Tag | ALM Posts
*Moved to: Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. Read more about Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 on my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com... more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
In this Issue: Joost van Schaik, Manas Patnaik, Kevin Hoffman, Jesse Liberty, Deborah Kurata, Dhananjay Kumar, Dennis Delimarsky, Samuel Jack, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek, and Jfo. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "How I let the trees grow" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior" Joost van Schaik Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 from last week posted, plus the ECOContest is ready to be voted on: SilverlightShow for Feb 28 - March 06, 2011 Drew DeVault is ...
*Moved to: Visual Studio ALM MVP of the Year 2011 For some reason this year some of my peers decided to vote for me as a contender for Visual Studio ALM MVP of the year. I am not sure what I did to deserve this, but a number of people have commented that I have a rather useful blog.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic! But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA ...
For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on ...
For most people, upgrading to Windows 7 has been a relatively painless process. Not me. I am in the unlucky 1% or less who had a somewhat less pleasant experience. First, I cloned my entire hard drive onto a larger (and much faster) solid state hard drive, only experiencing minimal problems. Then, I bought the Retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate, took a deep breath and... oh yeah, I almost forgot - BACK UP THE COMPUTER. The next morning I upgraded to Win 7 and everything seemed fine, until... I ...
This week has been a rough one. I’ve been sick and then in some kind of slump for my afternoon coding sessions. It could be from the cold, could be I’m still tired from writing that Windows Phone 7 game development book (which is out now!) or it could just be I’m tired of winter and want some sunshine. All I know is that even while I’m stick, the XNA world keeps going along at it’s whirlwind pace. Below are the things I caught in between my coughing fits.. Time Critical XNA News: The 2011 MVP summit ...
We are now successfully, able build Dynamics NAV solutions using the TFS Build workflow mechanisms. Lots of test builds were made, the builds can restore the NAV Database and start from a fresh solution, take latest of the NAV objects and then import it to Navision and call the compile method. The workflow is also able to generate FOB files as output which can be directly shipped to the customers. I think this is the First in the world implementation of the TFS build concepts in conjunction with ...
Chris Eargle, Telerik Evangelist, Microsoft MVP and INETA Speaker, was our guest speaker at the West Palm Beach .Net User Group February 2011 meeting. Chris shared many advanced C# tricks that he learned throughout his many years of programming in a talk earning raving reviews from all attendees. At the end of our event, we had a free raffle of 2 Telerik Ultimate Collection licenses and various .Net Ninja shirts. We would like to thank Chris for sharing with us and we look forward to having him again ...
Jeffrey Dean, Pixar Aspect Ratio is very important to home video. What is aspect ratio – the ratio from the height to the width 2.35:1 The image is 2.35 times wide as it is high Pixar uses this for half of our movies This is called a widescreen image When modified to fit your television screen They cut this to fit the box of your screen When a comparison is made huge chunks of picture is missing It is harder to find what is going on when these pieces are missing The whole is greater than the pieces ...
In this Issue: Rob Eisenberg(-2-), Gill Cleeren, Colin Eberhardt, Alex van Beek, Ishai Hachlili, Ollie Riches, Kevin Dockx, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), and John Papa. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4" Alex van Beek WP7: "Google Sky on Windows Phone 7" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: My friends at SilverlightShow have their top 5 for last week posted: SilverlightShow for Feb 14 - 20, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: ...
In this Issue: Oren Gal, Andrea Boschin(-2-), Kevin Hoffman, Rudi Grobler(-2-, -3-), Michael Crump, Yochay Kiriaty, Peter Kuhn, Loek van den Ouweland, Jeremy Likness, Jesse Liberty, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Multiple page printing in Silverlight4 - Part 2 - preview before printing" Oren Gal WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling" Jeremy Likness XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 4 - Animation (frame-based)" Peter Kuhn From SilverlightCream.com: ...
Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if ...
Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). ...
