Esteban Garcia - My thoughts on .NET and ALM with TFS

Orlando Code Camp 2012 is Live!

2012-01-24T00:12:00.001-05:00

It seems like we just got done with last year’s event and we are ready for another awesome edition of Orlando Code Camp on March 31st at Seminole State College. This will be the our 7th Code Camp and the entire ONETUG team is really excited about it. The new site is up (thanks to Z, John, Brian), sponsors have been contacted (other Brian) and JT is getting his spreadsheets ready. On top of that, we’ll have some awesome volunteers from our community!

Call for speakers just went out, so if you want to come and speak at one of the best Code Camps around, sign up here: www.OrlandoCodeCamp.com. We’ll have a little bit of everything: MVC, Visual Studio ALM, Windows Phone, Agile, HTML5, SQL Server, SharePoint, DNN, and much more!

ITPro Camp–Managing TFS

2012-01-23T07:19:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday, I did a presentation on "Managing Team Foundation Server 2010" at ITPro Camp - Orlando. It was a great event and it's awesome to see more and more community events popping up throughout the state. Thanks to everyone that came to my talk and for all the great questions.

Here are my slides:

Managing TFS

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TCM–Test Case Management Tool

2012-01-21T00:47:00.001-05:00

If you are using Microsoft Test Manager on a Team Project that was created prior to TFS 2010 (and was later upgraded to 2010), or you built your own process template, you will need to use the TCM tool to enable the automatic creation of a work item when a test finds a bug through MTM. The TCM tool lets you import/export a mapping file into TFS. This is also very useful if you want MTM to create a different type of work item than the one that is currently configured or if you want different fields to be pre-populated.

The tool is executed this way, and you can run it from the Visual Studio Command Prompt:
tcm bugfieldmapping /import /mappingfile:”c:\temp\myfile.xml” /collection:http://tfs:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /teamproject:MyProject

The mapping file looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<BugFilerMappings workitemtypetocreate="Bug">
   <ReproSteps>Microsoft.VSTS.TCM.ReproSteps</ReproSteps>
   <SystemInformation>Microsoft.VSTS.TCM.SystemInfo</SystemInformation>
   <BuildFoundIn>Microsoft.VSTS.Build.FoundIn</BuildFoundIn>
</BugFilerMappings>

Managing TFS Security through command-line: TFSSecurity.exe

2012-01-09T17:18:00.001-05:00

I was recently connected to a client’s TFS through VPN and the Team Explorer interface didn’t let me add users from their domain into one of the TFS groups. I could only see users from my local domain. In order to get around this, I used TFSSecurity.exe (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252504.aspx). It lets you create and modify groups as well as add permissions for groups and users.

This command added the user to the “Contributors” group in the specified Team Project:

tfssecurity.exe /collection:http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/Collection /g+ "[Team Project Name]\Contributors" n:"someDomain\SomeUser"

Managing Team Foundation Server at Orlando IT Pro Camp

2011-12-19T08:45:00.001-05:00

Next month, on January 21st, I will be speaking at the Orlando IT Pro Camp. My session will cover “Managing Team Foundation Server”, here is the abstract:

“Your company decided to adopt Team Foundation Server and now it’s your job to manage it and make sure that it’s always available and you can restore it if the need comes up.
Come and learn about the different technologies used by TFS, the tools that you will need to manage and administer it, and best practices to keep your installation running smoothly.”

You can check out the session information here, view the schedule here, and register here.

There is also a write-up on the AgileThought website, here.

Wondering what an “IT Pro Camp” is?
IT Pro Camps are a free, one day learning event for anyone seeking professional development. This community event serves IT professionals and students with a focus on IT Pro related technologies. IT Pro Camps offer a conference style learning environment free of charge to attendees and is open to presenters of all backgrounds and expertise. We encourage our local Sponsors to participate in their local IT Pro Camps!

Location

Saturday Jan 21st 2012

ITT
Suite 100
8301 Southpark Cir
Orlando, FL 32819

TFS Server-side event handlers

2011-12-07T06:45:00.000-05:00

TFS has had an event system since it’s first version, but prior to TFS 2010 that system consisted of SOAP and SMTP events. For SOAP events, you need to create your own Web Service, then subscribe it to a TFS event using BisSubscribe.exe.

TFS 2010 introduced a new concept with Server-side event handlers, which use a Plug-in model that allows custom code to execute upon a TFS event, and run under the TFS context. So the two big advantages here is that you no longer have to deploy a separate SOAP-based web service, and since you are running under the TFS context, you have direct access to the TFS API with much less hops across different processes.

The solution consists of a .NET Class that implements the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server. ISubscriber interface:

public interface ISubscriber
{
    string Name { get; }
    SubscriberPriority Priority { get; }

    EventNotificationStatus ProcessEvent(TeamFoundationRequestContext requestContext, NotificationType notificationType, object notificationEventArgs, out int statusCode, out string statusMessage, out ExceptionPropertyCollection properties);
    Type[] SubscribedTypes();
}

You implement your custom logic on the ProcessEvent method. The SubscribedTypes property is used to notify TFS what events you are subscribed to, this is an array so your code can respond to multiple events. Here is a good list with all available events: http://blog.hinshelwood.com/tfs-event-handler-for-team-foundation-server-2010/.

