY REALLY good year. Our relationship has never felt stronger (and well, I feel we've been pretty strong from ...
In Part 1 of this series, we looked at a simple template to help you can use to help document the security roles that need to get created for your new SharePoint application. In this part, we will look at a common process that is used to augment your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)and targets applications that you think might be suitable for running on the SharePoint platform. As you read through this blog post it is important to note that this process (or something similar) can be used to ...
In this issue: Jim Lynn, Silverlight Girl, Microsoft Natal, Damon Payne, Lutz Gerhard, Tamir Khason, Imran Shaik, Ning Zhang, and Joe Stegman. Shoutout: Cameron Albert is almost to the Alpha stage on Parenthia. Check it out: Almost Alpha Time! From SilverlightCream.com: Christmas in Silverlight Jim Lynn sent me this admittedly no-code Christmas card. Cool Deep Zoom demo though... I like it :) Create shadow effect in Expression Blend - Part 2 Silverlight Girl Continues with her Expression Blend Shadow ...
This is written to explain Dependency Properties in general as they are available in .NET Framework 3.0 but specifically targeting Silverlight 2.0, in most places effort has been placed to explain the differences in Dependency Properties in WPF and Silverlight (With Silverlight perspective). But all examples are for Silverlight. What is Dependency Property? Dependency properties are new addition to .NET Framework 3.0, Dependency properties are completely new implementation of properties, all programmers ...
In this issue: Damon Payne, Bryant Likes, Expression Blend and Design BLog, Jesse Liberty, and Kevin Dockx. Shoutouts, and almost as many of these as Silverlight posts: This isn't Silverlight, but the Shoutouts aren't necessarily :) ... Bill Reiss announed that Dr. Popper now on Xbox Live Community Games... very cool, Bill! Joe Stegman has an Update on Silverlight and Opera from yesterday's post... if you're using Opera and Sivlerlight, give this a read. Jeff Paries has entered the MIX 10K Challenge ...
RT @NikitaP: 100 Cities That Need a Nap http://is.gd/d6k6 Results are: 100. Miami, Fla ...89. Tampa, Fla. - is this why I am awake?! PS: Seattle is merely 61. [Posted 4:37AM] Tampa, FL #11 We have almost as many night clubs, bars and "other" late night venues as #1 Miami, FL. I don't know why Orlando is #3 on there, everything closes at 2AM there. Guess it's because large portion works in hospitality and works nights..? Was interesting to see Seattle #39 no where close to FL, which ranked top with ...
I'm on a bit of a fun project here at work: while most of the team is away me and a co-worker have been tasked with setting up an internal BizTalk environment that we can set up with a sample application and use as demo/reference material. We hit a snag though, and I'm putting this post out as a warning to others that may tempt fate and walk in our path: DON'T CHANGE THE SSO PASSWORD OR ACCOUNT! But I digress...how did we get here? Well, we noticed that there were a bunch of BizTalk services that ...
In this issue: Steve Commisso, Silverlight Girl, Tim Greenfield, Damon Payne, and Agata Staniak(2). Shoutout: Adam Kinney reported on Twitter that the SilverlightNews Twitter feed has been getting a lot of new followers lately. Welcome aboard, and tell a friend :) From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Extenders Steve Commisso is a local (Phoenix) developer and sent me this link to some extenders he has done that are very cool. Dragging, rotating, resizing, etc... very useful and I look forward to ...
So it finally came! The big St. Louis Day of .NET event. Man was I tired afterwards. We had it at CAIT and we reached our limit of the number of bodies that were supposed to fit into that facility. We had to finally shut off registrations because we were afraid there would not be enough room for everyone to sit! CAIT is a teaching facility so the rooms were laid out with workstations and plenty of desktop space. We rented chairs to fill in the blanks. Some rooms were VERY tight. Next year, we'll ...
First off (Since I am likely to get hate e-mail over the title of this post), let me say I am a huge fan. I saw them for the first time on Nov. 16, 1983 It was a fantastic show, and the first real concert of my life. It was arena rock at it's finest, at what I consider to be the apex of genre. This is my perspective when evaluating last night's show. I still enjoy the heck out of Angus Young's playing and he is a strong influence on my electric guitar playing (my acoustic...not so much). The show ...
