Etienne's VSTS World

Seen on Windows-Now.com...

a whale with millions of tiny barnacles attached to it. on Microsoft ecosystems... love the imagery of this, it's about the best metaphor that describes Microsoft I've seen ;-).

Cheers,

ET

Wow! Exactly what I've been waiting for!! So yesterday Brian Harry blogged about a Server Manager tool he developed on the side and asked us if we taught that was going to be useful as a power tool.  Well... Absolutely.  Manageability as been...how to say... difficult in V1 with tools like this it will certainly help see if our infrastructure is healthy and how well we do.  Those stats will be very important for some of our folks.  So I say ... absolutely Brian bring it on.

Cheers,

ET

So today an internal Team decided to move to our corporate TFS instance (nothing new there) the crux was that they are running a mix of VB6, VS2003 projects.  I say "Hey no problem you guys can use the MSSCCI Provider for TFS and it should work like a charm!" so after our conversation I remembered that I had not tried this at home like they say, I have been using VSTS (2005) and have not worked on a legacy project in a while.  So off I go and download the MSSCCI Provider and install it in VM (that can connect to the corp server).  Now I stop and wonder how I will test this... I decide to download VB6 since it's more lightweight then VS03 to install.  I install VB6 + SP6 and then start VB...

...Nothing there, I look around can't find anything with TFS anywhere... a bit perplexed I go to the forum and type "VB" and find a post on wanting to change back to VSS after installing the TFS provider, I jump in there and wam! I fall on this link to Ed Hintz about how to do just that.  Now I figured what happened is since in installed VB "After" the TFS MSSCCI provider it put back VSS as it's provider.  I run then the second command from Ed's post

reg add HKLM\Software\SourceCodeControlProvider /v ProviderRegKey /d "Software\Microsoft\Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider" /f

to "put back" the TFS Provider as the default ... then start VB again.  Well then that was a pretty sight my old trusty friend VB with a link to TFS.  Life was good.

I then proceeded to create a little project and add it to TFS.  Very cool that we see the same dialog as in VS05 (with the Source Control channels) and as a bonus we can pick work items!!! How very cool!!! I then added my VB6 project and all was good.  I can view history, compare versions, I can get normally or exclusively by changing a few params in the Team Foundation Properties or options from under the tools->Team Foundation (how cool is that TFS in VB6) menu.

So I have to say I'm quite impressed with the provider. 

Lessons learned: If you need to change provider (VS03, VB6, VP9, other MSSCCI apps) follow the indication in Ed's post, Use it, it works and you can store you most important asset (your source) into trusty TFS for safekeeping.

Good work guys,

Cheers,

ET

So Howard tagged me yesterday ;-).  I met Howard at Microsoft a few months back working on the OD for TFS.

Here goes 5 things few people know about me ...

1. Today is my birthday... I'm old ... but I'm still barely clinging to my 30s.

2. I used to play football when I was ... younger ;-).  I had to stop because I broke my tibia (that's the big bone on the lower part of the leg) and was 6 months in various casts and it was never the same after.  Oh and did I mention it was touch football ;-).  I still very much enjoy football but have less and less time to play.

3. I'm an avid Dungeons and Dragons fan and have been for the last 25 years.  I think it's a great creative outlet, it helped me a lot with my English (having the read all the manuals), It also helped me to stand in front of other people and explain things (which is great for my presentation skills), finally it helped me develop great problem solving skills (solving riddles and ways to resolve various scenario twists) which are very important in the IT industry (problem solving skill that is not solving riddles ;-)).  This year I think i'll fullfill a long dream of attending Gen Con in Indianapolis with all the miles i've accumulated last year :-).

4. I have a mechanical engineering degree from Ottawa University but I have never worked in engineering when I graduated in the early '90s there was no jobs at all so I joined EDS and have been working there for the last 15 years.  I have worked for a lot of different customers in a lot of different industries including manufacturing and mining which my engineering degree certainly helped a lot with.  If I had to do it again I would do the exact same thing, the problem solving skills that I developed while doing my degree are still very important to me today when I develop software and infrastructure architectures.

5. I love billiards.  I don't play as much anymore but I used to have a pool table at my parent's house and I played all the time.

There you have it a little bit about me you may not have known about.

So here we go I'm going to tag Guy Barrette, Mario Cardinal, Laurent Duveau, Willy-Peter Schaub and Aaron Kowall.

Cheers,

ET

Update: I tough Jeff Beehler had already been tagged I just noticed he had not.  Jeff Tag... ;-).

The RC is out get it here

Note: you need to be part of the connect site to be able to download it.

I'll be testing in the next few days to see if the pesky 915 Chipset problem is resolved or not (that's the keyboard stutter problem for those that don't know).

Cheers,

ET