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We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it ...

I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are ...

OK this is just a first post to see how Windows Live Writer works. I’m sure as I become more familiar with it the easier it will be.

I am new to the world of contracting and am finding it very similar to my permanent roles I’ve had. Anyone have any advice for a new contractor in the software development and/or software configuration management role?

 

Thanks,

DC

This was a big week for Windows 8 news (given the relative secrecy around the whole project). At the beginning of the week we learned that the Consumer Preview (fka the "Beta") of Windows 8 will be released at the very end of the month in concert with the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona (MWC). Then, just yesterday, Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky uploaded an 8600+ word post to the Building Windows 8 blog detailing Microsoft's plans for Windows on ARM (i.e. ...

Anyone who has worked with Visual Basic for any length of time should be familiar with the VB Type Conversion Functions like CBool, CInt, and CStr. These functions can provide a short and easy way to coerce the value of one type into another. I’ve been working with ~300,000 line VB .NET project for the past couple of years that is littered with calls to these functions. We never had any issues with them until we sat down to convert the project to C#. Converting a 300,000 line project from VB .NET ...

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/... ...

Over the past few months we have been tweaking the usability of the Geekswithblogs.net Admin Tool for editing posts. We definitely suggest using Windows Live Writer for publishing you blogs due to the awesome plugins and support of image uploads, we understand the need for a non-Windows editor for posts or updates. One of the bugs submitted to us in the usage of our text editor was reformatting of posts when you publish from WLW and then make changes from the admin tool. The tool was eating up all ...

In my search for a way to allow readers to tweet post that I put on GWB I have come across the TweetMeme plug-in for Windows Live Writer. It automatically puts a twitter button at either the top or bottom of your post depending on how you configure it. It comes with a warning that it does not work with blog servers that strip out script from posts which I made me afraid it was going to make it incompatible with GWB. This turned out to be the case so I figured we would need either an upgrade to the ...

I have wanted to have a Tweet button on my individual posts for a short while. So here is a test to see if the Twitter code for their button con work on Geeks With Blogs site via Windows Live Writer. Tweet del.icio.us Tags: Twitter,Tweet blog ...

I ran into a frustrating scenario today, while working with SharePoint 2010’s Managed Client Object Model. My application queries a SharePoint document library using the file’s name (the FileLeafRef field). Given that this field is unique, I was expecting only one result with the following code: 1 CamlQuery qry = new CamlQuery(); 2 3 //filter the results to only get back the item with the filename we're looking for 4 qry.ViewXml = string.Format( 5 "<Query><Where>... ...

The updates are installed, all you want to do now is get connected, authenticated and get going. The first step needed here is to open Visual Studio 2010, once opened then you need to get to Team Explorer. Once there, you will click on the Connect to Team Project button on the toolbar. If you had a connection defined to another TFS environment, this will be adding one more, so you click on Servers… On the next dialog, you will click on Add… Then you will proceed to provide the details of your Team ...

Hi Everyone, This is a place for .NET lovers like us can go and learn more about all Microsoft Cloud technologies. This website makes it more easy, simple and actually fun to know what the technologies are, how they work and what we can do for it in the perception of both business and personal entities. Here is what you have to do (to make it much easier, follow the steps) 1. Go to http://www.microsoftvirtual... this website 2. Login with your Windows Live ID (Create one if you ...

I have been part of the Azure TFS Technical Access Preview (TAP) since March 2011. TFS Azure has been previewed and officially announced as TFS Service in the 2011 Build Conference, California. The Non-Disclosure Agreement has been lifted from the participants of the TAP program. The below excerpt from bharrys blog encourages early adopters to provide feedback. "We’ve been running the service for months now and it’s been working reliably. I suspect now that they can talk about it, you’ll be able ...

I've just installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview. These are some first impressions: Installation of the preview was quite smooth and didn't take too long. It took a few minutes to extract the files onto a virtual image, but feature installation then seemed to happen almost instantaneously (according to the feedback on the screen). The installation routine then went into a preparation cycle that took two or three minutes. Then the virtual machine rebooted and after a couple of minutes more preparation, ...

As usual when I attend a conference, I like to take quick notes to remember what it was all about and take some time later to analyze it. Since Windows 8 is going to be the next big things, let me share my notes with you! Today is a launch Start by talking about Win7 450000000 copies of win7 sold Win7 usage is finally greater than XP usage 520’000’000 people using Windows Live services World of computing is changing especially since 1995, last big Windows overhaul Touch is very important in Win8 ...