I do performance measurements quite regularly which involves to call a piece of code several times to measure how long it did take. I am sure nearly everybody has done this already. But as a physicist I know that (nearly) every measurement has fundamental problems which never go away. Key to a successful measurement is that you exactly know what you are measuring and not what you think you measure. The easiest way to get out of this dilemma without too much knowledge is to simply ignore the fact ...
An attempt to trade quality for cost or schedule actually results in increased cost and a longer schedule. Steve McConnell, Professional Software Development What has long been known in other businesses is true for software development as well: if you cut corners for shorter schedules or lower costs, you will get longer schedules, higher costs, and higher defect rates; but if you take the right measures to lower defect rates, you can get lower defect rates and shorter schedules and lower costs. As ...
With Vista and Windows Server 2008 comes and new amazing feature: the possibility to include file system operations into a transaction. The functionnality is implemented as the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM). Requirements: Biztalk must be installed on a Vista box or Windows Server 2008 (which is not supported afaik). I had to implement this functionnality inside in a pipeline component in a Biztalk 2006 R2 solution . I started with the wrapper provided on Codeplex and it did not worked as expected. ...
There are 2 cool things I want to share here... Partial Mocking This is a very cool and useful feature of RhinoMocks, which allows you to test part of a class, but have some of it act normally. Its explained very well here: http://ayende.com/Wiki/(S(g... Making "protected" methods available for mocking. Partial mocks are great, but what do you do when you need to "mock" out a method that isn't visible to your test class - i.e. its private or protected. ...
Continuing The Project That Time Forgot, a UML case study in comic strip form... (Click pictures for larger images.) “We grow dinosaurs!” Big whoop, huh? Like anyone reading the strip hadn’t figured that out before I started Scene 1… It’s hard to surprise the characters in a story when the audience can tell from the promos what the surprise is. But since The UML Guy has been part of the project before, none of this was a surprise to him. So while the others were taking in the new sights, he was drawing ...
I really enjoyed the first St. Louis Day of .Net. There were over 200 people that showed up! My session this year was on Open Source Solutions for Application Lifecycle Management. Besides being one of the non totally Microsoft sessions, I also had the honor of having the longest title for the entire Day of .Net. Application Lifecycle Management is a huge topic, and I only had 50 minutes to cover some stuff, so I limited it to the following 4 areas: Defect Tracking and Change Management Unit Testing ...
*Moved to: Managing the “VSTS Developers” LinkedIn group. After making sending a “Call to Action” to my fellow Team System MVP’s I have added two managers to the VSTS Developers group I started on LinkedIn.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
I was working at home this weekend and I left my USB to Serial adapter at the office. My office is only 4 miles from home, but I didn’t feel like driving all the way there. But I almost did because I needed to capture the RETAILMSG output from an application that I was working on. I wasn’t using them so much for debugging, but instead to output some data. I decided to redirect the output and skip going to the office. The first thing that I did was to modify the application to use printf instead of ...
How can you use the word efficient memory usage and mention in the same headline .NET? We all know that C++ is much more efficient with regards to memory consumption. Yes I agree that if you really love your memory you should think twice if .NET is the right choice for you. There have been reasons why Windows Vista has not a single managed executable executed while starting up. Ok the Event Viewer is managed which explains why it is starting so slow. First of all you need to know what things cost. ...
A user group officer has referred a friend to me -- his friend wants to start a user group and does not know where to begin. The three of us are going to work together to get a group up and running. I will blog my advice, the acutal steps (and notes on what works and what doesn't). Phase 1: In this phase, we're going to start planning and create the user group. The group must exist before you can do anything else (promote it, recruit speakers etc). Find one enthused person that wants to spearhead ...
It's true, I'm a Gmail junkie. I've been using Gmail pretty much since the first week it was available. I don't know what I'd do without it. In addition to email, I use it as a massive filing cabinet for all kinds of stuff I just never know if I might need or not... it's always accessible and whatever I stuck in it, I can find with just a quick search term or two. Lately, they added a couple of new features worth mentioning. 1) SMS chat in gTalk is pretty cool, though I don't text nearly as much ...
I know I am updating almost every day about the event. I have no idea why, but I am really excited. I've never planned anything. I helped out a little with KC Day of Dot Net, but it's definitely not the same. I feel sympathetic for Lee Brandt. So we have a registration page and a word document that people can fill out to submit speaker abstracts. I am going to start working within the next few days to get more sponsors and setup the sponsor page. If you want to register for the event or download ...