The notificationEventArgs parameter contains contextual information about what raised the event. When responding to a Work Item-related event such as WorkItemChangedEvent, the EventArgs contain Core information about the Work Item, including the full list of changed fields. When responding to a Source Control event such as CheckinNotification, you get access to the ChangeSet. If additional information is required the TFS API can be used to gather this data.

All logging should be done through the TeamFoundationApplication class, which has “Log” and “LogException” methods. This is important as it will use the TFS context to log information and use the same logging verbosity that is set for the TFS process. So I would avoid using EventLog.WriteEntry() as your messages wouldn’t be logged as coming from TFS.

The code: This shows a sample implementation of code responding to a Check-in event:

namespace Sample.SourceControl.Server.PlugIns
{
    public class CodeCheckInEventHandler : ISubscriber
    {
        public string Name
        {
            get { return "CodeCheckInEventHandler"; }
        }

        public SubscriberPriority Priority
        {
            get { return SubscriberPriority.Normal; }
        }

        public EventNotificationStatus ProcessEvent(TeamFoundationRequestContext requestContext, NotificationType notificationType, object notificationEventArgs, out int statusCode, out string statusMessage, out Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.ExceptionPropertyCollection properties)
        {
            statusCode = 0;
            properties = null;
            statusMessage = String.Empty;
            try
            {
                if (notificationType == NotificationType.Notification && notificationEventArgs is WorkItemChangedEvent)
                {
                    CheckinNotification ev = notificationEventArgs as CheckinNotification;
                    TeamFoundationApplication.Log(string.Format("New Changeset was checked in by {0}. ID: {1}, comments: {2}", ev.ChangesetOwnerName, ev.Changeset, ev.Comment), 123, System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntryType.Information);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                TeamFoundationApplication.LogException("Sample.SourceControl.Server.PlugIns.CodeCheckInEventHandler encountered an exception", ex);
            }
            return EventNotificationStatus.ActionPermitted;
        }

        public Type[] SubscribedTypes()
        {
            return new Type[1] { typeof(CheckinNotification) };
        }
    }
}

Deploying your assemblies is really straight forward, you just have to copy them to “%Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins” on your TFS Server. As soon as you deploy the assemblies there, your Application Tier web application will restart and your plugin code will start getting called, so use caution and ideally deploy this to a local copy of TFS of a Test environment first.

TFS API: Accessing build definition values programmatically

2011-11-23T17:16:00.001-05:00

I’m working on some build customization and I needed to be able to access parameter values from my build definition programmatically. It turned out to be pretty easy once I knew where to look:

We start off by connecting to TFS and then to the Build Service:

TfsTeamProjectCollection server = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://myTFS:8080/tfs"));
server.EnsureAuthenticated(); 
IBuildServer build = (IBuildServer)server.GetService(typeof(IBuildServer));

That is followed by retrieving the build definition…you have a couple of options here, as you can use the build definition URL (something like vstfs:///Build/Definition/36), or you can supply the project name and build definition name, which makes things more readable:

IBuildDefinition buildDefinition = build.GetBuildDefinition("MyProject", "MyDefinition");

Build definition has a property called ProcessParameters where you can get all the names and values of the parameters that are defined in your build definition. Don’t confuse that with buildDefinition.Process.Parameters, as that gives you the values as found in the underlying build template. The ProcessParameters property is a string, but it stores a serialized Dictionary with all the keys and values found in the definition. This code helps you get the values out of it (in my case I was looking for a string array):

object argumentValue;
if (WorkflowHelpers.DeserializeProcessParameters(buildDefinition.ProcessParameters).TryGetValue("MyArgumentName", out argumentValue))
{
    return (string[])argumentValue;
}

Connecting VS 2010 to Team Foundation Service Preview (TFS Azure)

2011-11-15T09:42:00.001-05:00

If you have access to TFS Preview and you want to connect to it from Visual Studio 2010, this is what you need to do:

Install hotfix KB2581206 (More info on the VS ALM Team Blog)
Run Visual Studio 2010, and from Team Explorer, click on “Connect”, then “Add Server”. Enter the name of your instance, and select HTTPS.
You will be then be prompted to sign in with your LiveID
You will then get the regular prompts to select your collection and team projects.
From Team Explorer, you will now be able to view/manage Work Items, Builds, and Source Control. More should be coming in the future.
Note that if you want automated builds, you will need to setup your own build server and connect it to TFS Preview, more information here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/09/15/configuring-a-build-server-against-your-shiny-new-hosted-tfs-account.aspx

Continuous Integration with TFS at Sarasota .NET Developers Group

2011-11-07T07:49:00.000-05:00

On November 16th, I will be speaking at the Sarasota .NET Developers Group.

You will learn the in’s and out’s of TFS Team Build, starting with Build Controllers and Agents and then all the way through to the new Workflow-based templates. We will go over how to create custom activities, and much more in order to take full advantage of TFS's powerful build system and empower your team.

The session will include:

Introduction to TFS Build system
Build Templates
Built-in activities
Custom activities
Running static analysis, metrics, unit testing
CI best practices

The group’s website is http://www.sarasotadev.net/

Test Scribe for Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and Test Professional 2010

2011-10-24T18:00:00.001-04:00

If you use Microsoft Test Manager, you *have to* install Test Scribe! It is a documentation power tool that integrates direction into MTM and allows you to create a Word document based on your Test Plans and you Test Runs. This is a great way to report test progress, create User Acceptance Testing documents, or just review your test cases with your team away from MTM.