We're 10 minutes away from the Build keynote, and I'm going to be live blogging the event. Now, to be clear, you shouldn't just read this - I mean, the keynotes are streaming live online. But I want to capture my thoughts on the announcements as they happen. So without further ado, let's start!And we're done! Great keynote, lots of content! However, we still don't have our schedule! LOL...off for lunch.11:16 - The path to RTM: Beta, RC, RTM, GA - Driven by quality and not a date, I'm ok with that.11:11 ...

Para los que quieren smartphones con Mango, cada vez hay más a la venta. La compañía Taiwanesa HTC es la segunda en sacar lanzar smartphones con Windows Mango. Mango es la última versión del sistema operativo para celulares de Microsoft. Este sistema operativo ahora si podrá competir contra iPhones y smartphones con Android. Los dispositivos HTC Radar y Titan saldrán primero a la venta en Europa y Asia, para nuestros países latino americanos Nokia parece prometedora. Microsoft debe ahora apurarse ...

After setting up the Cross Domain parameters properly, using _setDomainName(), _setAllowHash(), and _setAllowLinker(), and making sure to call the _trackPageview() last, using ga_debug.js in Chrome, I was able to see that the AccountID and the SessionID were still changing upon navigating to the other Domain. This meant the cookies were not being shared across the Domains using the _link() method from Google Analytics Asynchronous Library. So what is the [workaround]? After carefully studying how ...

I just got back from Microsoft’s 15,000 attendee-strong Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Los Angeles, and I have to say, the company and its partners are pumped. How can this be, given the number of people who have written Microsoft’s eulogy of late? If Amazon owns the cloud, if Apple owns the consumer, if Google owns search, if Cisco owns unified communications, if EMC/VMWare owns virtualization, if Oracle and SAP own ERP and if Oracle/Siebel and Salesforce.com own CRM, how can Microsoft be ...

<Updated 2011-5-1: slides and code from SPSSTL linked below (or click here) and sessions for SPSMI added> <Updated 2011-5-15: slides and code from SPSMI linked below (or click here)> April 30th, 2011 I’ll be presenting at SharePoint Saturday St. Louis. My presentation is “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to developers. This session is fairly demo heavy but stays more on the “overview” side rather than deep ...

Ahhh, the beauty of having Windows Live Writer on the mac again, I love it. So when I bought this machine, I said I would never run Boot Camp, Parallels, or Fusion on it because it only has 2GB of ram that is not upgradeable and who can run a VM with under a 1GB ram dedicated? Well the answer is Windows 7 Starter Edition. How did I come to that conclusion, trial and error. We are prepping for a big event at TechEd 2011 (the announcement will be coming soon) and I needed Windows Live Writer on my ...

First entry in a new neighbourhood . Whether it be cheating or whatever I’m giving Windows Live Writer a try as an editor interface for this new blog. In the process I’ll also give these plug-ins a try: Source Code Formatter Amazon Book Linker Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Syntax4Writer For Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter Paste As Visual Studio Code Twitter Notify ...

I have written about adding support for specifications to NHibernate’s ISession type. Shortly afterwards Paul Stovell moaned on twitter that no one had demonstrated how to mock ISession. Since my implementation relied upon an extension method (QueryBySpecification) I googled how to mock extension methods – and discovered that you can’t. What I did find was Daniel Cazzulino’s post about converting extension methods to methods that return a Func that exposes your extension method. That way you can ...

Recently I wrote about JavaScript class patterns, and in particular, my favourite class pattern that uses closure to provide encapsulation. A class to represent a person, with a name and an age, looks like this: var Person = (function() { // private variables go here var name,age; function constructor(n, a) { name = n; age = a; } constructor.prototype = { toString: function() { return name + " is " + age + " years old."; } }; return constructor; })(); var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); ...

Even when using an ORM, such as NHibernate, the developer still has to decide how to perform queries. The simplest strategy is to get access to an ISession and directly perform a query whenever you need data. The problem is that doing so spreads query logic throughout the entire application – a clear violation of the Single Responsibility Principle. A more advanced strategy is to use Eric Evan’s Repository pattern, thus isolating all query logic within the repository classes. I prefer to use Query ...

This weekend I presented “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell” at SharePoint Saturday New Orleans. This was my first time visiting New Orleans so I was excited for the experience. A big thanks to everyone who attended my session. I condensed the material a little but the slides and scripts below have additional material that we couldn’t cover. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or feedback. Thanks. Slides and Scripts Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell Photos Pictures ...