Continuing The Project That Time Forgot, a UML case study in comic strip form... (Click pictures for larger images.) And just in case you can't read that sign above the gate, here's a larger view: So Editor Bill looked at this strip and said, "Geez, Martin, what happened? You spent so much time drawing that volcano cone, you didn't have time for any UML?"* "What?" I said, "You don't see the UML content in this Episode?" "Well, yeah, there are a couple new systems mentioned, I guess." "Ah," I said, ...
Char.IsDigit and Char.IsNumber are both methods within the System namespace. The methods themselves are almost confusing in name at first glance. You might think that they do the same thing, but then why have both? Well, because they don't do the same thing. IsDigit refers to only the decimal digits whereas IsNumber can refer to anything in the numeric Unicode category. So, if you just want decimal, stick with IsDigit. Otherwise, you'll be getting a lot more than you bargained for if cleaning data ...
Good news ... On Monday December 8th, 2008 Microsoft announced Public beta of BizTalk Server 2009 (https://connect.microsoft.... What’s new in BizTalk Server 2009? Ø Simplify Interoperability ü Support for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - take advantages of the latest developer tools. ü Support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 – full support of Hyper-V, and increased performance and scale. Ø Extend To The Edge ü EDI - enhanced out of the ...
In this issue: Page Brooks, Jeff Wilcox, Jesse Liberty, Robby Ingebretsen, Rob Zelt, and Jonas Follesø. Shoutouts: Jeff Weber is giving some sneak peeks at a new game: Introducing Tire Storm (Sneak Peek). Shemesh has updated his Grid splitter: Silverlight: GridSplitter with a collapse button (V2). From SilverlightCream.com: Building a Resizable Silverlight Control Page Brooks has a nice tutorial on building a resizable control... why you may need to do that and how... cool stuff, Page! Creating a ...
Microsoft's SDL Optimization model is for moving your organization along in their Security Development Lifecycle. The SDL is really born out of a lot of lesson's learned and pain realized by Microsoft over the years. The idea is to build into your development process a more security centric focus throughout the lifecycle. The Optimization Model follows this diagram: The idea here is to first determine where your organization is at, figure out where you want to be, and determine how to get there. ...
Dec 6th' 08 I presented ADO .Net Sync services at the Tampa code camp. This was my 6th presentation on same topic in as many months and except Orlando Tech Ed I did not see enough developers interested in Sync services. At first it was kind of disappointing to see just 15 developers in the session but then I realized that there were few other sessions running parallel and the one that had biggest crowd was MVC architecture in ASP .net. I guess that's true for winform or smart client development. ...
Today is the end of my very first week at IdentityMine. Let me just say that it was really great. In the same week I worked on a proposal for a client (maybe our very first project in the new European IdentityMine, crossing fingers) and prepared a presentation for next week. I'll be flying to Vienna, Austria on Wednesday morning and will go back home on Friday evening. I will demo various technologies that IdentityMine is working on, and I am really looking forward to that experience. Next week is ...
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My XNA talk went really well today. I had a full room, no equipment malfunctions and quite possibly the most questions in a session yet. I almost ran out of time with all the questions, and continued answering them into lunch (which was right after my session.) I also met a couple folks interested in starting another XNA user group, right in Kansas City. Very cool. Everyone I've met and interacted with has been super nice. It's a really good event (around 100 people... just right) and a nice venue ...
Continuing The Project That Time Forgot, a UML case study in comic strip form... (Click pictures for larger images.) There's the business, and then there's the role of the system within the business. If all you focus on is the role of the system, you can miss chances to see where the system's really needed. So time permitting, I would rather start by understanding the whole business and then work inward. Oh, sometimes the division is very clear: if my client asks for a change to their payroll system, ...
We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting our Q4 BISIG meeting at Microsoft Corporation, 8300 Norman Center Drive, Suite 950, Bloomington, Minnesota, 55437 from 3:00 p.m to 6:00 p.m. We hope you will plan to attend this meeting where we have lined up two very exciting and informative speakers. Registration URL: www.ncbisig.org Times: 2:30 - 6:00 Agenda: 2:30-3:00 Registration 3:00-3:15 BI SIG Updates & Announcements (Hear about how the organization is growing and changing to better serve ...