You can download it from Visual Studio Gallery: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/e79e4a0f-f670-47c2-9b8a-3b6f664bf4ae

Once you install it, you will see a new “Tools” option in the MTM drop-down:

From Tools, you get two options:

- Test Plan Summary: a list of all the test plans that you have setup

- Test Run Summary: a list of all the test runs that you’ve done

Clicking on the “Generate” button gives you the reports:

Give Camp–Orlando

2011-10-14T14:46:00.001-04:00

As geeks, we don’t get a lot of opportunities to give back to the community by using our skills. Luckily, there’s a great way for us to do so coming up in just a week. On the weekend of October 21st – 23rd, Orlando is joining 15 cities across the US (and UK) on National Give Camp day.

You are probably wondering what GiveCamp is! GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals – including designers, developers and database administrators as well as marketers and web strategists donate their time and unique talents to provide software solutions for local charities and other non-profit organizations.

We have received proposals from 16 different Central Florida non-profit organizations and we are going to do our best to help all of them. These are some great causes and I’m sure that it will allow those organizations to make a huge difference in our area. So come on out and use your geek powers for a great cause!

Thanks to our awesome sponsors, we will cover your food for the weekend. We will work hard and we will try to keep it a lot of fun.

Want to volunteer? Go to http://givecamporlando.org/

Where? Full Sail University

Follow GiveCamp Orlando on Twitter

Customize your Work Item Type Definitions: Take advantage of Link Types

2011-10-14T14:01:00.001-04:00

TFS 2010 allows you to create many different types of links between work items. These are the available link types (out of the box):

Affects/Affected by
Tested By/Tests
Test Case/Shared Steps
Successor/Predecessor
Child/Parent
Related

This is a big change from the previous version as back then you could only create “related” link between work items.

When you create a link between work items, you get a different graphical view depending of which link type you pick:

Affects/Tested By/Test Case/Successor

Parent/Child

You can then choose to show related work items with a specific link type as part of your Work Item Type Definition. You can see this in action if you look at a User Story in the MSF for Agile template:

The Implementation tab shows you only Parent/Child relationships, the Test Cases tab shows you “Tested By” relationships, and the “All Links” tab shows you every work item, changeset, and hyperlink related to your work item.

If you want to implement something similar on your own work item type, this is what you need to do:

From the WorkItem editor (Power Tools), add a new control of type “LinksControl”
On the new control properties, select the Control Settings: “LinksControlOptionsType”
By default, you are going to see this:
```
<LinksControlOptionsType>
  <LinkColumns>
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.Id" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.Title" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.AssignedTo" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.State" />
    <LinkColumn LinkAttribute="System.Links.Comment" />
  </LinkColumns>
  <WorkItemLinkFilters FilterType="includeAll" />
  <ExternalLinkFilters FilterType="includeAll" />
  <WorkItemTypeFilters FilterType="includeAll" />
</LinksControlOptionsType>
```
The LinkColumns section allows you to specify which values of the related workitems you will show on your list.

The WorkItemLinkFilters is used to control what types of links you will display. This also controls the links types that show up on your “Link Type” drop-down when you are going to link to another work item from this control. If you want to see a list of the link types that your TFS system has available, you can run this command:
witadmin listlinktypes /collection:http://yourserver:8080/tfs/defaultcollection
You can read about the different link type topologies here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293527.aspx

The ExternalLinkFilters section lets you specify if you want to see work items, changesets, external links, etc.
The WorkItemTypeFilters section lets you filter by just specific work item types.

In my case, I wanted to all my parent and children tasks, so I used this:

<LinksControlOptionsType>
  <LinkColumns>
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.ID" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.WorkItemType" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.Title" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.AssignedTo" />
    <LinkColumn RefName="System.State" />
    <LinkColumn LinkAttribute="System.Links.Comment" />
  </LinkColumns>
  <WorkItemLinkFilters FilterType="include">
    <Filter LinkType="System.LinkTypes.Hierarchy" />
  </WorkItemLinkFilters>
  <ExternalLinkFilters FilterType="excludeAll" />
  <WorkItemTypeFilters FilterType="include">
    <Filter WorkItemType="Task" />
  </WorkItemTypeFilters>
</LinksControlOptionsType>

And that translates to this:

You can also further filter which relationships are shown (for example, parent vs child). You can read about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638522.aspx

Presenting at the Acadiana .NET User Group this Thursday

2011-09-25T11:02:00.001-04:00

This Thursday night I’m heading up to Lafayette, LA to do a presentation on “TFS and your Scrum team”. Here is the abstract of the presentation:

TFS is a very powerful Application Lifecycle Management tool that helps teams come together and collaborate starting with requirements gathering all the way until an application is in production. We will take a look at Work Items, Builds, SharePoint integration, Reports, Source Control, and Microsoft Test Manager. We will also cover how you can leverage TFS to empower your Scrum team from Release Planning all the way until your Release Sprint.

You can get more information about the group here: http://acadianaug.org/Event/Show/32

This speaking engagement was setup through the Telerik Insiders Program!

