At my company we write a lot of tools and extensions that uses the TFS API to automate various things for us. A very common thing to automate is the creation of work items and the areas and iterations structure. Creating a work item using the TFS API is simple, just connect to TFS, get the WorkItemStore service object and create a new work item and set any fields that you want to: Creating a work item //Connect to TFS and get the WorkItemStore object var tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://localhost:8080/...
In a previous posting, I discussed replacing the stock MVC serializer used for the JsonResult exposed when you use the controller method Json(..) instead of View. This was all find and dandy. But how – you may wonder – can I call actions that contain complex parameters? Do I need a special binder? Should I write my own? The answer is mostly "no". As Phil Hack blogged, the ASP.NET MVC framework already contains value providers that take care of that for you. All you need to do is ensure that your...
Command passing is a handy way to execute pieces of code on specific threads. The idea is simple enough: Write a command into a buffer and that command then gets executed on some specific thread that monitors that command buffer. This paradigm is used in graphics APIs like DirectX and OpenGL, for instance. This allows you to split your data into working sets that are owned by a single thread and must maintain their state over a specified time period. In the graphics engine I’m developing at Raccoon...
I’ve been seeing many members in the forums asking how to display a large copy of the image on mouseover. Some of them are displaying the image in a Repeater, GridView or DataList control. I didn’t find any direct solution that shows the scenario they wanted so I thought of writing this post to demonstrate how to go about it. I know there are lot of ways of doing/implementing a solution for this scenario and this is just one them. In this example I’m going to use the DataList control for displaying...
This article is a Part 6 of the Interview Questions series. Part 1: BizTalk: Questions for interview without answers Part 2: BizTalk: Interview questions and principles Part 3: WCF: Questions for studying and interviewPart 4: WCF: Questions for studying and interview: DiscoveryPart 5: WCF: Questions for studying and interview: Routing Service Part 6: BizTalk: Advanced Questions It is time for fun! These questions are for an Advanced level of the BizTalk Developers. I hope you don’t have a single...
While adding a new feature to the LINQ to Twitter Search API, I made significant changes to the Search entity that will break existing code. The new feature is support for Tweet Entities, a recent addition to Twitter’s Search API. I’ll cover Tweet Entities support after explaining what has changed. Motivation for Change When Twitter implemented Tweet Entities for their Search API, they only supported JSON format. LINQ to Twitter used ATOM for Search API queries; so, I didn’t have a choice on data...
Axiom can be a little daunting when you first start working with it. This guide is designed to get you through the first initial hurdles and get you going on your first project using the library. A Brief History Axiom was started in 2003 by Chris McGurk ( leedgitar ) as a port from the popular OGRE project . Chris led the project until 2004, adding many features and providing a solid base from which to continue. I ( borrillis ) became the project lead in September of 2005 after a long pause in the...
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...
What a better way to start of the year, but with a product that I recommend. I reviewed this product last year on my personal site and now almost a full year later, I still recommend this product. I develop for different platforms and different languages so it is important for me to keep my snippets organized. Visual Studio and Eclipse both have a way to store snippets, but what if your put into a situation where you may need one and find that its in the other IDE that you are working with. That’s...
The latest release of the Community TFS Build Extensions include a brand new tool called Community TFS Build Manager and has been created for two reasons: An implementation of the Team Foundation Build API which is referenced by the Rangers Build Customization Guidance V2 (available H1 2012) Provide a solution to a real problem. The Community TFS Build Manager is intended to ease the management of builds in medium to large Team Foundation Server environments, though it does provide a few features...
I'm a big believer in the benefits of having automated tests live with your code. I'm not an aspirant to Red-Green-Refactor Nirvana, but I believe there is a huge value to be gained by taking the code from Button1_Click in the only Windows Form application you've ever written and placing it instead into a method that can be used by a unit test framework. Some of the benefits that I glean from this include my test being preserved past the initial implementation (when you write the next feature of...
Wishing a very happy and blessed New Year to you in advance! A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on December 29th. We expect that its 11 new code samples covering typical programming scenarios in Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Shell, and WDK would ease your development in the coming New Year. You can download the code samples using Sample Browser or Sample Browser Visual Studio extension. They give you the flexibility to search samples, download samples on demand,...
Agile taught us to release early and release often, Agile also taught us to get the end user involved more frequently and directly. Goes without saying that release notes are an important part of any release. But what you don’t want to be doing is manually putting together the release notes with each frequent release you do. TFS lets you manage the application lifecycle with great ease & minimal administrative overhead, if your team is already checking in the code against work items and if you...
Today's $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/97814... is Beginning Google Maps API 3"This book is about the next generation of the Google Maps API. It will provide the reader with the skills and knowledge necessary to incorporate Google Maps version 3 on web pages in both desktop and mobile browsers."...
