Windows Phone 7 App Challenge: TFS Mobile Client

I have an MSDN Ultimate Subscription to give away to the winner of this challenge! The winner will have successfully built a showcase TFS Client for Windows Phone 7. I will accept entries until November 30th.

There are boundless opportunities for features and functionality. Creativity counts here, but to get you started, here are some ideas:

    • Build Server Status
      Would love to see the status of a given build type, the latest build, success/fail, the offending people who checked in code on a broken build. Would be nice to kick off a QA or Production build (or any type for that matter) from my phone once I’ve got the all clear from QA.
    • Iteration Dashboard
      What’s the status of the current build? What exit items are still open? What’s our current velocity? What’s the burn down look like?
    • Work Items
      Would love to edit a work item, reassign it to somebody else, close it, reactivate it, etc. Log a bug perhaps?
    • Opportunities with the Phone
      Being able to look up a work item owner, or build breaker in my address book and phone or email them seems obvious.

 

Remember the highlights of this challenge:

  • Entries due by Nov 30th. Email me some code including a link to video demonstration ideally. bgervin@objectsharp.com
  • Let me know if you are planning on entering. I’d be excited to provide some coaching and guidance along the way.
  • On the line is 1 year MSDN Ultimate Subscription. I think that is worth like a million dollars or something Smile
  • I’m sure you will also win a free date with a MS Developer Evangelist and be featured on the CDN Dev Blog.
  • I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to win if you live in Quebec or work for Microsoft or the Chinese government, but please don’t let that stop you from submitting an entry!

Gentlecoders, start your engines! Best of luck.

Toronto Code Camp 2010: Ultimate Architecture Experience Follow Up

This is just a quick follow up post from my demo at the Toronto Code Camp last weekend. Thanks for everybody who came out.

In addition to my slides, here ere are a few resources that will help you learn more about the architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition:

  • The .NET Pet Shop that I used as a sample is available for download.
  • Walkthrough: MSDN How-To’s on Modeling in 2010
  • Blogs: Cameron Skinner, Peter Provost and last but not least Chris Lovett who has some most awesome video demos and tips for dealing with large diagrams. He also provides some samples for those that are interested in learning more about Directed Graph Markup Language for creating their own diagram generators.
  • The Patterns and Practices Team has released a set of templated layered diagrams for various references architectures.

Architecture with Visual Studio 2010 At The Movies

This is just a quick follow up post from my demo at Visual Studio 2010 At The Movies last week. Thanks for everybody who came out, especially those from out of town.

I didn’t use any slides but I thought about recording my demo here. I may still get to that, but in the meantime, here are a few resources that will help you learn more about the architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition:

  • The .NET Pet Shop that I used as a sample is available for download.
  • Walkthrough: MSDN How-To’s on Modeling in 2010
  • Blogs: Cameron Skinner, Peter Provost and last but not least Chris Lovett who has some most awesome video demos and tips for dealing with large diagrams. He also provides some samples for those that are interested in learning more about Directed Graph Markup Language for creating their own diagram generators.
  • The Patterns and Practices Team has released a set of templated layered diagrams for various references architectures.

VSTS Load Testing Deal of the Day: Why you need to buy a VS 2008 Load Agent before April 12th, 2010

There are important licensing changes happening imminently with VSTS as part of the transition from 2008 to 2010:

  • The current VSTS 2008 Test Edition can load test up to the limit of your machine. On a good day, this is 1000 users. That satisfies a lot of the cases where people need to do load testing. If it’s not, and you have multiple testers, you always all run load from your own machines, however you don’t get the same unified collection of statistics – that’s what the Load Agent & Controller software is for. It’s not a huge deal, and that is why most people don’t buy Load Agents.
  • If you did need centralized collection of statistics, you’d want to buy a number of load agents, one for each CPU, at least in the 2008 SKU. If you wanted to test 10K users, you’d probably want 10 licenses (at least).  But that is changing.
  • In 2010, load testing licensing is no longer done by the CPU, it’s done by the virtual users!
  • When you upgrade to VS 2010 Ultimate come April, your load testing ability changes to only 250 users from your workstation copy of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. If you want to test more, you’ll want load agents. The 2010 Load Agent SKU will give you 1000 virtual users. If your hardware is not up to snuff, or your web tests are intensive, you can install a single 2010 SKU on any number boxes, but you’re limited to a total of 1000 users per SKU that you purchase.