Intro to Microsoft Test Manager at Space Coast .NET User Group

2011-09-20T23:42:00.001-04:00

Tonight I did a presentation on Microsoft Test Manager at Space Coast .NET User Group in Melbourne, FL. It was a great crowd with very good questions and everyone seemed to really enjoy the presentation and had a lot of interest in MTM. Here are the slides that I used. Also, Ken (SCDNUG president) will be posting a LiveMeeting recording of the presentation. I’ll update this post when that is ready.

Thanks for the invite and for everyone that came out to the meeting!

Microsoft Test Manager

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Microsoft Test Manager @ Space Coast .NET User Group

2011-09-14T07:06:00.000-04:00

Next Tuesday, September 20th, I will be speaking at the Space Coast .NET User Group in Melbourne, FL. I will be covering Microsoft Test Manager. We’ll start with an intro of MTM, I will show how you can create and manage test cases, test iterations, recording, and playback. We will also take a look at Coded UI tests and test automation. It should be a really fun night. So if you are in the area, come on out and check it out!

When: Tuesday Sept 20, 2011 @6:30 PM
Where: 3900 Dow Road Suite C Melborne Fl 32934

Creating a TFS branch from PowerShell

2011-09-07T10:26:00.001-04:00

The TFS API is really powerful and sometimes it’s just not very convenient to write a .NET app to consume it. You can get just as much done with PowerShell and easily deploy and run the script on your servers. I needed to create a TFS branch, but I could not use Team Explorer to do so, so I came up with this script (simplified version).

param(
 
)
begin
{
 # load the required dll's
    [void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")
    [void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client")
    
}
 
process
{
 $server = New-Object Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TeamFoundationServer("http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection")
 
 $vcServer = $server.GetService([Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.VersionControlServer]); 

 $changesetId = $vcServer.CreateBranch('$/Demo/Code/Main', '$/Demo/Code/Dev/Branch', [Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.VersionSpec]::Latest, $null, "New branch from script", $null, $null, $null)

 "Branch created with ChangesetID: $changesetId"
 
}

This uses the VersionControlServer.CreateBranch() method, which runs server-side, which means that there’s no need to create a workspace or commit after the branch is created. There is a simpler overload, but that one doesn’t let you specify comments, so I chose this one. This creates a 2010-style branch (allows visualization).

Continuous Integration with TFS 2010 at Jacksonville Code Camp

2011-08-27T15:03:00.001-04:00

I just completed my talk at Jacksonville Code Camp. I had a very good turn out and great questions, it is great to see more and more people using TFS and taking advantage of its capabilities. Here are the slides and sample code.

CI with TFS

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Speaking at Jax Code Camp

2011-08-25T21:34:00.001-04:00

This weekend I will be speaking at Jacksonville Code Camp. This will be my second time speaking there…I was there last summer and they put together a great event.

I will speaking about Continuous Integration with TFS. If you come to my talk, these are some of the things that I will cover:

Continuous Integration concepts
TFS Build components
Automated builds
Unit testing with Team Build
New Workflow-based templates
Custom activities

And much more. This is one of my favorite subjects, so bring your questions and I’ll keep the talk fun and flexible.

There are some great talks on the schedule, so no matter what you are looking for, you are bound to find something that interests you.

Three of us from AgileThought are coming up to Jacksonville and you can catch their talk, here’s some info on Nikita’s blog.

Tomorrow at ONETUG: Joe Healy talks about Mango!

2011-08-24T15:17:00.001-04:00

Thursday, August 25th, we have Joe Healy (@devFish) coming to Orlando to talk about Windows Phone “Mango”.

About the presentation:

Windows Phone "Mango" introduced a wide range of enhancements for Windows Phone. During this session we'll take a high level pass of Devfish's "at the moment" top ten favorite features in Mango. Possibilities include any number of new features like sockets, augmented reality capabilities, gyros, camera access, profiler, Silverlight and XNA integration, background execution, database, HTML5, notifications, ringtones, search extensibility, sensors, and more.

Where:

Orlando City Hall at 7:00 pm

How to register:

http://augustmangomeeting.eventbrite.com/

See you there!!!

Succeeding with Scrum presentation at DevLink

2011-08-19T10:35:00.001-04:00

I just gave a talk at on “Succeeding with Scrum” at DevLink 2011. I had a great turnout and very good discussion with the people that attended. Here are the slides for my presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/EstebanFG/scrum-8922042

Scrum

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Introduction to Microsoft Test Manager – Part 2: Running Tests

2011-08-02T09:16:00.001-04:00

This is part 2 of an Intro to MTM series. Here is part 1.

On the previous post, I introduced test planning with MTM. Today we are going to take a look at how you run and analyze your test cases. We start by moving to the “Test” tab at the top of MTM.

This screen shows us all our test suites that are marked as “in progress” and that have test cases under them. You can double-click on each test case to view its results, you can run your test case, mark it as blocked, or just open it up to edit it.

Running a Test case
We’ll start by clicking on “Run” in order to get the test case started. You are going to get a side-bar with the option to start your test case. This allows you to see your test steps on the left, while executing your test on the right-hand side. You are given the option to create a new action recording, which will later allow you to re-run your test without having to physically interact with your application. This is great for regression and (as I will show), for running multiple iterations of the same test. This action recording is also used if/when you want to turn your test into a Coded UI test.

