Martin Kulov's Blog

MVP Summit 2008

2008-04-22T14:53:00.001+03:00

Last week it was the MVP Summit 2008 at Seattle. I had a chance to attend it also this year. Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie were answering questions during the keynote and we had a great three days with the VSTS product group. Many things to come in Rosario so make sure that you keep in touch what is coming out in the next releases.

Here are some fresh ones. April Rosario CTP is the longest expected one (more info below). Note the significant push in the architecture tools as also the new build system based on Windows Workflow and the improved historical debugger and test tools available in the previous CTP. There are some very useful video tutorials that you must checkout after downloading the release.

TFS Power Tools March 2008 is also released (more info below). There is a very cool tool called TFSServerManager for monitoring current status of the TFS server. Also the Process Template Editor is now working with custom controls.

April Rosario CTP now available!

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/11/april-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx

Architecture Edition

Exploring the existing code structure
Designing process flow as activities
Designing user interactions with systems
Designing system functionality as components
Visualizing and designing types in systems
Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems

Development Edition

Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
Identify the test impact of code changes
Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Database Edition

Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.

Test Edition

Planning a testing effort
Executing manual test cases
Verify the fix
Automate a manual test and add validation.

Team Foundation Server

Managing an Agile schedule
Easier reporting from Excel
Managing features with the CMMI Process
A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements

March 2008 TFS Power Tools now available

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/21/march-2008-tfs-power-tools-now-available.aspx

Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls

TFSServerManager client

TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008

Work Item Template improvements Scriptable Team Project creation

Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms

Unshelve to a different branch

Improvements to tfpt review

Delete global lists in the work item tracking system

Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes

Performance improvements in tfpt online

MVP Award 2008 Renew

2008-04-02T02:54:00.001+03:00

I got awarded for the third time with the MVP Award. The award is presented on an annual basis which makes it even harder to keep up in the years. Still Microsoft does not stop releasing new products and CTPs so one can easily lose many days and nights working with their products. Becoming an MVP is great and has a lot of benefits. My category is VSTS which gives me access to a number of great people that are eager to discuss and share their knowledge in VS and VSTS. If you want to become one, you have to keep one thing in mind: community work! You should be ready to spend a lot of your time helping online and local communities without getting paid for this. Believe me this could mean having weeks of few hours sleep per day. Or just leaving your daily job and concentrate on this :)

C2C 2008 Conference

2008-04-02T01:52:00.002+03:00

I am going to speak this Saturday at a brand new conference at Warsaw, Poland called Communities to Communities 2008 - " the first ever countrywide IT conference in Poland organized by community of Microsoft .NET and SQL Server professionals and geeks". I am going to talk about Debugging and Crash Dump Analysis of ASP.NET Web Sites where I will show real life examples how WinDbg saved my poor soul a number of times. WinDbg and related debugging techniques are something that every single production manager should know and shouldn't be scared to run and try. I will also show how you can analyze a sample stack trace and track down a specific value in stack. If you are in the area, I would love to see you there and talk to you.

VS 2008 Course in Denmark

2008-03-11T03:34:00.002+02:00

I am going to teach a one day course on what is new and shining in Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008. The course is delivered by WebAcademy.dk. It will be held on 13th March (this Thursday). Below is course agenda in Denmark (as Steven Forte says - I hope they know I will not speak in Danish :)). The course will be held at a wonderful location called Raadvad Kro in Copenhagen area.

A great prize is expecting its lucky winner :)

There is still a chance to register if you didn't yet.

Looking forward for this great event!!!

08:00-09:00 - Check-in, udlevering af materiale og morgenkaffe
09:00-09:15 - Velkomst og præsentation
09:15-10:30 - What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5

I denne session kigger vi nærmere på alle nyhederne i Visual Studio 2008. Vi vil også lære dig hvordan du bygger dine løsninger imod forskellige versioner af .NET frameworket, og afsløre næsten hemmelige debugging tips som hidtil kun har været kendte af eliten. Vi vil også vise dig hvordan du bedst udnytter webudviklings features såsom JavaScript debugging, IntelliSense, JSON support og meget mere. Til slut vil vi lære dig hvordan Visual Studio 2008 vil hjælpe dig med at speede din udviklingstid op og forbedre dine debugging skills, til et niveau som dine kolleger vil misunde dig.