This all sounds rather terrible, but as part of the transition, MS is offering this:

If you have purchased a 2008 Load Agent with Software Assurance, as part of the upgrade to 2010, they will give you 5x1000 Virtual Users in the 2010 Load Agent SKU. Wow!

For your benefit of pricing, that means if you buy a 2008 Load Agent with SA today, for about $8,000 you will get 5000 users in 2010. That’s a very good deal. If you wait until after April 12th, you will no longer be able to buy the 2008 SKU and you’ll have to buy the 2010 SKU. At about $8,000 per 1000 users. So if you wanted to test 5000 users come April 12th and you didn’t take advantage to get in on this deal, it will cost you 5x$8000 = $40,000! I’d say that an 80% discount is pretty good – snap it up today.

If you need help purchasing a license prior to April 12th, drop me a note at bgervin @ objectsharp.com and I can hook you up.

Join ObjectSharp for Silverlight on the Silver Screen – July 9 – Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

Silverlight 3 will soon be released.  And to properly celebrate the excitement of its release, ObjectSharp is teaming up with Microsoft to present an action-packed first look at the UX3 platform, live from the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. 

As one of the first companies to be featured on Microsoft’s Silverlight gallery, our consultants will share with you their deep knowledge of the next generation of tools.  Whether you are a designer, developer, or purely a marketing geek, you will not want to miss this blockbuster event.  You will see feature-rich demonstrations of Silverlight, Expression Blend, SketchFlow, and  Windows 7 touch technology.  You will also see how these tools can be used to dazzle your customers and gain attention for your brand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Developers and Designers:

  • See in-depth demonstrations of Silverlight 3, Expression Blend, and Windows 7 touch technology.
  • Learn how to quickly design user interactions with Microsoft SketchFlow
  • Take Designer/Developer work flow to the next level with Visual Studio Team System
  • Learn how to cut off your bosses head off and paste it on other people’s bodies with Expression Studio

 

For CTOs and Marketing Managers

  • Understand the benefits of creating line-of-business applications with Silverlight and .NET RIA Services
  • Learn how to integrate Rich Media and Advertising with the Microsoft Platform
  • See Touch technology and natural user interfaces bring kiosk applications to life with Windows 7 and WPF

Technologies You Will See:

  • Silverlight 3 featuring WPF & XAML
  • Expression Blend 3 featuring SketchFlow
  • Windows 7 featuring Touch
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint System 2007 (MOSS) for external facing web sites
  • Visual Studio 2010 Team System

Register Online   |   Watch the Movie Trailer

Changing Generated Code in VS2008

Have you ever been dissatisfied with the code that is automatically generated by Visual Studio in response to various commands that you perform. For example, in VS2005, I got used to using the prop snippet to create properties. This snippet created a property declaration complete with a private backing variable. However, in VS2008, the prop snippet was modified to create a property declaration in the form of the automatic property declaration. That, to me, was annoying.

(Note to Microsoft: Please consider the existing snippets to be part of what you consider when looking at backwards compatibility. Create more snippets, sure. But please don’t change what the current snippets do…especially when the ‘better’ snippets are not actually better)

Or, consider the fact that, as more and more work is done in WPF, the need to ensure that business classes implement INotifyPropertyChanged grows. Adding or modifying a snippet to include the code to call PropertyChanged could be quite useful. It certainly has been for me.

Little known by most developers is the location for the snippets that Visual Studio provides. Or, what might be more interesting to intrepid developers, the snippets used by Visual Studio refactoring. All of these are found in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC#\Snippets\1033. The keyword snippets can be found in the Visual C# subdirectory, while the refactoring snippets can be found in the Refactoring subdirectory. Take a look at what’s there and you may be surprised how you can increase your productivity for mundane (and frequent) tasks.