Once you click on “Start Test”, you get this:

At this point, MTM is using all the settings that you set when you were planning in order to figure out what it should be gathering. If you click on the Attachments icon towards the top, you can see everything that is gathered. If you’ve previously made an action recording of this test plan, you can select the test steps that you want to automatically re-play and click on the “Play” button and MTM will execute all those steps for you. NOTE: Take your hands off the keyboard and mouse as this is happening! From here, you can generate a bug (which would be seen by a developer right away…no synchronizing required), you can take screenshots, environment snapshots, and also enter any test-run-specific notes.
On my previous post on planning, I showed you how to create parameters in order to create multiple iterations. This is how it shows up when you are running a test case:

Notice the “databound” symbol next to each value, and also notice that the values came directly from the list of parameters that I entered at planning. When you are running your test case and you get to this step, all you have to do is put the cursor on each text box, paste (don’t need to copy), and the value will be automatically entered on your textbox and databound. This means that next time you run your test case (or the next iteration), MTM will know exactly what control should be populated with your values.

Test Results
Once you are done testing, you can take a look at test results. This is what the screen looks like:

Here you can see all the steps that were executed, attachments (including recordings, screenshots, system info, etc), and iterate through iterations. You can also take a look at results from previous test runs. All this information is available to the entire team.

Verify Bugs
The “Test” tab has a second section called “Verify Bugs”. This is where you will see all the bugs that have been generated while running a test case. You can see bug status, who it’s assigned to, and other information. Clicking on the “Verify” button automatically starts the test case that generated the bug, so you don’t have to hunt around for a test case that you may have run a week or two ago. You are also able to create new bugs from this screen.

Analyze Test Runs
The third section of the “Test” tab allows you to see a list of all the tests that you run. Selecting each one takes you to an analysis screen where you can see the status and results of your tests.

That concludes the “Test run” part. Next, we will cover test case management/organization, followed by Coded UI tests.

Introduction to Microsoft Test Manager

2011-08-01T18:41:00.001-04:00

This is part 1 of an Intro to MTM series. Here is part 2.

This summer, I did two presentations on Microsoft Test Manager. It is still a relatively unknown and unused tool, but when people get exposed to it and see it in action, I can tell that they get excited by it as they start thinking about its possibilities. This series will cover a lot of what I went over in those presentations.

What is Microsoft Test Manager (MTM)?
MTM is a tool introduced along with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010. It is used to create and organize test plans and test cases, and execute manual tests. MTM is built specifically for testers to be able to interact with other members of the team.

Why MTM?

Prior to the 2010 release, Visual Studio Team System covered the majority of the team, but QA did not have any really good tools. Most QA shops were left to either use a combination of applications such as Excel, Word, Notepad, etc or a lot of times the QA team would use specialized testing tools such as the HP test suite.
MTM gave Microsoft all the essential pieces to go from a development solution to a full ALM solution. This was the final piece needed to get the entire team communicating through TFS rather than using 3rd parties or synchronizers. Along with a new name for Team System (now Visual Studio ALM), the new picture looks like this:

How does it work?
MTM allows you to plan, execute, analyze, and track your test cases. You are also able to automate your test cases through the use of Coded UI tests and add them to your builds. So there is a lot of integration between the entire team. From within MTM, you also have access to Lab Management, which allows you to manage tests across multiple virtual environments. We will focus on Test Case Management for now.

Planning
We start by taking a look at the “Plan” tab in MTM. Of course, the first step is to plan what the test team will be working on. When you first start up MTM and connect to a TFS Server (you must be using TFS to be able to use MTM), you are taken to Testing Center plan selection screen:

At this point, you can either select an existing plan or you can add a new test plan. Each test plan is referred to as a “Test suite”, you can have multiple Test Suites under each suite (hierarchical) or you can just create all your test cases under the root.

From here, you can create a new test case, add an existing test case, edit test cases, and change test suite properties. Let’s take a look at the properties screen:

This screen allows you to manage your test suite (name, description, owner, status, start/end date. You can also assign it to an Area Path and Iteration, just like you would for a Story, Task, Bug, etc in Team Explorer. Behind the scenes, a test plan and a test case is just a work item.
The part that interests us the most here is the “Run Settings” section (middle of the screen). This is where you can customize how your test cases are going to run and set environment settings. Here is the Test Settings screen:

On this screen you specify the type of information that will be gathered during test runs. This is really important as it will help testers and developers communicate and re-create any issues that you run into. So this should reduce any “Can’t repro” or “Works on my machine” bug responses. You can set settings on the following diagnostic values:
- Actions: What applications will be recorded for play-back
- ASP.NET client proxy: Lets you collect information about the http calls from a client to a Web server (used along with IntelliTrace)
- Event Log: Event logs and event types that should be collected.
- IntelliTrace: Data that should be collected by IntelliTrace (Processes, Events, etc)
- Network emulation: To emulate slower networks
- System Information: OS, memory, etc
- Test Impact: This is probably one of the most powerful features. It collects information about which methods were called by your application. When a developer touches that same method, then the test cases will be flagged to be re-run.
- Video recorder: Records the tester’s desktop while a test runs, which helps with reproducing any bugs.

In addition to all these settings, you can specify which Build your test cases are going to run against and also the configurations that you are going to test (Windows 7 + IE 8, Windows XP + Firefox 3, etc).