10:30-10:45 - Pause
10:45-12:00 - Implementing Best Practices with Team Foundation Server 2008

At bruge best practices i software udviklingsprocesser kan være en langtrukken og kedelig opgave. At håndtere, ændrede anmodninger, enhedstest, løbende integration, peer reviews, daily build, web, load, performance tests, defekt management…. du har hørt om dem alle, men hvor mange af dem bruger du virkelig i dine udviklingsprocesser på nuværende tidspunkt? Team Foundation server kan de fleste læse om i ugevis, men alligevel gå glip af de mest banebrydende og nødvendige features. Vi lærer dig hvordan de nye features i Visual Studio 2008 og Team Foundation Server 2008 kan bidrage til at din virksomhed leverer bedre og hurtigere resultater. Denne session vil også introducere dig til tredjepartsværktøjer der vil gøre din udvikling nemmere end nogensinde før.

12:00-13:00 - Frokost
13:00-14:15 - LINQ - the New Way for Data Access

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) er en ny programmeringsmodel fra Microsoft der gør det at arbejde med data i .NET frameworket til en simpel og ligetil opgave. I Visual Studio 2008 er C# og VB sprog kompilieringen væsentligt forbedret for understøttelse af nye udvidelser. Imens at sådanne muligheder længe har eksisteret i 3. parts værktøjer er .NET frameworket 3.5 det første til at understøtte lokal adgang til forskellige datakilder ved brug af en ny dataorienteret metode i C# og VB. I denne session vil du også lære hvordan du bruger den indbyggede Object Relational Mapping (ORM), der muliggør at modelere relationsdatabaser til objekt orienterede modeller og nemt skabe, læse, opdatere og slette (CRUD) data ved brug af .NET objekt adgang.

14:15-14:45 - Kaffe og networking
14:45-16:00 - Scenarios for Integration of WCF and WF

Med tilkomsten af Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) og Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), tager Microsoft konceptet om forbundne systemer skridtet videre. Denne session vil vise dig hvordan du integrerer WCF og WF i forskellige scenarier og lære dig hvorfor du bør gøre det.

16:00-16:15 - Pause
16:15-17:30 - Profiling, Load and Web Testing in Visual Studio 2008

Denne session vil bl.a. lære dig hvordan du tester den maksimale load på dine systemer, ved brug af de i forvejen skabte brugsscenarier. Til slut vil vi vise dig hvordan vi under load testing kan måle din kodes ydelse bedst muligt.

17:30-18:00 - Afslutning / Bingo

Kurset foregår d. 13 marts i inspirerende omgivelser på Raadvad Kro nord for København. Prisen er 3.900,-, inklusiv frokost og forplejning.

MS Days 2008 in April

2008-03-07T04:19:00.003+02:00

Microsoft has just announced their annual conference MS Days 2008 on 24^th and 25^th of April in the International Exhibition Center - Sofia. For the second time the conference is paid one, but the price is only 50 euro for two days which is absolutely nothing compared to what you get. Having a paid conference makes a lot of things also possible. They now have three external speakers (and may be even one more, but he is still tentative) and great prizes to give out to lucky winners. The prizes are three 3 ATV motor cars! They are also planning a party on 24^th :)

Hurry up and register because I have the feeling that after few weeks it will be sold out so do not blame me that I did not tell you this :)

I will be presenting two sessions there:

Testing with VSTS 2008

Testing is progressively becoming a real first class citizen in Visual Studio Team System. In this session we will show you what tools you have available in different Visual Studio 2008 editions and how to use them effectively. This session is intended for every team member who cares about how to write high quality code without sacrificing productivity.

Debugging and Crash Dump Analysis of ASP.NET Web Sites

This session will show you how you can debug and resolve problems in web applications that are running on a production server. We will take a look at the features in developer's best friend - WinDbg. You will see different problem scenarios that may sound familiar to you and ways to get problem located on the live server. Additional tools for tracing and diagnostics will be shown.

Find out more at MS Days 2008 Agenda and MS Days 2008 Speakers.