I recently described some of the patterns used to simulate classes (types) in JavaScript. But I missed the best pattern of them all. I described a pattern I called constructor function with a prototype that looks like this: function Person(name, age) { this.name = name; this.age = age; } Person.prototype = { toString: function() { return this.name + " is " + this.age + " years old."; } }; var john = new Person("John Galt", 50); console.log(john.toString()); and I mentioned that the problem with this ...

Note: Updated 2/12/11 with links to both presentation materials. This past week I presented two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011. The first session was “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which . Thanks to all of my attendees for this session. They had so many great questions that we ran out of time before covering all of the planned material. Especially for them I’ve provided the slides and code samples to walk through them on their own. The second session was “Real World ...

To write object-oriented programs we need objects, and likely lots of them. JavaScript makes it easy to create objects: var liam = { name: "Liam", age: Number.MAX_VALUE }; But JavaScript does not provide an easy way to create similar objects. Most object-oriented languages include the idea of a class, which is a template for creating objects of the same type. From one class many similar objects can be instantiated. Many patterns have been proposed to address the absence of a class concept in JavaScript. ...

To write object-oriented programs we need objects, and likely lots of them. JavaScript makes it easy to create objects: var liam = { name: "Liam", age: Number.MAX_VALUE }; But JavaScript does not provide an easy way to create similar objects. Most object-oriented languages include the idea of a class, which is a template for creating objects of the same type. From one class many similar objects can be instantiated. Many patterns have been proposed to address the absence of a class concept in JavaScript. ...

One performance issue i faced at a recent project was with the way that our constraints were being managed, we were using Subsonic as our ORM, and it has a useful tool for generating your ORM code called SubStage – once configured, you can regenerate your DAL code easily based on your database schema, and it can even be integrated into your build as a pre-build event if you want to do this. SubStage also offers the useful feature of being able to generate DDL scripts for your entire database, and ...

I receive daily newsletters from DotNetSlackers regarding various .NET topics. Today I read an article from an apparent Microsoft employee who gave some insight to the organizational culture within the company. Always on the lookout for new tools and technologies I noted that he used Windows Live Writer for editing and managing his blog content. I thought I’d give it a try. Let’s try adding a picture and adjusting it’s placement within this blog post relative to this text. … Adding the image is quite ...

Introducing Functional Decomposition Before I begin I must apologise. I think I am using the term ‘functional decomposition’ loosely, and probably incorrectly. For the purpose of this article I use functional decomposition to mean the recursive splitting of a large problem into increasingly smaller ones, so that the one large problem may be solved by solving a set of smaller problems. The justification for functional decomposition is that the decomposed problem is more easily solved. As software ...

This past weekend I presented “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell” and “SharePoint 2010 and Integrating Line of Business Applications” SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach. A big thanks to everyone who attended my sessions. I had a great time presenting, getting to meet new folks, and exploring a little bit of the local life. Below are slides, materials, and pictures from the event. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or feedback. Thanks. Slides and Materials Managing SharePoint ...

If you’ve ever written an application that accepts date and/or time inputs from an external source (a person, an uploaded file, posted XML, etc.) then you’ve no doubt had to deal with parsing some text representing a date into a data structure that a computer can understand. Similarly, you’ve probably also had to take values from those same data structure and turn them back into their original formats. Most (all?) suitably modern development platforms expose some kind of parsing and formatting functionality ...

In the UK we have seen some fantastic take up around the Windows Azure Platform and we have lined up some great stuff in 2011 to help companies fully exploit the Cloud – but we need you to tell us what you are up to! Once you tell us about your plans around Windows Azure, you will get access to FREE benefits including email based developer support and free monthly allowance of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and AppFabric from Jan 2011 – and more! (This offer is referred to as Cloud Essentials and is explained ...

*** The sample build process template discussed in this post is available for download from here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d... *** In my previous post I talked about library builds that we use to build and replicate dependencies between applications in TFS. This is typically used for common libraries and tools that several other application need to reference. When the libraries grow in size over time, so does the number of assemblies. So all solutions ...

Some time ago, I wrote a post about how to implement dependency replication using TFS 2008 Build. We use this for Library builds, where we set up a build definition for a common library, and have the build check the resulting assemblies back into source control. The folder is then branched to the applications that need to reference the common library. See the above post for more details. Of course, we have reimplemented this feature in TFS 2010 Build, which results in a much nicer experience for ...

At the end of November 2010 we released a new version of the Windows Azure SDK which contains many new features driven by the great feedback of early adopters plus a shiny new portal. New Portal implemented in Silverlight: The new portal is implemented using Silverlight and replaces the (IMHO rather clunky) original HTML + JavaScript portal. It is 100% better although does still have a few bugs. Enjoy! P.S. You can if you wish still use the old portal: New runtime functionality: The following functionality ...