Creating a Test case
Obviously, the most important feature would be to actually create your test cases. Here is the screen for that:

If you are familiar with TFS, this probably looks familiar to you. A test case is a work item, so you will have a lot of the common fields that you’ve seen in other Work Item Types towards the top. Something that is new to us is the “Steps” tab. This is where the user would enter all the steps that a tester would need to follow in order to complete a test case. This is specific to a manual test case, so the test steps should be written as human-readable as possible. There are some interesting things that you can do here, such as combining multiple test steps into “shared steps”, which would allow you to reuse your steps in other test cases. To do this, You just need to highlight the test steps, right-click and select “Create Shared Steps”. To use them in the future, you can click on the “Insert Share steps” toolbar button.
You can also use parameters in order to make your test cases data-driven. Take a look at Step 4 on my screenshot above: “Add Mailing list item: @Name, @Email, @Twitter”. When MTM sees a word preceded by an @, it adds is a parameter on the “Parameter Values” section at the bottom. This allows you to create multiple iterations. Later on, I will show you how to use them to achieve some automation on your manual test cases.
There are other tabs such as the “Tested User Stories”, which allows you to relate a test case to a User Story in order to be able to track progress/completeness.

So that covers the first part of this series. Next step is Test Execution.

Changing your Visual Studio TFS Merge tool

2011-07-05T12:47:00.001-04:00

I’ve used WinMerge for a while now and really enjoy it. It is definitely much better than the merge tool that ships as part of the TFS plugin for Visual Studio. Last week during one of my presentations, someone asked me how to change the default behavior in Visual Studio so that it uses your diff tool of choice. So here it is:

Download WinMerge: http://winmerge.org/
From Visual Studio go to Tools –> Options –> Source Control –> Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
Click on the “Configure User Tools” button
Click on the “Add” button and enter the following values:

Extension: .*
Operation: Compare
Command: C:\Program Files (x86)\WinMerge\WinMergeU.exe
Arguments: /ub /dl %6 /dr %7 %1 %2

That’s it! From now on WinMerge (or whatever you configured) will come up when you do a file compare. There’s a great post from a few years back that shows you all the different settings if you are looking to use a different merge application: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmanning/archive/2006/02/20/diff-merge-configuration-in-team-foundation-common-command-and-argument-values.aspx

Atlanta Code Camp slides and sample code

2011-06-27T08:50:00.001-04:00

As mentioned here, I presented at Atlanta Code Camp over the weekend. It was a really well-run event and I had a lot of fun up there. I met some great people and it seems like my session attendees got pretty excited about the tools that I presented. You can get my slides here:

Microsoft Test Manager

Continuous Integration with TFS

Succeeding with Scrum

During the “Continuous Integration” talk, i showed how some samples of custom build activities. You can download that code here.

Here is the sample code for my Twitter update Activity

   1:  using System;

   2:  using System.Collections.Generic;

   3:  using System.Linq;

   4:  using System.Text;

   5:  using System.Activities;

   6:  using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client;

   7:  using System.IO;

   8:  using System.Drawing;

   9:  using System.Drawing.Imaging;

  10:  using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;

  11:  using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;

  12:  using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities;

  13:  using TweetSharp;

14:

  15:  namespace Demo.Tfs.BuildTasks.Activities

  16:  {

  17:      [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)]

  18:      public class SendTwitterUpdate : CodeActivity

  19:      {

  20:          /// <summary>

  21:          /// Message to update.

  22:          /// </summary>

  23:          public InArgument<string> UpdateMessage { get; set; }

24:

  25:          protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)

  26:          {

  27:              var updateMessage = context.GetValue(this.UpdateMessage);

28:

  29:              SendMessage(updateMessage);

  30:          }

31:

  32:          public void SendMessage(string message)

  33:          {

  34:              TwitterService svc = new TwitterService("fdafwTdI6eE8Xg", "3X5467TicVasrfdasfdasC4M", "xxxxxxxx-XVGL93uBK91KIpZEXDssez25CYs4ZH6bzonLEB7Z", "asfasreaklejfasd");

  35:              svc.SendTweet(message);

  36:          }

  37:      }

  38:  }

And for my “Add Date to Image” activity:

   1:  using System;

   2:  using System.Collections.Generic;

   3:  using System.Linq;

   4:  using System.Text;

   5:  using System.Activities;

   6:  using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client;

   7:  using System.IO;

   8:  using System.Drawing;

   9:  using System.Drawing.Imaging;

  10:  using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;

  11:  using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;

  12:  using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities;

13:

  14:  namespace Demo.Tfs.BuildTasks.Activities

  15:  {

  16:      [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)]

  17:      public sealed class AddDateToImage : CodeActivity

  18:      {

  19:          /// <summary>

  20:          /// The workspace that is used by the build

  21:          /// </summary>

  22:          [RequiredArgument]

  23:          public InArgument<Workspace> Workspace { get; set; }

24:

  25:          /// <summary>

  26:          /// Server file path to the image.

  27:          /// </summary>

  28:          [RequiredArgument]

  29:          public InArgument<string> ImageFilePath { get; set; }

30:

  31:          /// <summary>

  32:          /// Server file path to the source image.