A co-worker was showing me an in phone scripting environment on the iPhone and I knew I had seen one mentioned for the Windows Phone before. TouchDevelop is an app from Microsoft Research that allows you to create small applications that do a wide variety of operations including using most of the capabilities of the device. So could this be a fun way for us geeks to waste some time while waiting for our oil to be change or a table to open up at your favorite restaurant? So what does this language...
I was playing with the new Membership API (System.Web.Providers) for the upcoming Virtual TechDays While I was trying out a lot of options for using as DB store, one of the obvious choices was SQL Azure. With SQL Azure, I could offload the Database hosting capabilities to Azure and just focus on my application code. Of course, it comes at a cost and SQL Azure is a subscription based database available in different sizes and rates there of. One of the challenges I faced was, working with the Membership...
In this blog post I’ll show you how to use the TFS 2011 API to get the Exploratory Testing & Feedback Manager session information programmatically. Introduction TFS 2011 includes Exploratory Testing and Feedback Manager, the first empowers the testers to explore the application and second empowers the stake holders to explore the application. This rhymes a bit… that’s because… under the hood both use the same infrastructure to drive and store the session information. If you try to run both at...
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...
Daytona - Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure Overview MapReduce is a framework for processing highly distributable problems across huge datasets using a large number of compute nodes. It is a generic mechanism that comprises 2 steps: Map step: The master node takes the input, partitions it up into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes. The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes the answer back to its master node. Reduce step: The master node then collects the...
Upgrading a SharePoint farm can reveal hidden issues that may not be causing any visible consequences in your current environment. This was especially the case in a recent customer visit to assist with an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. During the upgrade we encountered the error “Failed to create field: Field type <field name> is not installed properly” while attempting to upgrade hundreds of SharePoint lists and document libraries. The issue my customer faced related to a...
Overview C++ AMP is a GPGPU API – it allows you to define functions (kernels) that take some input, perform an expensive calculation on the GPU and return the output to CPU. GPU supports fast calculative operations across many SIMD-like cores - NVidia Tesla supports 512 cores compared to the paltry 10 cores available on the CPU today - even Intel's Knights Corner will only support 60 cores next year. Suitable only for certain classes of problems (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others...
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...
In this Issue: Colin Eberhardt, Lazar Nikolov, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Derik Whittaker, Chris Koenig, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Facebook Graph API and Silverlight Part 2 – Publishing data" Lazar Nikolov WP7: "Suppressing Zoom and Scroll interactions in the Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser Control" Colin Eberhardt Metro/WinRT/W8: "Tip/Trick when working with the Application Bar in WinRT/Metro (C#)" Derik Whittaker Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert...
Here are some of the best introductory HTML5 videos I have found online/for free. Mix 2011: HTML5 for Skeptics - Scott Stansfield channel9.msdn.com/Events/MI... Filling the HTML5 Gaps with Polyfills and Shims - Ray Bango channel9.msdn.com/Events/MI... 50 Performance Tricks to Make Your HTML5 Web Sites Faster - Jason Weber channel9.msdn.com/Events/MI... TechEd 2011 HTML5 and CSS3 Techniques You Can Use Today - Todd Anglin channel9.msdn.com/Events/Te...
Download Demo Solution - here In this blog post I’ll show you how to use the TFS API to get the name of the Process Template that is currently applied to the Team Project. You can also download the demo solution attached, I’ve tested this solution against TFS 2010 and TFS 2011. 1. Connecting to TFS Programmatically I have a blog post that shows you from where to download the VS 2010 SP1 SDK and how to connect to TFS programmatically. private TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs; private string _selectedTeamProject;...
This is the third of a three part series that deals with the issue of faking test data in the context of a legacy app that was built with Microsoft's Entity Framework (EF) on top of an MS SQL Server database – a scenario that can be found very often. Please read the first part for a description of the sample application, a discussion of some general aspects of unit testing in a database context, and of some more specific aspects of the here discussed EF/MSSQL combination. Lately, I wondered how you...
This is the second of a three part series that deals with the issue of faking test data in the context of a legacy app that was built with Microsoft's Entity Framework (EF) on top of an MS SQL Server database – a scenario that can be found very often. Please read the first part for a description of the sample application, a discussion of some general aspects of unit testing in a database context, and of some more specific aspects of the here discussed EF/MSSQL combination. Lately, I wondered how...
In this all-submittal post-"GoLive" 3 week marathon Issue: Vikas, Rene Schulte, Ollie Riches, Alex van Beek, Kevin Dockx, Michael Crump(-2-), Michael Washington, Antoni Dol, Colin Eberhardt(-2-, -3-), and Lazar Nikolov. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Paging Data from the Server with Silverlight" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Tessellating shapes on top of Bing Maps in a WP7 app" Ollie Riches LightSwitch: "Creating a Minimal LightSwitch Shell" Michael Washington Metro/WinRT: "Photoshop in METRO style" Antoni...