*Moved to: Do you know about the Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects Guidance?Early on in the Team System (now Visual Studio ALM) cycle a new product surfaced within Team System that was affectionately called “Data Dude”, but had the more formal name of “Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals”. The purpose of this product was to try and make the database a “first class citizen” in the development world. Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
IASA South East Florida Chapter Meeting 02/15/2011 Meet 6:00PM Present. 6:30 PM Karin Kennedy Christopher & Weisberg, P.A. How Google, Walmart & Apple Make their Millions Intellectual Property: The Secret Ingredient Sign up for this exciting event at: http://tinyurl.com/4tta6qx Posted: Rainer Habermann, President IASA South East Florida Chapter ...
On January 29th Etienne Tremblay and I presented infront of roughly 120 people in Ottawa a 7 hours "sketch" on how VS 2010 and TFS 2010 can help both devs and testers in their respective work. The presentation focused on how a testers' work can positively influence a developers' work and vice versa. The format was quite unusual as I said it's a "sketch" where Etienne and I "ignore" the audience and we do as if we were at work and the audience is sort of "spying" on us. In all I'm quite pleased with ...
Hey everyone, I know it’s been an eternity since I blogged but I have so much to do that I unfortunately need to prioritize. Vincent Grondin and I did a 7h presentation on the new developer and tester tools available in the VS 2010 suite. It was a blast. We did it in front of an audience (around 120) and it was taped. We did it as a play and really didn’t look at the crowd at all we were training each other on the technology. It is now available for anyone that would like to watch it at this location: ...
About eighteen months ago, I wrote a post covering how to clear saved passwords in Windows XP. This week at work I was reminded how useful it is to not only deleted saved passwords, but to also setup wildcard credentials using this same interface. The scenario that I run into as consultant working at a client site, is that my laptop is not a member of the Windows Domain that my client uses to secure their network. So, when I need to access file shares, shared printers, or even the clients internal ...
If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA ...
In this Issue: Mark Monster, Jaime Rodriguez, Mark Hopkins, WindowsPhoneGeek, David Anson, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Martin Krüger(-2-), Beth Massi, Joost van Schaik, Laurent Bugnion, and Arik Poznanski. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Parsing the Visual Tree with LINQ" Jeremy Likness WP7: "Silverlight-ready PNG encoder implementation shows one way to use .NET IEnumerables effectively" David Anson Lightswitch: "How to Send Automated Appointments from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: ...
Wednesday, HP pre-announced the second coming out for its recently acquired Palm webOS mobile operating system. I happen to think webOS is quite good, and when the Palm Pre first came out, I thought it a worthwhile phone. I was worried though that the platform would never attract the developer mindshare it needed to be competitive, and that turned out to be the case. But then HP acquired Palm and announced it would be revamping the webOS offering, not only on phones, but also on tablets. It later ...
*Moved to: How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or Sarbanes–Oxley.)Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
All of us work with Visual Studio (or the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition) for developing web applications targeting ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC or Silverlight etc., Over the years, Visual Studio has grown to a great extent. From being a simple limited functionality tool in VS.NET 2002 to the multi-faceted, MEF driven Visual Studio 2010, it has come a long way. And as much as Visual Studio supports rapid web development by generating HTML mark up, it also added intellisense for some of the HTML ...
*Moved to: Do you know about the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Guidance? I have been tasked with investigating the Guidance available around Visual Studio 2010 for one of our customers and it makes sense to make this available to everyone. The official guidance around Visual Studio 2010 has been created by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers and is a brew of a bunch of really clever guys experiences working with the tools and customers.Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
Sorry for the long blogging hiatus. First it was, of course, the holidays hustle and bustle, then my brother and his wife gave birth to their son, so I’ve been away from my blogging for two weeks. Background: Finding an item’s index in List<T> is easy… Many times in our day to day programming activities, we want to find the index of an item in a collection. Now, if we have a List<T> and we’re looking for the item itself this is trivial: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = ...
Once again lets dive into the Little Wonders of .NET, those small things in the .NET languages and BCL classes that make development easier by increasing readability, maintainability, and/or performance. So probably every one of us has used an enumerated type at one time or another in a C# program. The enumerated types we create are a great way to represent that a value can be one of a set of discrete values (or a combination of those values in the case of bit flags). But the power of enum types ...