Sofia.NET User Group Monthly Meeting

2008-03-07T03:41:00.001+02:00

This month UG meeting will be held on 7th of March, 19:00 at Elieff Center for Education and Culture, Studentski grad, Sofia, Hall 103. We have a special guest from INETA - Alex Thissen.

Alex is going to talk about WPF and LINQ in two different sessions.

Here are the abstracts:

Windows Presentation Foundation

In this talk the speaker will show some of the powerful features of WPF that clearly shows its potential as an application framework. The session will focus on styling, resources, templates and data-binding for WPF controls. Learn how styling for WPF brings CSS of the web to the world of Windows applications. You get to see that templates allow you to completely change the look of controls and how resources are used in WPF. And last, but not least, this session will cover the data-binding options, which offer much more control and possibilities to combine data and controls. The session shows all features in several demos and puts the pieces of this puzzle together by combining it all.

LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML

The .NET Framework 3.5 has support for language integrated querying and ships with providers for various data sources. In this talk we will take a close look at two of these: LINQ to query SQL Server databases and XML data. After a quick introduction to the basics we are going to dive right in and get a deeper understanding of how and where LINQ queries are executed. Finally, you get to see how LINQ can be used for real-life scenarios such as a WPF application. This session is going to be full of demos and offers room for lots of questions from the audience.

About the Speaker

Alex Thissen is .NET technology evangelist from INETA Europe Speakers Bureau. He works for Class-A, a company specialized in training and coaching on Microsoft technologies and tools. He is a .NET trainer and teaches and coaches developers to build better software. He teaches the .NET Platform and Framework to both developers and architects. He has been a trainer for many years now and also spent quite some time with COM+ and Visual Basic. Alex performs audits of .NET implementations and the development teams responsible for it. He has written a number of articles for various magazines, such as .NET Magazine, the Visual Basic Group and SDC Magazine. You can probably find Alex at conferences, seminars and other community events where he likes to share his experiences from training and coaching.

Thanks to Telerik and INETA for all the support!

IASA Free Virtual Conference

2008-03-07T03:30:00.002+02:00

There has not been much activity from me in the IASA field, but this does not mean that I have stopped following up with the ATC team. IASA is growing very strong and you can expect a lot more to come this year.

Now IASA is offering a free virtual conference. You can register on the web site below:

http://iasa.brighttalk.com/

Wrap up:

Illities and Illiancies: Quality Attributes from Security to Resiliency

Quality attributes or cross-cutting technical concerns represent a key area for architectural focus and constraints. From security which is a massively important enterprise issue to resiliency and flexibility, IT architects are faced with quality attribute trade offs on a daily basis. For example, optimizing an application or set of applications for performance will often result in detrimental effects on flexibility. These tradeoffs are an important part of the architects job and if overlooked can cause tremendous downstream impacts to the value IT can generate.

In this virtual conference you will hear thought-leaders, such as Scott Ambler and Angela Yochem, discuss quality attribute issues based real world ramifications. Take a look at the agenda and register here today! As we said attendance is virtual (from your home or office) and free! So don’t miss this excellent education opportunity.

TFS Times and Radio

2008-03-07T03:20:00.002+02:00

Paul Hacker is a VSTS MVP guy that started something very cool - a TFS Times magazine. He already have few issues published. Make sure you go and read them - it is a great resource of summarized information about VSTS with real world tips and tricks from VSTS MVPs.

Make sure you subscribe so you can receive future publications also. It is free of charge.

Also Paul Hacker, Mickey Gousset and Martin Woodward recently started a new podcast called Radio TFS.

It is about 40 min long and you can listen to the latest podcast here and subscribe.

IT Boxing Second Match is Over

2008-03-07T03:09:00.002+02:00

So many things are happening in Bulgaria and in Microsoft technologies in general that I can hardly manage to write a line about everything, but I will try to do this in series of posts.

The second match of IT Boxing has just finished. This time the fight was about "ASP.NET vs. Java & JSF vs. PHP vs. Ruby'. Alex Thissen did a great job showing new things in web development with .NET 3.5 and VS2008 and also the fresh Preview 2 of the ASP.NET MVC pattern. I was disappointed to find out that Java team won, after all they showed to the public was a recorded usage of a simple CMS system and general description of how enterprise is J2EE, although we did not see almost no demos from them. I guess that the Java fens just were outnumbering the .NET fens. Poor Java guys - after all they saw from Alex, Stefan and Emil and they are still voting for Java - same as Bulgarian politicians - they never know what they are voting for.