There are several ways to chain demux IC’s to get more outputs than the ones that a single IC can get you. In these posts I’ll explore the ones I could find and use successfully. The first one has to do with the differences of inverting and non-inverting IC’s. In this video, I have 2 iC’s driving 16 LEDs. With this configuration I could drive as much as 64 LEDs with these 2 IC’s. I simply didn’t have the patience to connect them all: 16 LEDs with 2 IC’s In my previous post I mentioned that the 74HC138 ...

The release of the recent update to the Xbox 360’s dashboard has caused quite a commotion among the Xbox LIVE Indie Games (“XBLIG”) community. The primary reasons for this have been a negative response to various changes that have occurred in regards to XBLIG’s look and presence on the Xbox. Unfortunately, what was an “Indie Developers Unhappy With Dashboard Changes” story has been slowly corrupted into a “Microsoft Wants To Kill XBLIG” story. I undoubtedly played a part in that with my post here ...

In my previous post I used a lot of transistors (not very successfully, I might add) to drive 4 LEDs with 2 digital GPIO pins from a Netduino. I mentioned that there are Integrated Circuits (ICs) that may be used for that. In this post I’m going to use one of those ICs (specifically, a 74HCT138) to do the exact same thing. First, here is how it looks: Very simple prototype of the use of a 74HCT138 The code I’m using is exactly the same as before. I have the Encoder class, which will receive a single ...

WARNING: I’m probably doing something terribly wrong here. In my last post, I mentioned that using transistors you can do boolean logic. This is the fundamental basis for computers to work. I wanted to test the concept. In that article, I was using a single Netduino digital output to drive two LEDs. In this experiment, I’m using two digital outputs to drive four LEDs, using some transistors. Here’s the video: Driving 4 LEDs from 2 pins using transistors You can see the LEDs turning on in order when ...

One of the great new features in TFS 2010 Build was the ability to define Build Process Templates that can be reused across build definitions. The Build Process Template file itself is a Windows Workflow 4.0 xaml file and can be stored anywhere in source control. When a developer creates a new build definition in Team Explorer, he can choose from a list of Build Process Templates: This list is populated with the following build process templates: The ones that come out of the box (DefaultTemplate.xaml, ...

My coworker John Sonmez had a great blog post recently illustrating how to refactor a switch statement. In short, he outlined how to take a switch statement covering all known values of a C# Enumeration and convert it into a Dictionary “map” object allowing you to quickly determine what action to take given any valid enumeration value. I really like this approach as I think it leads to more readable code. The one thing that’s always bothered me about enumerations though is that they can change with ...

JavaScript was created to add interactivity to Netscape 2.0 back in 1995. A consequence of this limited scope is that the language was given only a minimal standard library. Should you ever try to solve a significant problem with JavaScript you will quickly feel the need for more advanced library methods than what JavaScript provides. Underscore.js Underscore.js is a library of utility functions for JavaScript. Most of the functions add functional capabilities to JavaScript. Simply add a script reference ...

Updated 2011-01-28 to reference the correct question stackoverflow.com Updated 2011-10-02 With a link to a sample application on github. In the web application I work on we sometimes need to create PDF documents based on some user input. In most cases, these documents are fairly simple and quick to create, allowing us to create the documents in memory and then send them back to the requesting user with a “Content Disposition: attachment” in the HTTP response. This causes the browser file download ...

Update 2012-01-23: Added note about .NET framework Martin Hinshelwood wrote an excellent post recently (http://geekswithblogs.net/... about a new type of integration available in TFS 2010, namely server side event handlers, that is executed within the TFS context. I wasn’t aware of this new feature and as Martin notes, there doesn’t seem to be any material/documentation of it at all. Previously, when you wanted ...

Be warned: this will be very basic. I find it amazing nonetheless. As a newbie, I went out and bought a 5V led to be used in an output port in the Netduino. This will of course not work, as the output ports of the Netduino are 3.3V. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just use some resistors”. The only problem is that resistors don’t work that way. You can take 5V to 3.3V by using resistors (although you could take 5V to a 3.3V led). I ended up giving the led to a friend who does very cool led projects, ...

These days it seems that everyone has a crush on Ruby. I presented two sessions at this year’s Adelaide Code Camp: BDD with StoryQ and I Am IronRuby. After the standard IronRuby demonstration (creating a new project and scaffolding) I showed off some of what I like about Ruby. I started with a file containing Ruby comments describing nice features of the language. Then I worked my way through the script writing the Ruby to demonstrate each feature. The result is similar to my JavaScript Koans, but ...