Neural Networks · I recently read a book Introduction to Neural Networks for C# , by Jeff Heaton. http://www.amazon.com/Intro... Not the 1st ANN book I've perused, but a nice revision. · Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a mechanism of machine learning – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... · Problems Not Suited ...
I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham. The book is available from Manning. First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher. I've found their books to be top-quality, over all. As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy. I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with ...
*Moved to: Do you know about the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture Guidance? If you have not seen the Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Guidance from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers then you are missing out. Read more...Follow my new blog on http://blog.hinshelwood.com ...
Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#. Today we will be looking at two set implementations in the System.Collections.Generic namespace: HashSet<T> and SortedSet<T>. Even though most people think of sets as mathematical constructs, they are actually very useful classes that can be used to help make your application more performant if used appropriately. For more of the "Little Wonders" posts, see the index here. A Background From Math In mathematical ...
One of our users was having difficulties with their mac and using some web software. I decided to go peruse the landscape and see how much of a premium people were paying for their macs. I priced out a Dell and a Mac from their websites. I tried to get them as close to the same configuration, from a hardware standpoint, as I could. I found the following: Apple Macbook Pro Dell XPS 17 There are several important differences in the hardware: The mac doesn’t have a blueray player, but the dell does. ...
While I'm waiting for my Arduino kits to show up, I started reading the Getting Started With Arduino book from O'Reilly (review coming later) and I'm about 40 pages in when I get to a parts list for one of the first projects. Looks pretty straightforward, and even has Radio Shack part numbers next to almost everything. So on my lunch today, I decided to run out to "The Shack" (seriously, that's their rebranding?) to pick up some basics, like a couple resistors, a breadboard, a momentary switch and ...
For the record, this can be just as easily done with a .NET class with a DLL call. The two major reasons for this ending up as a SSIS package are: There are a lot of SQL resources in the organization for maintenance, but not as many .NET developers. There is an existing automated process that links up SQL Jobs (more on that in the next post), and this is part of that process. To start, this is what the SSIS looks like: The first part of the control flow is just for the override scenario. In the Execute ...
I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The ...
In this Issue: Tony Champion, Gill Cleeren, Alex van Beek, Michael James, Ollie Riches, Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Daniel N. Egan, Loek Van Den Ouweland, and Paul Thurott. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using the AutoCompleteBox" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Windows Phone Image Button" Loek Van Den Ouweland Training: "New WP7 Virtual Labs" Daniel N. Egan Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 most popular news articles up: SilverlightShow for Jan 24-30, 2011 Rudi Grobler posted answers ...
Advert alert :-) The UK's only Cloud user group The Cloud is the hot topic. You can’t escape hearing about it everywhere you go. Cloud Evening is the UK’s only cloud-focussed user group. Cloud Evening replaces UKAzureNet, with a new objective to cover all aspects of Cloud Computing, across all platforms, technologies and providers. We want to create a community for developers and architects to come together, learn, share stories and share experiences. Each event we’ll bring you two speakers talking ...
Just thought I would get a couple of notes up here for reference to anyone that is interested...it is now Feb 2011 and I have not been posting here enough to remember this blog. Back in Nov 2010 I ordered the Ti launchpad msp430, it is a little target board kit replete with a mini USB cable, two very inexpensive programmable mcu's and a couple of pin headers with a couple of led's on board, a spi connector some on board jumpers and two programmable micro switches....all for less than $5.00...INCLUDING ...
If you aren't into tabletop (aka pen & paper) RPGs, you might as well click to the next post now... Still here? Awesome. I've recently started running a new D&D 4.0 Dark Sun campaign. If you don't know anything about Dark Sun, here's a quick intro: The campaign take place on the world of Athas, formerly a lush green world that is now a desert wasteland. Forests are rare in the extreme, as is water and metal. Coins are made of ceramic and weapons are often made of hardened wood, bone or obsidian. ...
For the first time today we began conducting load testing on a ASP.NET application already in production. Obviously you would normally want to load test prior to releasing to a production environment, but that isn't the point here. We ran a test which simulated 5 users hitting the application doing the same actions simultaneously. The first few pages visited seemed fine and then things just hung for a while before the test failed. While the test was running I was viewing the performance counters ...