Project Management Course

2008-03-07T02:32:00.004+02:00

A very good friend of mine, Mihail Mihaylov (a.k.a. Mike Ramm), is starting professional training services.

His first course will be next week (13 March 2008) on Software Project Management Fundamentals. Usually I find such project management courses a total waste of time. However I know that Mike was in all the hell of project management in small outsourcing companies. I know that his experience is real and he is feeling the pain of developers and their direct managers.

If you are still reconsidering attending, do not think - register! Seats are limited!

Mike is also running the PM Stories blog, Nova Rabota and few others.

LOC counter for VS2005

2008-02-24T22:11:00.002+02:00

Code Metrics are completely new and exiting functionality in VS2008. It still needs a lot of work and integration scenarios to be provided from Microsoft, but it is there and you can use it. For the rest of the poor VS2005, VSS or plain file system users there is a custom add-in for Visual Studio 2005 that counts LOC using customizable counting rules. The tool is written by MicrosoftIT in partnership with Microsoft Research. You can download LOC counter here.

CodeCamp in Bulgaria

2008-02-18T02:45:00.003+02:00

This Saturday we organized the first pilot CodeCamp in Bulgaria. Personally I think the event was superb. First it was the variety of the nature of presentation that were given. They were not required to follow any specific technology track and no one get bored because of that. The small group that we kept allowed us to have discussions on any question at any given time. In one of the sessions the speaker was interrupted to fix a using clause, which eventually led to 15min discussion on why developers have to use tools like Resharper and their prons and cons. We also gained a lot of experience in car repair services under -20°C as an added value :)

Next meeting is scheduled for May so keep an eye on my blog and the CodeCamp web site. You can also see pictures from this pilot event at the CodeCampBG FaceBook space. A registration of codecamp.bg is pending. If you need support of setting up .bg domain, you can always contact me (for non BG readers - yes, it is f* hard to get a .bg domain).

Thanks to Deyan Varchev and Stefan Dobrev for organizing this event together.

Get latest does not work in TFS

2008-02-08T04:55:00.001+02:00

Get Latest Version may not work properly in some circumstances with TFS 2008. I recently found how to reproduce this strange problem that I was experiencing from some time. It happens that if you have already set up a working project on your machine (after you have resolved possible problems with Web Application Projects in the initial project setup), the project may fail to update when you ask to Get Latest Version even using Get Specific Version option is on. The reason for that may be a newly added project to your solution. When someone adds a new project to your solution VS2008 automatically creates a new mapping for this project. So if your workspace mapping before the update is like $\MyProject - > c:\projects\MyProject, when you as for the get latest version you will find that VS has created additional mapping for the new project like $\MyProject\NewProject -> c:\projects\MyProject\NewProject. After that point, for reasons that I am not aware of, get latest version does not work any more. To solve this problem you have to open the Source Control panel from Team Explorer and in the workspace dialog box to edit workspace mappings and delete this new entry.

If you do not edit workspace mappings you will most probably get this error:

---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
Source Control Explorer

All files are up to date.

No files were updated because the requested file versions were previously downloaded.

To force an update, use the "Get Specific Version" command with the "Overwrite all..." option checked.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

Precompiled sites and VirtualPathProvider

2008-01-25T03:27:00.001+02:00

Coskun Sunali posted an amazing article how you can set up VirtualPathProviders to run when using Precompiled sites.

Do you know that even MS do not use VPP in precompiled sites? Check this out.

This is just an example what you can achieve with Reflector and a lot of patience.

(The support for VPP is explicitly disabled in precompiled sites by Microsoft. We do not know the reasons why they did it, so please you this fix with careful testing :).)

Good work Josh!

.NET Source Code Debugging Tips

2008-01-23T01:48:00.001+02:00

John Robbins is the ultimate debugging hero for me.