The Azure Table service, provides a semi-structured storage in the form of tables that contain a collection of entities, these entities have primary keys and set of properties. A property is a name, typed-value pair. Every entity in table storage has two key properties, Partition Key and the Row key which together uniquely identify each entity in the table. The Table Service API is compliant with REST API provided by WCF Data Services. In order to use the WCF Data Services Client Library to access...
· For the last decade, the majority of my dev work has leveraged the .NET Framework for construction of information systems. However, my interest has lain in numerical computing. · Is it possible to have an increasingly higher level of abstraction and at the same time achieve underlying high performance computing? The prevailing winds say no: C# is aimed at productivity, and C++ is for performance. Garbage collection was great, but do we still need it with the availability of smart pointers? Would...
Introduction In case you missed it, I have a 10-part series on Silverlight 5 on SilverlightShow.net. In this extensive guide to Silverlight 5, I give a step-by-step introduction to Silverlight 5, and dives into the features most important to a Silverlight developer. You can check out the first 3 parts now and I will be adding a new one each week. The Roadmap for this Series I’ve included the Roadmap for the series below as you may want to visit other sections as you learn Silverlight 5. I picked...
In this Issue: Michael Crump, Kevin Dockx, Ollie Riches, Shawn Wildermuth, Kunal Chowdhury, Beth Massi, Joost van Shaik, Colin Eberhardt, Tony Champion, David Catuhe, Igor, Jeremy Likness, and Dhananjay Kumar. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "SL5 PivotViewer Custom DetailPaneStyle" Tony Champion WP7: "Taking screenshots with Windows Phone 7 applications using a video feed" Joost van Schaik LightSwitch: "“I Command You!” - LightSwitch Screen Commands Tips & Tricks" Beth Massi Metro/WinRT/Windows8:...
When using the storage client library to access Azure Storage, it is recommended that we make use of the Async calls to execute queries against the Azure Tables/Blobs. TableClient and BlobClient expose methods to execute queries asynchronously, for e.g. blobClient.BeginListContain... : which retrieves the list of Blob Containers in our storage. cloudTableClient.BeginListT... : which retrieves the list of tables in Azure strorage and many more Then there is CloudTableQuery class...
UPDATE The below sample just showcases the locality sample. The complete set of attributes exposed which include PostalCode, CountryRegion, Address etc., are available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... This is the third in the series of posts I am doing on HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers Geolocation is one of the popular features of HTML5 that’s being touted as a favorite for building location aware applications. It helps to a great extent not just for Web Applications that run...
There is no one best branching strategy, the branching strategy that best fits the requirements of your enterprise is the best strategy for you. The ALM rangers have comprehensive guidelines to help you decide what might work best with your enterprise. A couple of parameters you need to consider while thinking about the branching strategy are, What is the length of the Iteration your team will be delivering in. Agile – Weeks, Waterfall – Months. Would you have multiple versions of the applications...
I am here to take your attention on size of .Net object when we call a service. This will help when you want to find out the size of .net object in a service call. This might happen when you face a buffer overrun problem. While trying to debug a service call, where we suspect a buffer overrun situation, we wanted to find out the size of object being returned by a service call. However finding size of .net object is not trivial and if you thought that you can do it with sizeof(object), and then you...
Microsoft officially released the preview of Vnext i.e. VS 2011, TFS 2011 and TFS Azure (also known as TFS Service) at the Build conference on 13th September 2011 @ California. It wasn’t too long ago I remember helping customers set up ALM processes using TFS 2010, so what are the compelling reasons these customers who have heavily invested in TFS 2010 should consider moving on to TFS 2011. In this blog post I’ll try and answer what exactly is new in TFS 2011, how TFS 2011 is different from TFS 2010....
Los servicios de almacenamiento de Windows Azure, son expuestos nativamente desde una interface REST lo cual permite su uso desde cualquier tipo de aplicacion y plataforma.Los servicios del API REST permiten Windows Azure Storage sonQueue Service APIOperationDescriptionList QueuesLists all queues under the given account.Create QueueCreates a new queue under the given account.Delete QueueDeletes a queue.Get Queue MetadataReturns queue properties, including user-defined metadata.Set Queue MetadataSets...
Download a working demo (below): No showing off, this has been developed in VS11 using MTM11 and version controlled in TFS Azure Working Demo = Download-Testing Scorecard In this blog post I’ll be showing you how to use the TFS API to build a testing scorecard. In this testing score card, I’ll be going through each of the test plans programmatically looping through test suits (yes, the test suits can be nested) looking for test cases and querying their status and further going in at the test step...