*Moved to: Live FrameworkI have been getting very interested in the new Azure Services Platform and how I can use it to facilitate WPF development. Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
I thought I would restart this blog that I've barely used, by doing the traditional introduction. I'm Kelly Jones and I work for Sogeti USA in the Columbus, Ohio office. I've been working in the IT field for ten years now. Like most computer geeks, I've always tinkered with them, going clear back to my Commodore VIC-20 circa 1983. Several years ago, I setup Another Old Computer Museum website. The name was a little bit of a joke, since there were quite a few websites devoted old computers. I originally ...
I made the trip from Phoenix to Montreal yesterday with only a couple issues... our flight out of Phoenix was delayed 20 minutes so my 45 minutes between planes in Denver got tight. From wheels down to wheels up was exactly 30 minutes and that included switching concourses and almost giving me a stroke :) Of course my bag-o-clothes did NOT make it, and as of 8am it has not yet, but Air Canada just told me on the phone that it was on it's way. I packed one spare set of clothes in my laptop bag, thankfully. ...
*Moved to: TFS Event Handler v1.3 releasedUpdated and improved for Team System 2008. Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
Just wanted to write a bit about the upcoming Day of .NET conference coming soon to St. Louis. We are putting the final pieces together this week and currently have nearly 200 people registered. The conference will be on December 13th, 2008 and, if you want more information or just want to register, please check out the site at www.StLouisDayOfDotNet.com. If you are waiting to register, please be aware that our registration closes on Monday, December 8th and we cannot accept on-site registrations. ...
*Moved to: Retrieving an identity from Team Foundation Server using only the display nameThis is a lot harder than it sounds. At first you think there will be a built in option with the Read Identities method on the IGroupSecurityService Interface, but you would be wrong! When capturing an event from Team Foundation Server you have access to a lot of information about the change, including the Display Name of the fields for Assigned To and Changed By.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
Tampa CodeCamp is this weekend. Great speakers and great sessions, see you there! 12/6/2008 8:30 AM - 5:30 PM Welcome Time: 12/6/2008 7:30 AM Eastern Time K-FORCE BLDG 1001 E Palm Ave Tampa, FL , FL 33605 Be sure to sign up for this event ASAP at - http://www.tampacodecamp.com/ UPDATE: I will be presenting: "Building apps for WindowsMobile: SMS BackUp http://www.tampacodecamp.co... ...
We’ve been experimenting with calling ASMX web services from orchestrations without having to add a web reference (for the SOAP adapter) or use the generated items (for the R2 WCF adapter). The idea, in short, is to achieve increased decoupling between systems even in a web service scenario - Generally when you add a reference to a service in BizTalk 2006 or in R2 (although there are some clear differences between the implementation) the schemas for the request and response types are generated for ...
*Moved to: TFS Event Handler v1.1 releasedUpdated and improved for Team System 2008. Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
edit: an amendment to this review is posted here. Before launching into this review, there are maybe a few minor points I should address. 1. I REALLY liked GNR a lot, from the time I was 17 until around 25. 2. That was 13 years ago. My musical tastes have changed a bit since then. 3. This is Guns N Roses back in the day: 4. This is Guns N Roses today: Ok, I think we're ready to begin the review. I'll start with the short version: Save your money. Even at $9.99 you're going to feel a little ripped ...
This is in response to a post by John Viega entitled “Why Microsoft’s free AV won’t matter”. Yes, Microsoft failed with OneCare. But I don’t agree with John on why. (Keep in mind John works for a company that produces AV software, so he is biased, even if he is knowledgeable.) Let’s look at the three major different kinds of anti-virus users. Type A – Anti-What-Now? A large number of consumers don’t care about anti-virus. They might know what it is “sort of”, and they may want to know that their ...
My apologies for being tardy with the follow up post on my Nokia E71 experiences. Its amazing how work tends to take over your life at points and keep you from the things you truly love – spending time with your family or writing blog posts. Thanks for the reminder emails some sent me that I promised to pen this. Before I get started, there has been some other follow-on Nokia news. First Nokia is rumored to be working on the E75, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard version of the E71. It offers a 2.4” screen ...
*Moved to: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR InstallationFirst, download the new Data Dude. Download page http://www.microsoft.com/do... Setup http://download.microsoft.c... Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
*Moved to: Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR has been released!What a mouthful! Has there ever been any products with names as long as the Team System toolset ;), Maybe thats why it is just called Data Dude. Anyway, congratulations to the Data Dude team for this wonderful piece of work. I have been following the GDR for a while and I have been very impressed with the capabilities on offer.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...