September 2006 - Posts
Some of the international speakers coming to TechED.
Luca Bolognese - lead program manager on the C# Team. Doing a bunch of talks on LINQ with a lots of demos (he tells me). Talks would be of interest to all developers (not just C# ones). Luca was heavily involved with Objectspaces (for any of you who remember that)
Jay Schmelzer - group program manager on the VB Team. Will be doing a VB Tips and Tricks session and one on building n-tier distributed solutions (this one should be relevant to both C# and VB guys)
Kate Gregory - Kate is a regional director based in Canada (i.e does not work for Microsoft). She has been to South Africa for the last couple of TechED's and has done a great job. She will be doing a session on VSTS for Developers as well 2 Vista dev sessions - one on modifying apps to work nicely on Vista and another on leveraging the native APIs. She is also very good at C++.
Dave Webster - Dave is a developer techie based in the UK/Europe. He travels through Europe, Middle East and Africa. He was out last year for Devdays and TechED and was very high rated. He will mainly be doing ASP.NET sessions including one on Atlas (or now ASP.NET Ajax)
Luca, Jay and Kate all had great ratings at TechED US (Dave did not present there)
Unfortunately I will not be there (some of you might be happy :-)) as it conflicts with Eid - the religous holiday that follows Ramadaan. I still own the dev track and advise on other dev sessions in other tracks though.
When I blogged about the VS03 SP being available recently I got some questions on availability of the VS05 SP - not to mention some comments that it will be ready in 2008 :-) . Well the good news is that the Beta of the Service Pack is available. You can visit http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/content/content.aspx?ContentID=3311 if you like to apply to get the beta
Question from customer - Can I view TFS workitems in VS03 or VB6 in the IDE?
Answer : No and Yes
You can view the workitems only when clicking the checkin button. I guess do not technically have to do a checkin but the checkin button is only available if there is something to checkin. You cannot view workitems without invoking this dialog.
Note that the MSSCCI provider requires the Team Explorer tool to be installed as a prerequisite and you can use this tool to view workitems but the Team Explorer is only directly integrated in VS05 (not VS03 etc)
Check out this blog entry from Craig Mcmurtry on the Live Service Trace Viewer. This is a WPF app that shows WCF interactions while it is happening
Question from customer - Does the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals have direct support for the scripting/comparing of jobs.
Answer - Unfortunately no. VSTE DB works with schema objects. Please check http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=664627&SiteID=1 for more information and discussion (and where the answer was found :-))
I was busy setting up a laptop with Vista RC1 and wanted to install Cider and the workflow addons for Visual Studio 2005. These require the Windows SDK to be installed as a prereq. I decided to give the express online installer a go. I downloaded and ran the setup file directly (not by saving first). This was a small download (under 1MB). I was then able to select what I wanted to install. I went for as little as possible - selected the zipped sample and the .NET utils. Did not install the doc or any C++ stuff.
I must say I was impressed with it. About an hour later the install was done and I could install Cider.
I would interested in any feedback if you tried this rather than downloading the 1GB Platform SDK.
Just over a week ago I blogged about whether TFS could be clustered. A few days after that blog entry Brian Harry blogged about an offering from HP for high availability TFS.
With this offering you have "hot stand-by" solution where the application tier will automatically and transparently fail over in the event of a primary failure. You can find the details on the HP site in this whitepaper
We released some new TFS power toys in the last week. Power Toys are tool that are released off cycle from the normal release process as Brian Harry describes it and the philosophy
You can download the power toy from here
The feature is I am really look to play with is the TreeDiff functionality. A quick description of the features you get
1. Unshelve – adds merge capability to the existing Unshelve command
2. Rollback – allows you to undo a checkin of a changeset
3. Online – allows syncing of files that you’ve edited while not connected to a server
4. GetCS -- gets all the items listed in a specific changeset
5. UU – undo unchanged. Undo checkout with a check for what’s actually unchanged
6. Review – code review tool, review files in any order you choose
7. History – display version history of a file, folder or branch
8. Workitem – create, view or update a work item from the command line
9. Query – run a work item query and display the results
10. Bind – convert VSS-bound solutions into TFS-bound solutions
11. TreeDiff – Compare folders and reconcile differences
12. Annotate – show who last changed a section of code
One other bit of good news is that the TFS MSSCCI provider (this allows you to use TFS from environment like VB6, VS2003, Access etc) is now fully supported as well.
Scott Guthrie has blogged about Atlas naming and the feature delivery plan. The good news is that a proper supported product should be available before the end of the year - or at least that is what they are pushing for. This product will focus on the core set of functionality. Addtional functionality will be available in seperate downloads.
And as you guessed it we have names for the client side (now Microsoft AJAX Library), server side (now ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions) and control toolkit (now ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit) portions of Atlas. As changes in names go this one is not too bad at all.
XNA Express became available for download last week and I decided to give it a try. I have never been much of gaming developer - just an aspiring one and marvel at those who have those lekker DirectX skills.
To my joy I found XNA Express on our local server (found out by mistake when looking to install Office 2007 Beta 2 TR) - so this saved me the 90MB download. Installed it - and it moaned. It wanted Visual C# Express. I have Team Suite and thought it would be happy. Nope it wanted Express. So installed C# Express and then XNA Express and good to go. BTW I actually installed this on a Windows Server 2003 box - the docs say on XP SP2 is supported but so far no issues.
Then to play around a bit I went into the docs where they have a small section on creating your first XNA Game and voila. There is also a nice starter kit based project. I think I might just be spending a bit more time playing around with gaming dev.
Finally a nice resource I found is http://learnxna.com
Question - How do I provide high availability for TFS
Answer - You can cluster the database tier. This would require the appropriate hardware and the correct editions of SQl Server
Q - What about the application tier/Web Services etc
A - You can create a warm standby server for application tier
For more information visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253159.aspx
<In case you are wondering what these blog posts are about, these are some questions I got from recent customer sessions. I thought it a good idea to share the answers on my blog >
Question : Can the web test/load testing features of Team System playback an IIS log?
Answer : Not with anything directly available in the box. It would be possible to take the log and generate your own coded web test. After some hunting around a nice post on how to do this in a better way can be found on Josh Christies blog entry
Question from customer : Is there a utility to migrate from Sourcesafe to Team Foundation Server
Answer : Yes
Q: Does it migrate the history or just the data?
A: The history is migrated as well. You can also migrate the history after a specific date using the archive feature in Visual SourceSafe.
Q: Are there features in Sourcesafe that are not available in TFS?
Y : Share, Pin,Archive and Restore, Destroy and Keyword Expansion are features that do not exist in TFS
For more information visit
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181369.aspx and http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181247.aspx
I have been getting this error for the last couple of weeks and today decided to troubleshoot it. Turns out there is an option in Excel "Ignore other applications that use DDE". Once I unchecked this my problem went away.
Now how many people still remember DDE?
Question from a customer - In Project I can link tasks using Predecessors etc. How does this work with Team Foundation Server
Answer - Linking of tasks is not currently supported in TFS. Also TFS does not currently support subtasks and hierarchies of tasks