Most of us spend our time in Visual Studio writing .NET code within a Visual Studio solution. Given this situation we find it very easy to integrate with Team Foundation Server for our source control and have a well known work pattern. But what happens when you want to use TFS as source control for non-Microsoft development? The most important thing to remember is that source control should be as transparent as possible to the developer. If the particular language or product does not have an Integrated...
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/...
I’ve been testing\evaluating ComponentOne’s Studio for ASP.NET Wijmo suite for an MVC 3 project and I’m quickly becoming a fan! This product has so many things going for it that I’m not sure where to start. I’m going to focus on the Wijmo components, but the suite also contains a set of controls for ASP.NET WebForms development. If the Webform controls are as good as the MVC controls, they’re worth a look. There are two versions of the Wijmo components. An open source version containing 30 widgets...
One of the great things about 2012 is that I am not in our office nearly 100% of the time during business hours. This is the first time I have been able to work from our office this much in about 4 years. In fact, we have moved three times during that four years and I have only averaged about 10-25% of my time in the office. This means I can actually setup my desk for development instead of business related tasks only. That means THREE MONITORS! My first reaction after a week with this setup: I never...
This post is an example of how to write a WCF Service using a class. The example uses Visual Studio 2010, written in C#, SQL Server 2008 and hosted in IIS. So lets have at it. The table is pretty simple just three columns, an TestID (int), Value1 (varchar(50)) and Value2 (varchar(50)). The stored procedure used will return one record from the table using the TestID as a parameter. Table SQL: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table_1]( [TestID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Value1] [varchar](50) NOT NULL, [Value2]...
JetBrains have recently released ReSharper 6.1, along with compatible updates to dotCover (version 1.2) and dotTrace Performance (version 4.5.2). Here is a list of common developer tasks that ReSharper 6 helps handles better than previous versions: Improve Visual Studio responsiveness: While developing ReSharper 6.0 and 6.1, Jet Brains have fixed more than 200 performance and memory consumption issues, as well as over 2900 bugs!Use proper tooling for web development: ReSharper 6 introduces extensive...
So lately I have been back in the dev arena more so and working from home. I find that I have some spare time because sometimes I pile directly through lunch. Today I was playing around with a control that I felt I had tested thoroughly. I was completely wrong. So here is an explanation of how to build out the accordion control in a webpart without having the same issues. First off go here and download the jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.min.js and jquery-1.6.2.min.js. Then what I want you to do is create...
My collegue told me that placing the opening curly brace at the end of the line is safer than at the beginning of the new line, because it prevents some hard-to-debug errors, related to Automatic Semicolon Insertion and pointed me to the article Basic JavaScript Part 6: Automatic Semicolon Insertion. The article has the recommendation Trying to outline curly braces at the end of the line can save you some headaches in case a semicolon is forgotten somewhere in the code.The statement is misleading...
In this blog post I thought I would talk a little about one of my favorite features of VS2010, Intellitrace. Intellitrace is debugging on steroids. In regular debugging session you can see the values of variables at a certain time, but you can’t go backwards, and you cannot see the state of the entire system. This means that some bugs cannot be reproduced. With Intellitrace a log file is created that allows you to debug the file. This is similar to a dump but has lots more information, and when run...
If you are not following Shawn Wildermuth or haven't bought the Essential WP 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight I would highly recommend. I am not going to talk about why we need a smartphone or how smartphone is taking over all the World, We all know how it started and where it took and where is going to take us in the future. Since we all know the future of the Mobile Eco systems I think it will be a good time to be a part of. lets jump into our series of blog posts of Windows Phone 7.5...
Next month, the TechDays edition 2012 (14-15-16 february) will take place in Belgium. The last three years, the event passed in Antwerp, but now they are moving to a new location. Kinepolis Imagibraine in Braine l'Alleud (Eigenbrakel).The location isn't that important.The hard thing will be, to pick out the most interesting sessions, because there any many sessions in the same time-blocks. Here is a list of some sessions, i'll certainly attend:Introducing Windows Runtime in Windows 8What's new in...
