Ahmed Salijee

May 2006 - Posts

Getting only unique records in Excel

I had a list in Excel where certain email addresses were duplicated. I wanted only the unique records. I was hunting down the route of macros etc but then came across this support article.

How to remove duplicate records or create list of unique records in Excel

That did exactly what I wanted (with no code) and the feature was there all the time ? shame on me and I guess it is true that about 80% of user requests are already there.

ADO.NET Tech Preview

Data is something that affects just about all developers. This article seems to have been quietly posted on the msdn site – it details some of the planning for the next version of ADO.NET. The The ADO.NET Entity Framework seems kinda interesting

 

Oooh, Time to install Office 2007 - You can author blogs from Word

Now this looks cool. Check http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/12/595963.aspx

I have not installed Office 12 largely due to concerns about it affecting other apps ? most notably the TFS integration but I might just decide to give this a go. A killer feature has just been added.

Devdays 2006 - Go and register

Devdays is open for registration. We have one track on security (amazing how people still cannot recognise code that could cause a SQL Injection attack) and another one on WinFX (WCF, WPF, Workflow and InfoCard). The WinFX track is largely introductory  – and I am sure one or two are saying Info What?

 

Durban 6 June - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-ZA&EventID=1032297130&EventCategory=1

Johannesburg 8 June   - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-ZA&EventID=1032297132&EventCategory=1

Cape Town 14 June - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-ZA&EventID=1032297137&EventCategory=1

 

 

 

 

VS 2005 Web Application Project V1.0 Released

If you wanted your VS03 type behavior in VS05 for Web Projects than you want this.

 

Check out Scott Guthries blog entry for more information. You can download directly from here

Xbox coming to South Africa -

Don?t ask me when but an announcement was made at the E3 event that South Africa (amongst other countries) would have the Xbox coming. Most of us knew it was coming but now it is official

And so the dream ends
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I am a long time Spurs supporter (or should that be long time sufferer). After many years in the doldrums we finally seem to be coming good. We entered the last day of the season needing a win to get into the Champions League (Europes premier competition). Alas we fell at the last hurdle.

 

But wait – there is more. It turns out that around 10 of the Spurs players were suffering from food poisoning prior to the match and had hardly eaten or drunk much for the day. Conspiracy theories abound. What the chance of something like this happening on the last day of the season in probably the biggest match for a decade?

VSTS - Of APIs, Tools and UIs

Recently I have been working with TFS and VSTS quite a bit. One of the biggest learnings I have made is that what you see is not what you get, you get a lot more. What do I mean by this?

 

Well, if all what you focused on what the user interface provided by Visual Studio there is quite a bit you could me missing out on. This applies not just to the server portions (TFS) but to the client portions as well. The one example that resonates best is source control.

 

There are a bunch of stuff you can do with the UI but when you start to look at tf.exe you realize that there is stuff that is not exposed through the UI. These include things like baseless merges or doing a recursive history on a folder. In order to get full value you need to take a good look at tf.exe and see what additional things can be accomplished.

 

In some cases certain tasks are not exposed through a UI at all. For example TFS allows you to subscribe to events. A portion of this is available through the UI for email alerts but the process of hooking up an event to some subscribers requires the use of bissubscribe.

 

And that is not the end of it. These tools are all built on an API where you can build your own apps. Check out this entry where a list of files for review is extracted using code. Have a look at this post for another example.

 

The moral of the story – spend some time checking out the command line tools and understand that TFS is more than a product, it is a platform where you can extend it to provide you a lot more goodies.