Download a working Demo: Working Demo Download In this blog post I'll show you how to use the TFS API to get the security groups, members, permissions and security settings of users in Team Projects in TFS. Problem I would like to see the version control permissions and security settings for each user in a Group for each Team Project. Can I see all of this in one place in a report? Solution Is the report below similar to what you are looking for? Let’s build one using the TFS SDK… if you enjoy the...
If you want to get up to speed on Azure AppFabric brokered messaging there are a couple of resources you should check out. SB CTP Messaging User Guide This is a 30 page word document put together by the AppFabric dev team. It’s a great read to get an introduction to Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. If you are working in the AppFabric Labs environment using the May or June CTP the code will work fine. There have been significant changes in the API in the September 2011 release, so don’t expect any...
In Windows Azure, we have the DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener which can be used for writing diagnostics to Local resource (like a local storage in the Worker or Web Role) which can then be ultimately stored in Windows Azure Table/Blob storage (transferred automatically by the Diagnostics Monitor in Windows Azure based on config settings). We could either configure the Diagnostic Monitor using Code (in Role Startup) or we can use a config file for the same (called diagnostics.wadcfg). The code configuration...
In this Issue: Eric Jensen, Andrea Boschin, Gill Cleeren, Rene Schulte, Colin Eberhardt(-2-), Mark Tucker(-2-), Mark Monster, Walter Ferrari, and Michael Washington(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Welcome to Zombieland, the Metro Style Land of WinRT and the Undead" Rene Schulte WP7: "Adding Tactile Feedback to your app the easy way" Mark Monster LightSwitch: "A Random Walk Through The LightSwitch Data Model" Michael Washington Windows8: "TweetSearch – A Cross platform Metro UI WinRT and Silverlight...
Introduction I’m sure by now you have heard that the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate has been released. I recently had a chance to Guest Blog for the Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog on “Getting Started with the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate”. Now before we get started learning about it, let’s look at a few new features: What is new in the Silverlight 5? Multiple Window Support - Trusted app can create additional Windows. Ancestor RelativeSource Binding – Enables a DataTemplate to bind to a property...
Last week, Microsoft held their long awaited Build Windows (or simply "Build") conference in Anaheim CA. About 5000 people packed the convention center to discover the latest version of the Windows operation system: Windows 8. This is a very major iteration (much more than the Windows Vista –> Windows 7 transition) (and also, it is an early preview so it is quite unfinished ;) As such, we will definitely need a bit more time to play with it before we can express a truly informed opinion. Of course...
Technorati Tags: Windows 8 Just like many thousands of geeks around the world I downloaded the Windows 8 preview from Microsoft’s website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... and spent some time playing with it. Being an embedded developer I don’t have any powerful machine lying unused in my office, so I installed Windows 8 on a very low-spec machine, a 1.6GHz Atom with 1GB of RAM and a 120GB HD (taken from an old mac). First of all I must say that I’m pretty impressed by the responsiveness...
Programming for Metro Metro is the future http://zd.net/rnT9VZ .NET is for old apps. WinRT replaces WPF & WCF. XAML is big. There were no Silverlight sessions. HTML 5 and Javascript ( Blend for HTML) are back in fashion – I wont dwell on this because web apps are (inconsistently) simplistic in concept and over-complex in development. Yes, all those XAML skills are portable, Silverlight (RIP) apps can run as Metro apps with a bit of fidgeting with namespaces – you just need to know what controls...
The Azure AppFabric Service Bus Brokered Messaging functionality has shipped to production, and is available in Azure data centers across the world. This means that we now have point-to-point queuing and publish-subscribe messaging available in the cloud in the form of Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. Be aware that there are substantial changes in the classes in the Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging namespace, which means I will have to re-record webcasts and repost blog posts. I’ve spent quite a bit...
This week I’m at the Microsoft Build/Windows conference. Now I’ve been to many conferences throughout the years and this is the first conference where I literally knew nothing about including the agenda. When I signed up for my badge on arrival we got a conference guide with all the hours of the session but no sessions. Very secret, very cloak and dagger. This created a huge buzz but also upped the expectation quite a bit… So with the tabled laid out and the expectation high I sat down and waited...
Introduction · CQL is a SQL-like language (SELECT..FROM..WHERE) for static analysis of .NET code. · It is a nice complement to code contracts, & is usable in unit tests. If you've ever looked at creating custom FxCop rules using the archaic and undocumented Introspection API (see http://www.binarycoder.net/... ), then you will appreciate the elegant CQL syntax for static analysis! · supported by NDepend http://www.NDepend.com How It Works · Lets dive into a contrived example...