Luego de varios días sin hacer post, hoy nuevamente retomo para mostrar un pequeño ejemplo de un tema que últimamente ha sido muy tocado en los foros de asp.net de MSDN. Cómo hacer un menú dinámico con MySql? Antes de empezar a mostrar como crear el menú voy a explicar algunos problemas que encontré durante el desarrollo del ejemplo: 1. Para el ejemplo, utilizaremos la versión beta 6.5 del conector de .net para mysql, sin embargo, deben tomar en cuenta que este conector esta en desarrollo y aún carece...
I presented two talks on windows azure recently. One among them was focusing on Windows Phone 7 app development. The other one was on MVC3 ASP .Net app. The idea was to introduce how Windows Azure can be leveraged in both these exciting platforms. The talk was demo centric; below are the slides and the demo / webcasts recordings links for the same. Talk one- Building Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure Platform and Visual Studio 2010 Demo included: Creating a Demo application from VS 2010...
About a week ago we received a support call from one of our customers asking why she couldn’t open PDF files on our website anymore. She was using Chrome and the browser tab would just hang with the ‘Loading’ animation and a gray background after requesting an invoice PDF. After a little digging we figured out that this hang-up was occurring while Chrome was opening the PDF document. We were easily able to reproduce this issue ourselves in the production environment, but only while using Chrome....
The current version of MVVM Light had a couple of issues in the project templates. The most annoying one was causing a problem when creating new projects: The GUIDs used to uniquely identify the project were in fact not re-generated properly every time, and we ended up with the same GUID in every new project. The symptoms are the following: If you side-load an MVVM Light application, and then side-load another one, you will see that the first one is overwritten. Note however that this is only an...
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...
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...
A little more than three months ago, Microsoft hosted the //build/ conference at which they unveiled the upcoming version of Windows (commonly called Windows 8, though I don’t know if the marketing folks have accepted the fact that that is the name most of us are expecting for it yet). They released to the developer world a build of it called the Windows Developer Preview (and Windows Server Developer Preview) along with various tools for creating the new “Metro style” apps. I wasn’t able to make...
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...
This demo is a continuation of my previous article about "ASP.NET MVC 3: Creating a Simple Sign-Up Form" which I wrote few months ago. Basically in this post I'm going to demonstrate how to create a simple LogOn form in which users can supply their username and password. And how to authenticate and validate users in ASP.NET MVC 3. I will not elaborate more in details about the model, view and controllers function so before you go any further, I'd suggest you to check my previous article first about...
In the team that I have been working with lately they use NDBUnit to control the test database state for Integration Tests. Today I thought I would blog briefly on one of the issues we had and how we are going to go forward in the future in structuring our solution and working with NDBUnit. Let me say upfront that I am no expert with NDBUnit, so if you are an expert with this tool, and you can see glaring mistakes in this post, add a comment (I would appreciate that). That said, let me highlight...
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,...
I would like to share with you some exciting news from the Gizmox labs. If you haven't heard by now the Visual WebGui Mobile Team @ Gizmox has been working on a .NET Mobile Framework for a few months now. This mobile dedicated framework continues the Visual WebGui vision towards the mobile development workd by enabling Microsoft core .NET developers to leverage their existing skills for developing cross-platform HTML5-based mobile apps within Visual Studio. As with its Web Framework, the Visual WebGui...
I have been looking into InRule, a business rule management system (BRMS) from InRule Technology, recently and thought I would do an intro blog on it. I have worked with business rule engines before and from past experience have developed my own list of priorities on what I feel are the most important aspects. Here they are… Priority 1 - Reduce the cost of change For me, one of the primary reasons for implementing a business rules engine is because you are expecting change and want to reduce the...
A friend of mine works for a large bank… about a year and a half ago they needed a new system developed for their division. They went through the normal process of using one of the recommended service providers to develop the system and this was their experience, which is still typical with most institutions I know… For the first few months development of the system seemed to be progressing along fine. They had meetings, business analysts put things on paper and the developers nodded their heads...