Read to what John Robbins says about the new released .NET Framework Source Code:

If you've been downloading your symbols with the Microsoft Symbol Server, make sure to delete your cache directory before you start downloading from the new symbol location.
Shawn says you'll want to check the "Search the above locations only when symbols are loaded manually" in the Options dialog, Debugging, Symbols node. Personally, I think it's much better to leave that unchecked so that you get the symbols and source downloaded automatically. Yes, there will be some slowdowns on the download, but by getting the symbols and source every time you access the item, you'll fill up the cache quicker.
If you're having some trouble getting everything to work, turn on the source server diagnostic messages in the Options dialog, Debugging, General node:

Also, as you are loading downloading source files by double clicking on them in the call stack window, you can see the path reference location in the status bar.

To get both the new Reference Symbol Server and Microsoft Symbol Server set in your _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable to the following:
UPDATE: This is the correct syntax
SRV*c:\symbols*http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols;
SRV*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
For you advanced hackers out there, I tried like crazy to get SYMCHK and PDBSTR to work for pre-downloading and bulk source extraction working, but with no luck at all. It appears that the WinDBG tools don't have support for source servers that use http downloads, but the QFE added that support to Visual Studio 2008. (See my article if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

Read original post.

COMException loading solution

2008-01-22T00:22:00.001+02:00

Happy New Year to all of you! I hope that my blog will keep helping you solve problems that are really tough to find.

Recently I bumped into a very strange problem when I tried to open a fresh new solution from the source control and then I got a strange error - Microsoft Visual Studio - System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException:

I wonder what the Cancel button will do here, but that is a different story.

A quick look at Solution Explorer, showed that all projects were loaded successfully except one - a Web Application Project.

I put some time to dig in with WinDbg and then I got some tips on what is going on.

In order to load the Web Application Project you must make sure that the URL that the project is using, is valid and can be resolved. This can happen pretty often since when you download a project from source control for the first time, it is highly unlikely that you will have the web site already set up.

And important note that I have to make also is that if you are running Vista, you should run in elevated privileges as well.

Using Web Application Projects is not really my choice for web site development. I would rather choose the new Web Site model. I hope that I will have the time to go further into this topic here.

The problem is reported to Microsoft and will be fixed in VS2008 SP1 (no date has been announced yet).

Power Tools for TFS 2008

2007-12-23T02:58:00.000+02:00

Team Foundation Power Tools for VS2008 is out.

MSSCCI Provider is also updated for 2008 object model.

Merry Christmas and Happy New 2008!!!

From Brian Harry's blog:

New in this Release

• Find in Source Control tool is an addition to the Team Explorer menu that provides the ability to locate files and folders in source control by the item’s status or with a wildcard expression.

• Open a selected folder in Windows Explorer straight from Team Explorer. This feature allows you to jump straight to the mapped folder location from within Source Control Explorer.

• Quick Label feature that allows labels to be easily applied to a given selection of files and folders in the Source Control Explorer.

• Build Notification tool that runs in the Windows task bar notification area monitoring the status of the build definitions you have specified. It can be configured to show notifications when builds are queued, started, or completed for multiple build definitions spanning multiple Team Foundation Servers.

• Additional TFPT.EXE commands for configuring Team Explorer connection settings (tweakui) and for destroying Work Items and Work Items Type Definitions (destroyWI, destroyWITD).

• Updates to the TFS Best Practices Analyzer for use with a Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server deployment.

• The Process Template Editor is updated for use with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. It also has several improvements, including: the ability to launch standalone w/o a Visual Studio installation, performance improvements, improved discoverability and bug fixes.

• Bug fixes and removal of Power Tools that are now included within Team Foundation Server:

• Annotate and Treedif are now included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer; however, Annotate remains is still available in the command-line tool (TFPT.EXE).

• TestToolsTask is included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server as part of Team Foundation Build.

Speaking at BASTA Spring 2008

2007-12-18T03:09:00.000+02:00

I have been invited to talk at BASTA! Spring 2008 edition between 25-29 February 2008. I am going to talk about what testing tools are available in Visual Studio 2008 compared in different editions and how to use these tools in real life production enviroment.

My session is part of the special VSTS day at BASTA!.

Other speakers that I would love to meet again are Hadi Hariri, Dino Esposito and meet for the first time the fellow VSTS MVP Neno Loje.