  33:          /// </summary>

  34:          [RequiredArgument]

  35:          public InArgument<string> SourceImageFilePath { get; set; }

36:

37:

  38:          protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)

  39:          {

  40:              var workspace = context.GetValue(this.Workspace);

  41:              var imageFilePath = context.GetValue(this.ImageFilePath);

  42:              var sourceImageFilePath = context.GetValue(this.SourceImageFilePath);

43:

  44:              //Get the file that matches the server item

  45:              var sourceFilePath = workspace.GetLocalItemForServerItem(sourceImageFilePath);

  46:              var filePath = workspace.GetLocalItemForServerItem(imageFilePath);

  47:              if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(filePath) && !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(sourceFilePath))

  48:              {

  49:                  workspace.PendEdit(filePath);

  50:                  context.TrackBuildMessage("Updating Image File");

51:

  52:                  Color color = Color.Black;

53:

  54:                  using (Image img = Image.FromFile(sourceFilePath))

  55:                  using (Graphics gr = Graphics.FromImage(img))

  56:                  using (Font font = new Font("Calibri", 14f, FontStyle.Bold))

  57:                  using (StringFormat stringFormat = new StringFormat())

  58:                  {

  59:                      stringFormat.Alignment = StringAlignment.Far;

  60:                      stringFormat.LineAlignment = StringAlignment.Center;

  61:                      gr.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.AntiAlias;

62:

63:

  64:                      gr.DrawString(DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString(), font, new SolidBrush(color), 10f, 10f, stringFormat);

  65:                      img.Save(filePath, ImageFormat.Png);

  66:                  }

67:

  68:                  workspace.CheckIn(workspace.GetPendingChanges(), null, "***NO_CI***", null, null, new PolicyOverrideInfo("Auto checkin", null), CheckinOptions.SuppressEvent);

  69:              }

  70:          }

  71:      }

  72:  }

Speaking at Atlanta Code Camp

2011-06-24T13:50:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow I will speak at Atlanta Code Camp. I have 3 presentations scheduled:

10:50 am: Testing with Microsoft Test Manager in TFS - A look at the new testing features found in Microsoft Test Manager 2010 and how they work together with TFS and Visual Studio to bring application testing to a new level. We will cover manual and automated testing.

1:10 pm: Continuous Integration with TFS - Learn the Ins and Outs of TFS Team Build, starting with Build Controllers and Agents and then all the way through to the new Workflow-based templates. We will go over how to create custom activities, and much more in order to take full advantage of TFS's powerful build system and empower your team.

3:50 pm: Succeeding with SCRUM - Scrum is not a new concept but it has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years. It is a very powerful agile project management methodology that, when used correctly, can help your team deliver better software faster than before. We will start with a brief overview of the process and look at some techniques and tools that will help you succeed, as well as common pitfalls that you should avoid. Come prepared for an interactive session where you will be encouraged to share your experiences with Scrum.

So overall, it will be a pretty busy day. If you are at the event and come to one of my talks, I hope that you get a lot out of them and you are able to go back to work on Monday and put some of it to practice.

This will be my first event as part of the Telerik Insider program, so I will have some Telerik licenses to give away during my talks!

TF203071: Error when branching a nested branch

2011-06-16T17:11:00.001-04:00

TFS 2010 does not support branching a folder that contains child branches in it, and it will give you this error: “TF203071: The operation cannot be completed because the source folder that you specified contains a branch”.

The cause for this is the new branch visualization features. To work around this, you’ll need to turn the branch back to a regular folder (the underlying branch doesn’t go away):

Select your child branch
Go to File –> Source Control –> Branching and Merging –> Convert to Folder

This turns the branch back to the “old-style”, which does not support visualization. But you gain the ability to branch a folder with child branches. Hopefully they will fix this in the next release.

Installing TFS Basic on my laptop

2011-06-14T18:08:00.001-04:00

I just installed TFS Basic on my laptop. I’m amazed at how much better the install experience for TFS has become. It pretty much went from non-existed in 2005, to a lot better in 2008, to super simple in 2010, and the fact that i can now install on my 64-bit laptop with SQL Express is an added bonus. I remember spending a whole week with Marius back in TFS 2005 Beta (with multiple uninstalls) before we got it working!

I’ve done 5 or 6 TFS 2010 installs on production servers, but this was my first time installing it locally. Some things to note:

The installation process is the same than it was when i ran it on the server
After installing, the configuration screen came up and that’s where I chose to go the “Basic” route

Basic means that you get everything except for reporting services and SharePoint
You don’t need full SQL Server, you can install Basic with SQL Express

I didn’t have IIS configured on this laptop (i know…OMG!), and the configuration tool installed and configured it for me. That step took the longest.
I had an issue connecting to SQL Server: My login didn’t have access and I forgot the SA password. But never fear, Mikey came to the rescue:

Run the SQL Server service in single-user mode (add a –m to the startup parameters of the service)
Now i can connect to SQL Server as long as I am on the Administrator group for my machine
Added my account to logins
Restart SQL Server service, by taking it out of single-user mode

Installation took about 25 minutes, the IIS part took about 8
There is no loss of functionality when it comes to Work items, builds, and source control
Once I was done configuring TFS, I went through the Build Service configuration right from the Admin Console

It’s great when things just work on the first try!