First off in order to get your asp.net site up and running (without membership) all you have to do is copy your aspx files to the root of the htdocs folder that they supply for you. This in itself is an application directory and because of this you can run ASP.NET pages. For your information, I host my site with HostForLife.euSecond, you can use membership by going to their admin pages, creating a database, exporting your data and schema from your current membership database, and then running a script...
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 pushed two big updates to MVVM Light setup components. MSI installers with Silverlight 5 support The MSI installers are available on Codeplex. The current version supports Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5 (new), WPF 3.5 SP1, WPF 4, Windows Phone 7.0 and Windows Phone 7.1. The installer for V3 is available, as well as the one for V4 beta. NuGet support including Silverlight 5 I also pushed a new version of the NuGet packages which includes Silverlight 5. To install MVVM Light into...
Welcome to the hidden treasure of “MTM.config.exe” Navigate to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE” and open the 1. Can I change the number of Action Recording steps selected when a Bug is created? When you are exploratory testing using Microsoft Test Manager or performing a feedback session using Feedback Manager and decide to raise a bug or create a test case, the last 4*10 Action recordings are selected by default. You can change the number of action recordings selected...
To add a new role into my aspnet database, I tried to use the asp.net Web Application Administration Website. But it was showing the following error message:An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again. Strange, because I was sure, that my connectionstring was correct.After a while, after reading about the asp.net Web Application Administration Website, I found that it can't handle spaces or special character in the project path.My project was located in C:\Users\JEROEN\Documents\V...
What could you build with the XBox Kinect? Well we want to know! Connect your Kinect to your PC and build an application using your favorite .NET language. Kinect for Developers is a 2-day workshop for developers, artists and technicians interested in Kinect hacking or 3D scanning. This hands on workshop will teach you the basics of programming for Kinect and the potentials for developing on video and depth sensor cameras. Expect live demonstrations, presentations, food, and lots of hacking. You...
So, to step back up on my soapbox for a quick moment. The buzz and the noise around jQuery and Client Side development in general is growing and at a fairly rapid pace. This of course is good and bad. It’s good because our applications are becoming more and more user friendly and the visual appeal is increasing exponentially a well. Plus, as developers, we get to develop some pretty awesome functionality that before we would have had to crack open Visual Studio to get the same results. It’s definitely...
It's been a long time since I've done a post or had any motivation to do so. Much of that is due to events that turned my life upside-down for a time. However, I can concentrate on other things now that I'm shaking off the shackles and things are looking brighter. With that in mind here are a couple of random tips for Visual Studio. These tips work specifically in Visual Studio 2010; however, it's possible they may be relevant to past and future versions. Tip #1: Editor does not work correctly for...
Don’t miss out on these great session with Markus Egger in the Dallas office! Where: Microsoft Dallas Office – 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 When: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 – 1:30 – 4:30 PM Signup for this FREE event in Dallas Join Markus Egger, Microsoft RD and one of the longest running MVPs, for an afternoon of free information. CODE Magazine and EPS Software are in a unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own...
I often use the VS 2010/TFS 2010 evaluation virtual machines that Microsoft publishes every 6 months with the latest bits. It’s a great timesaver to use an image where everything is already setup and also contains a bit of sample data that is useful when you want to demo something for customers. There is one thing that has always been a, albeit small, but still very annoying problem and that is that the builds always partially fail when you start using the image. When you want to demo the powerful...
I came across a challenge last week, wherein I was asked to remove the path information from the dll files which were build inside my project. For those who don’t have an idea about what I am talking about, here is a quick introduction. The dll/exe files which are build by Visual Studio contains the Win32 PE header information, and this is true for all the dll and exe on Win32 platforms. Read about it at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wi... To check the headers in your dll/exe files...