Problems Publishing Unit Tests from VSTS

Earlier today, a colleague had an issue with the publishing of unit test results into a TFS instance. The publication process, which is typically done manually at the click of a button, was no longer available. Specifically, the Publish button was actually disabled. There was no obvious error message indicating what, if anything, was wrong. This lack of information made identifying the problem a challenge, to put it mildly.

The solution, at least to identifying what the problem was, is to use the command line version of MSTest. If you execute the command MSTest /? in a command window, you will see that there are a number of options which can be used to execute a set of unit tests and publish them to a TFS server. For example, the following command will execute the unit tests in the TestLibrary.dll assembly and publish the results to the TFS server located at http://TfsServer:8080

MSTest /nologo /testcontainer:"TestLibrary.dll" /runconfig:"localtestrun.testrunconfig"
/resultsfile:"TestLibraryResults.trx" /test:TestLibrary /publish:http://TfsServer:8080
/publishbuild:"DemoTestBuild_20081103.1" /teamproject:"DemoProject" /platform:"Any CPU" /flavor:Debug

In this particular situation, running MSTest generate an error that indicated that the drop location for the build could not be created. An error that was, thankfully, quite easy to correct. But difficult to identify without using the command line tool.

VSTS Development & Database Editions to Merge!

VSTS2008 Database Edition の箱An early Christmas present from our friends in Redmond! Beginning October 1, 2008 subscribers to VSTS Developer Edition and Database Edition will have access to the additional SKU. This was reported this week over at the MSDN VS 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0 overview page, but you don’t have to wait until Visual Studio 2010 is released.

Well that is just an awesome announcement and kudos to MS for listening to the community feedback about the multiple hats people wear on projects. I’m sure that this will lead to more teams actually using the Database edition functionality on their project which offers great source code integration for their database scripts not to mention T-SQL unit testing and test data generation.

Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008 Conflicts

I'm just passing along some information that has been making the rounds (I found it on Guy Burstein's blog).

If you attempt to install SQL Server 2008 on a machine that has Visual Studio 2008 installed, it will fail. The requirement is to have VS 2008 SP1 installed, an update that is still about a week away from release. And you need the 'real' SP1. The same problem exists with the beta for SP1.

So, for you developer/database people out there, it looks like at least a week of waiting to get the combination on a single machine.

Essential MS Subscription for Mac-aphile Designers

Are you a design & mac user in a Windows Development Shop? Are they eyeing your Mac and measuring your desk to outfit you with a new PC? Over your cold dead corpse I bet. No worries. You owe it to yourself to check out the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription.  Yeah, you could run Bootcamp but then you'd loose the OS X & Quicksilver goodness while you paid the bills.

This annual subscription's most important piece of software isn't made by MS: Parallels Desktop for Mac. Parallels will let you run Windows Vista or Windows XP (also included with the subscription) without leaving OS X - better yet with Expose, your desktop will be unified. And with the SmartSelect feature, you'll be opening Mac or Windows files in the OS of your choice automatically. Edit XAML files in Expression Blend (also include) in Windows, but open JPEG's in Photoshop in OS X - regardless from which OS you launched the file from. Very cool.

Here's the complete list of included software

                • Expression® Studio
                  Which includes Expression Web for aspx/css/html stuff, Blend for WPF/Silverlight/XAML stuff,  Expression Design for illustrations & graphics, Expression Encoder for media encoding, and Expression Media for asset management.
                • Visual Studio® Standard
                  Just in case the .NET guys make you check stuff into source control.
                • Office Standard
                • Office Visio® Professional
                  For those workflow diagrams and ugly mock ups that the dev guys send you.
                • Windows® XP
                • Windows Vista® Business Edition
                • Virtual PC
                • Parallels Desktop for Mac

And just to make things even easier, they've already included some pre-configured virtualized servers in the box as well - that will save you some time. Current pricing is about $1000 USD for the first year. This won't be available for a few weeks, but visit here to learn more.

And if you're trying to learn more about WPF and Silverlight, check out our new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Developers & Designers course. Rob Burke, our User Experience (UX) practice lead talks more about this course here. And finally, check out Rob Windsor's post on our Summer Seat Sale to learn how to save up to $500 on our training this summer.