Please, drop me an email if you plan to attend BASTA and we can have few beers there :)

Server Search for Free

2007-12-18T00:57:00.000+02:00

Microsoft is releasing a new server for searching your documents called Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. As the name implies this server will be delivered FREE to everyone.
Here are some of the features that I would like to highlight:

Search Center. Empower your people to quickly find the information they need through a familiar, web-style search interface and easy-to-use query syntax. Re-configure the layout of Search Center elements without writing any code.

Localized Interface. (No Bulgarian unfortunately)
Out-of-the-box Indexing Connectors. Index content on file servers, web sites, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server public folders, and Lotus Notes repositories.

Search iFilters. Index a wide variety of documents and file types using an interface common across Windows Desktop Search, Windows Vista, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

Relevance Tuning. Retrieve the most relevant results across a diverse set of 3rd-party line-of-business systems and content repositories from a single search query. Use a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search.

Security-Trimmed Results. Ensure people only find information they should have access to by automatically trimming search results based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are automatically captured at index time.

Crawl Rules. Specify unique crawl inclusion / exclusion behaviors and authentication credentials for specific content sources

You can find the complete list here.

The current release is Release Candidate. Make sure you subscribe after download to can get notification when the final version is released.

Download Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express Release Candidate.

SQL 2008 Webcasts for Developers

2007-12-18T00:29:00.000+02:00

Galcho puts a very useful set of SQL 2008 Webcast sessions on his blog.
It is very good list that can boost your SQL 2008 knowledge very fast!

VS2008 Training VPC

2007-12-14T06:40:00.000+02:00

The Visual Studio 2008 Rhythm Training VPC is a sample VPC with latest tools and frameworks from Microsoft. I found it pretty usefull if you have to make presentation or just play with the tools. This VPC does not contain TFS. A separate VPC with TFS 2008 installation will be released soon.

All programs in the VPC are patched with all updates as of 11 December 2007.

NOTE: This VPC images will expire on March 8, 2008.

The Visual Studio 2008 Rhythm Training VPC contains a pre-configured installation of Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, and the Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit. The training kit includes 20 hands-on-labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos for technologies such as LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET Ajax, VSTO, the .NET Compact Framework, and more.

To login to the VPC, use the following username and password:

UserName: administrator
Password: pass@word1

The VPC takes about 15GB space.

UPDATE: There are new VPC images that will expire on 31st Dec 2008.

Username: TFSSETUP, password: P2ssw0rd

"This virtual machine is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Build 2008, Team Explorer 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and all necessary prerequisites. In addition, it has been updated with Office 2007 SP1, current Windows Updates as of March 25, 2008, and the December Release of the TFS Power Tools. Team Foundation Server is installed in workgroup authentication mode and thus does not require a domain controller. "

A separate downloadable set of 38 hands on labs and sample data is available also.

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is Released

2007-12-12T00:41:00.000+02:00

The preview version of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions is released. The Extensions are a new set of tools and controls that will be added onto existing release of ASP.NET with .NET 3.5. This will make possible for web developers to get the latest updates on ASP.NET without having to wait 1-2 years more for the next release of .NET Framework.
It also includes ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3, which you can also download as a separate file here (you do not need to download it if you have ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview installed already).

What’s in the Extensions Release?

ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC provides model-view-controller (MVC) support to the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime, which enables developers to more easily take advantage of this design pattern. Benefits include the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns, as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD).

The ASP.NET MVC Toolkit provides HTML rendering helpers and dynamic data support for MVC.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data
ASP.NET Dynamic Data helps developers build a fully customizable, data-driven app quickly. It provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid data driven development without writing code, yet it is easily extendible using the traditional ASP.NET programming model.

ASP.NET AJAX
New additions to ASP.NET AJAX include support for managing browser history (Back button support).

ADO.NET Entity Framework
ADO.NET Entity Framework is a new modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. Benefits include easier to understand and easier to maintain application code that is shielded from underlying database schema changes.

ADO.NET Data Services
ADO.NET Data Services provide new services that find, manipulate and deliver data over the web using simple URIs. Benefits include an easy and flexible way to access data over the web, while enabling the separation of presentation and data access code.

Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET
You can integrate the rich behavior of Microsoft Silverlight into your Web application by using two new ASP.NET server controls: a MediaPlayer server control that enables easy integration of media sources such as audio (WMA) and video (WMV) into your Web application, and a Silverlight server control that allows an ASP.NET page to reference both XAML objects and their event handlers.

TFS Web Access 2008

2007-12-01T03:57:00.000+02:00

Web Access Power Tool for Team System is just released. Brian Harry just announced the awesome news. As I said in my previous post - these guys at MS do not sleep. And it is 4am already and I can hardly catch up with the news.

Message to the Visual Studio product team at MS - guys, please take a break; we need to sleep :)

Here is the feature list (first one is my best friend) and VSTS Web Access 2008 Power Tool download page:

New linkable web pages - This is, perhaps, the coolest feature in the release. It allows you to easily link to work items, work item queries, work item query results, Changesets, File/Folder history, file differences, file contents and annotated views of files. This makes TSWA a far more powerful building block for integration with other applications. In fact, we've already started work to leverage this from notification emails so that you can get a richer experience. Because the notification emails are user configurable, you can read Neno Loje's poston how to modify work item alert emails to use TSWA links. Look forward to some future suggestions on how you can customize your checkin notification to get a richer experience using TSWA. See Buck's post for details on how to use the new TSWA links.

Custom work item controls - Web Access now supports custom work item controls. Now it is possible to create a rich client version and a web version of custom work item controls and have your fully customized experience available no matter which interface your users access. You'll find documentation for writing custom controls in the SDK folder under you TSWA installation folder.

Team Build support - Web Access has been updated to support several of the new features in TFS 2008 for build automation. Most importantly, it allows you to view the queue of builds and queue new builds.

Performance improvements - Every release of Web Access includes more performance improvements. The more we use the tool internally, the more we learn about it. Every time we find issues, we fix them and release them to you as soon as possible. The big performance improvements in this release are around server memory consumption.

No more TSWA users group - The 2005 Power Tool required that you manage a user group of web access users for security reasons. We've improved the server side impersonation and directory management to eliminate the need for this. TSWA can now manage access securely just using the permission settings you already have and no longer requires a "special" restricted group. This should make managing TSWA easier.

Documentation - It's not extensive but should be enough for you to find your way around TSWA. You'll find it located here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892990(VS.90).aspx

"Rosario" November CTP

2007-12-01T01:26:00.000+02:00

Three weeks after releasing Visual Studio 2008, Jeff Beehler announced the release of "Rosario" November CTP, the next version of Visual Studio.
I guess Microsoft product teams does not get any rest. Neither do we, because of them :)

Below are the set of features that this CTP includes. My favorite ones are the Historical Debugger and support for Windows Installer XML (WiX) technology!!! More on the first one - in some other post.

We are living in interesing times...

Architecture Edition

Visualizing Interaction Sequences between Service-Oriented applications

Using the Distributed System Designers and the Web Service Software Factory to build

WCF applications

Designing and Visualizing Interactions between classes

Development Edition

Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with Rule Sets

Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger

Identify the test impact of code changes

Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Test Edition

Planning a testing effort

Executing manual test cases

Team Foundation Server

Managing user stories with the Agile Process

Managing features with the CMMI Process

Download documentation only here.

First LINQ tutorial in Bulgarian

2007-11-28T05:41:00.000+02:00

The first LINQ tutorial in Bulgarian is fact!

It just came to my mind that I forget to tell you the good news earlier.
Author of the tutorial is Galin Iliev aka Galcho. He wrote about 50 pages tutorial written in Bulgarian. He covers everything you need to get started with LINQ by yourself. The tutorial is available in HTML and PDF format. It is on introductory level, so one can easily find his way into the whole story.

Here are the contents of the tutorial:

Въведение
Въведение в LINQ и основни възможности
Инициализиране на обекти и колекции
Подразбиране на типа на променливите
Анонимни типове
Автоматично изграждане на свойства
Разширяващи методи (Extension Methods)
Ламбда изрази
Дървета от изрази (expression trees)
LINQ в детайли
Основни оператори
LINQ to Objects
LINQ to SQL
LINQ to Entities
LINQ to DataSets
LINQ to XML
LINQ to XSD
Заключение
Използвани източници

Download the PDF file