This is another x64 issue where I was really surprised that it does exist. When you compile in VS2010/MsBuild a managed target for which the corresponding serialization assembly is generated you will find that all works until you try to compile for 64 bit. There you will get: "SGEN : error : An attempt was made to load an assembly with an incorrect format: xxxx.dll." Here is the 32 bit SGen is called for the 64 bit target which cannot load a 64 bit assembly. I have no idea why MS did not provide...
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...
Whenever I do use Visual Studio and try to compile something under 64 bit I run into problems. It seems that most MS Devs for Visual Studio and the relevant tool chain are still mainly writing 32 bit applications. Here are some of the latest issues I did run into. COM applications targeting x64 are still using x32 as target platform for the MIDL compiler by default Resolution: You have to select in the UI MIDL – Target Environment X64 by yourself. Alternatively you can edit the vcxproj file directly...
UPDATE 10.01.2012: The issue has been resolved by Microsoft and will be addressed in patch soon. Here is the full description from the Connect site: “We've identified the rootcause. This bug was introduced in the compatibility GDR patch released for VS 2010 to work against 2011 TFS Server. We shall be releasing a patch soon. Till then, please follow the workaround mentioned to unblock yourselves. “ When setting up a physical environment for a new test controller on our TFS 2010 server, I ran into...
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on the BizTalk Server blog site. This is advanced notice, given that this new version will ship six months after the release of Windows 8, expected in the second half of next year. On this basis, we can expect the new version of BizTalk Server to arrive in 2013. Given the BizTalk team’s previous record of name changes, I wonder if this will eventually be released as BizTalk Server 2013. Microsoft has been refreshingly...
If you haven't already checked out WebMatrix , go check it out now. It's awesome for a variety of reasons. It’s very cool feature.Anyway, one of the cool features of WebMatrix (and Visual Studio 2010) is the ability to publish straight from the IDE to a compatible web host. Not all web hosts support Web Deploy but I know HostForLife.eu support this technology.Here is a quick walk-through with screenshots showing the publishing process from WebMatrix. I try to publish Orchard CMS here. J OK, let’s...
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...
I was recently made aware of a couple of people having issues with WCF services (or ASP.NET applications) when using the MVVM Light project template for Silverlight. There is a blog post and a StackOverflow question, so what exactly is happening there? Well in fact it is pretty simple when you know how Silverlight connects to web services. Due to the security model of Silverlight, the application cannot connect to a web site if it is not originating of this very website. In laymen’s terms, it means...
When you’re debugging security related things, sometimes you need to take a look at the thread identities user token. When you’re inside of Visual Studio 2010 – in the watch windows you enter ‘$user’ and you’ll get the same as when in windbg with !token –n...
Today's deal of the day from Microsoft Press at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is Managing Projects with Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System "Get the practical reference for using Visual Studio Team System in your software development lifecycle—and maximize project success. Designed for software project managers, this book offers straightforward product information and expert insights for collaborating with architects, developers, and testers in one integrated development environment."This...
Overview Windows HPC Server 2008 is infrastructure for high-end applications that require high performance computing clusters – i.e. for scaling out parallelizable across many compute nodes in a grid. These compute nodes can be coordinated by a head node , which in turn can be proxied via a service broker node that exposes a SOA WCF interface for job scheduling. Additional functionality includes the ability to coordinate between job processes running on nodes via MPI (message passing interface)....
Last week I get the information directly from Microsoft, that at build machines SDKs must be installed to guarantee that MSBuild works well in some circumstances. We have the problem, that a self-containing build should include all necessary build artifacts – particularly Silverlight stuff. I tried to encapsulate the special steps in own targets and a build was finally possible (see my former posts). But at local machines without installed Silverlight stuff it gives problems for problems. Because...
Here is the official documentation on how to publish a LightSwitch application – How to: Deploy a LightSwitch Application. For this example, I’m going to show how to deploy a simple application that does not have any role-based security set up. I’ll show how we can configure that in a later post. So back over on my LightSwitch development machine the first thing we need to do is specify the type of 3-tier deployment we want. In the case of my application, I want it to be a Windows Desktop client...
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...