A few months ago I blogged about using Model metadata to render a dynamic UI in MVC 2. The scenario in the post was that we might have a view model where the questions are conditionally displayed and therefore a dynamic UI is needed. To recap the previous post, the solution was to use a custom attribute called [QuestionId] in conjunction with an “ApplicableQuestions” collection to identify whether each question should be displayed. This allowed me to have a view model that looked like this: 1: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] ...
Supongamos que tenemos una aplicación Web utilizando una colección in-memory que cambia ocasionalmente pero que se utiliza muy a menudo. La colección se cargaría desde tablas Azure en el arranque de la aplicación, utilizando el evento Application_Start de global.asax, y se actualizaría cuando la aplicación actualizara la tabla, de forma que las consultas podrían realizarse sobre la colección en memoria. Si vamos a desplegar la en Azure habrá que tener presente que se ejecutará más de una instancia ...
Fear, it’s what turns maintaining applications into a nightmare. Technology moves on, teams move on, someone is left to operate the application, what was green is now perceived brown. Eventually the business will evolve and changes will need to be made. The approach to those changes often dictates the long term viability of the application. Fear of change, lack of passion and a lack of interest in understanding the domain often leads to a paranoia to do anything that doesn’t involve duct tape and ...
A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization. Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company. This is unfortunate. Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner! ...
When we were working with ASP.NET MVC 2, we needed to write our own JavaScript to get Client-Side Validation Summary with jQuery Validation plugin. I am one of those unfortunate people still stuck with .NET Framework Runtime 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.5; meaning I am still on ASP.NET MVC 2. So I will still keep on supporting by answering any question you may have with my original code. Long awaited ASP.NET MVC 3 has been released, and it supports Client Side Validation Summary with jQuery out-of-the-box ...
I presented at VBUG last year and can confirm that they put on a really good event. This year I stood aside for my “replacement” Steve Plank to work his magic. Worth checking out… VBUG SPRING CONFERENCE 28/29 March 2011 Wokefield Park, Mortimer, Reading RG7 3AH Day One (Mon 28 March): Developing SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010 - Dave McMahon Cache Out with Windows Server AppFabric – Phil Pursglove Extending your Corporate Network in to the Windows Azure Data Centre with Windows Azure Connect ...
As mentioned in some earlier posts, I’ve been hacking on Shopify for the past six months for an e-commerce project. My work with Shopify introduced me to Heroku, which is a simple “cloud-based” service for hosting and running Ruby applications. It’s dead simple to get started and, for the most part, seems to “just work”. While I enjoy playing with new languages and platforms, I’m by no means a Ruby developer. Heroku is a great service, but seemed somewhat inaccessible to me given that I’d have to ...
It’s with great pleasure that I can announce registration for Prairie Developer Conference 2011 is now open! This year we’ve expanded the conference to include more sessions, more speakers, and more technologies! Presenters are coming from across Canada and the US, and we have an amazing group of sponsors supporting the conference! One of those sponsors is Urban Turtle, a company that makes a Scrum add on for TFS. Each attendee will receive 5 FREE licenses for the product (a $450 value)! We also ...
A year or so back I was using the Boot from VHD feature lots – but not in recent times and not with my current laptop configuration (Lenovo T61p with 2nd internal hard drive). In readiness for the upcoming SharePoint 2010 training for UK ISVs in February I wanted to make use of a Microsoft created SharePoint 2010 VM, more specifically the VHD from the VM. It has taken me three hours on and off to get it to work – which must warrant a blog post, if only so I can remember what I did a year from now! ...
It's all about Letting Go. I'm the Technical Director at an established Software-as-a-Service provider, and I've committed to, without giving away our intentions to any competitor, building a "dominant" online enrollment product that's going to convert our company from a regional turboprop happily cruising at altitude and calmly building up the operating account a little bit each month, into a squadron of deadly stealth fighters, streaking and blurring across the sky, firing lethal laser beams into ...