April 2006 - Posts
This seems to have gone unnoticed but looks very useful. I picked up the info from Rob Caron?s entry
You can download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=786CA9D4-B048-462F-8923-42B4C5C010CD&displaylang=en and as that page states
The Visual Studio 2005 Team System Design for Operations Integration Kit furthers Microsoft?s Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) by integrating and automating the communication and management of unhandled (non-instrumented) application errors and performance bottlenecks between operations and development for any custom .NET application. With this Integration Kit, application faults and performance bottlenecks automatically generate work items/trouble tickets in Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The result: both operations and application support/development teams have clear insight into the behavior and health of .NET applications in production, better equipping both to quickly identify, isolate, and resolve application issues, and save unnecessary costs.
Monad has been renamed to Windows Powershell and the RC1 version is available. Must admit I have not yet played with this thing but it looks very nice. I have just downloaded with it and might start to play soon ?
You can download it from here
As a side matter one side cool thing is that is also a provider for VSTS (or TFS more specifically) version control. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/archive/2006/04/07/570810.aspx
The various Visual Studio Express SKUs are free. You might
think – that’s not news. Well initially we announced that the
Express SKUs would be freely downloadable for a year and then we would probably
start to charge (or make a decision).
We made the decision – it is free
Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2006/04/19/579109.aspx
including information on a whole bunch of neat starter kits like the Microsoft
.NET Interface for Lego Mindstorms Starter Kit
This looks really cool. You can use MindManager to create your software requirements and then connect to TFS and sync them. See http://www.mindjet.com/labs/mjrm.html - they have even posted the source code.
We are looking at the possibility of delivering more sessions using LiveMeeting. I recently set this up and was very impressed on how easy it was to get going.
Questions
1) Have you attended a meeting using Livemeeting
2) Did you like it?
3) Would you like Microsoft SA to deliver sessions using this technology? Do you see value in us doing it locally versus using the US based one and recordings?
4) If yes, when and how long (example lunch time for 30 minutes)
5) Would you like to present. Live Meeting is different so even if you are uncomfortable at the traditional face to face format you might rock at this. Similarly a good speaker might not be best at this format
6) What kind of sessions would you like
From Tom Hollander?s blog
The patterns & practices team is pleased to announce that the first public drop of the Web Service Software Factory is now available from our new community site at http://practices.gotdotnet.com/projects/svcfactory.
The "Atlas" Control Toolkit is a set of nine great
controls and extenders that use "Atlas" technologies and allow
developers to easily improve the client experience on their websites. All of
the controls come with full source, and the toolkit also includes Visual Studio
2005 templates to get you started writing your own controls.
What's even more exciting is that this is start of something
new for Microsoft. The plan is to take this set of controls and turn it into a
shared source effort into which we will be taking contributions from the
community. Our goal is to turn this toolkit into the best and most comprehensive
set of client side controls available.
For details check out our site online at:
Landing Page: http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid=477
Toolkit samples live: http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit/
Say you have a function and you want to make sure that it
takes less than 2 seconds to execute. How would you create a unit test for
this.
In VSTS there is a timeout
property on unit tests. So in the example below if the function unit
test does not return in less than 2 second the test will fail with a timeout. That
is kinda cool. Not only can you do functional tests you can also do some degree
of performance testing.
<Timeout(2000)>
<TestMethod()> _
Public Sub HelloTest()
Dim target As Class1 = New Class1
Dim a As Integer
= 3 'TODO: Initialize to an
appropriate value
Dim expected As Integer
= 3
Dim actual As Integer
actual =
target.Hello(a)
Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual, "UnitTestTimeout.Class1.Hello
did not return the expected value.")
End
Sub
Paul Flessner is his SQL Server 2005 update
made mention of SQL Server Everywhere. What is this edition – well it is
quite simply the SQL Mobile edition with the limitations on what OS’s it
can run on removed.
This note from http://blogs.msdn.com/stevelasker/default.aspx
is useful. SQL/e is SQL Everywhere and SQL/x is Express
Q: Which database should I use for my
desktop apps?
A: This is a longer discussion then what I’m
trying to cover in this Q&A, but both SQL/x and SQL/e will be available for
the general desktop scenario. However, SQL/e is targeted specifically for
general desktop usage. It runs in-proc, doesn’t offer data as a
service, has a lightweight model for applications that need to share the
resources of the users machine with other applications besides the database
engine. SQL/x is a free version of the server product. It runs as a
service, and while SQL/x has been tuned to be more efficient about resource
usage, it is a server based product. General guidance is to start with
SQL/e. SQL/x is well suited when you want exact functionality of the
server platform, but are willing to deploy a server based product that will
require significantly more resources then SQL/e. When considering local
data stores, consider the bigger picture of the problem. A users machine
is a different operating environment then a server.
st1\:*{behavior:url(#default#ieooui) }
This was one of the most common requests during the VSTS
beta timeframe. Most orgs wanted to access Team Foundation Server from products
like VB3 and VS03 etc. This provider will allow you to do that. You can get it
from here
BTW Anyone noticed that Bangladesh made more than 400
against the Aussies !
I was playing around with an Atlas sample and figured that this machine did not have SQLExpress. After installing it and trying to work with the database I kept on getting this error
Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance
Resolution ? I deleted all files from C:\Documents and Settings\ahmeds\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Data\SQLEXPRESS (you need to change ahmeds to your account J) and tried again. The files were recreated in that dir and my problem went away. I guess this was a result of a previous beta being installed and not fully cleaned up.