Summer of TFS & ALM

2011-06-07T17:12:00.001-04:00

It has been one of my busiest TFS-focused time in a while. I did a TFS Continuous Integration talk at BarCamp Sarasota at the end of April, then a Microsoft Test Manager talk at OPASS in May. This month, I’m heading up to Atlanta Code Camp on June 25th to do an ALM and/or TFS talk (I’ll know in a few days). Then a break in July followed by DevLink in August (“Continuous Integration with TFS” and “Succeeding with Scrum”) and then most likely Jax Code Camp at the end of August.

Busy and Fun times ahead!

Busy month ahead at ONETUG!

2011-06-07T16:45:00.001-04:00

As you can see here, we have a ton of stuff going on here in the Orlando .NET community this coming month: http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=64977fc747ab0f2cbb5429a9a&id=c438c19d56

This Thursday:
Virtual Brown Bag Meeting – Web Matrix with Drew Robbins: http://onetugwebmatrixvbb.eventbrite.com/
NerdDinner at Millennia Mall: http://junenerddinner.eventbrite.com/

Next Thursday:
ONETUG Open Mic: http://onetugjunemeeting.eventbrite.com/

July 7th:
John Papa’s Florida Tour: http://onetugjulymeetingjohnpapa.eventbrite.com/

August meeting:
Joe Healy – Windows Phone “Mango” development

Our team has been working really hard to bring the best content to our region and to keep building our community! Come on out, meet your fellow developers!

I received a Microsoft Community Contributor Award

2011-05-31T09:22:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I received an email informing me that I received the a Microsoft Community Contributor Award for the contributions that I’ve made on the Visual Studio ALM MSDN forums. I got this cool certificate:

And the logo that you now see on the right-pane. I also got a subscription to Safari Books online which seems to have a ton of great titles!

I joined the Telerik Insiders Program

2011-05-20T14:32:00.001-04:00

This week I joined the Telerik Insiders Program. I am really excited about this as it will allow me to go around and speak at a lot more events and spread the word on Visual Studio ALM, TFS, and Agile (Scrum) methodologies. I am really grateful to Telerik for selecting me and for what they are doing for the software development community.

For those of you looking for speakers at your event, here is their FAQ page: http://www.telerik.com/community/insiders/insiders-faq.aspx

These are the 4 topics that I will be covering through the insiders program:

Continuous Integration with TFS
A Lap Around TFS
Succeeding with Scrum
Testing with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

TechEd Recap: FDN03 - The Future of Microsoft Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (Visual Studio vNext)

2011-05-18T13:24:00.001-04:00

I just watched the TechEd Session on the Future of VS ALM by Cameron Skinner and Brian Keller: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/FDN03. Here is a recap of what they talked about:

- Since they released TFS in 2005, their main priority has been collaboration and they will continue down that path.

- A project/system needs transparency in order to be able to make changes to the process, code, etc.

- They talked about the Virtuous Cycle graph that they showed at the keynote. Product Backlog –> Sprint –> Working software –> Ops Backlog –> Monitor –> Requirements –> Back to the beginning of the cycle.

- IntelliTrace in Production: Historical debugging feature. In the current release, you can capture Intellitrace in a debugging environment. They are going to make the data “collectors” freely available in vNext so we can distribute them to as many servers as we want. You can bind, start, stop intellitrace remotely from PowerShell. This allows you to capture everything that is going on behind the scenes in your app in order to debug any issues. I have not actively used IntelliTrace, but this is probably the push that I needed to check it out. Like they said in the talk: “it’s like a VCR for your code”.

- Product Backlog (Scrum/Agile): They are extending the Web Access portal to give you a lot more planning functionality with task board. There are two new tabs to support agile development: boards and backlogs. The backlog tab allows you to enter new stories, move them into a sprint, reprioritize items, view sprint velocity charts, view sprint backlog, break down a story into tasks, view team capacity. Pretty much everything that you need in order to manage your sprint. The board tab allows you to move tasks from one state to another, and re-assign tasks. This is a really good tool for your daily Scrum/Stand-up meetings.
What I really like about this is that it’s using real-time data and you don’t have to wait for the Analysis Services database to be updated.

- New “My Work” tab: There is a new “suspend” functionality that works alongside the current “shelve” feature in TFS. Not only does it save your code, but it also saves all your Visual Studio configuration, resets your screens, breakpoints, etc. So it takes you back to where you were (or as close to that) as soon as possible.

- They added a “Team Navigator” tab, that seems to be supplementing (not replacing) Team Explorer. From there, you can go to “My Work”, “Work Items”, “Source”, “Builds”, “Reports”, “Documentation”. So most of what you can do from Team Explorer, just a different way to do it. The interface to check-in pending changes looks like it also got a facelift.

- Analysis: New “Analyze Solution for Code Clones”. It gives you a way to see how much “copy/paste” exists in your application. It looks for “semantically similar or identical code”. It gives you a way to find places in your code that can be refactored. You can also select a block of code and search for the same pattern. You get “exact”, “strong”, and “medium” matches.

- Unit testing – They are allowing you to integrate nUnit, xUnit, and other unit testing tools with the product. So you are no longer just limited to MSTest. So this means that your test results for all your testing frameworks will be bundled together and the user experience will be the same for all the tools.

- Work Item search: They added a search toolbar on the Team Navigator tab. Currently it is not very easy to search through Work Items within Visual Studio.

- Code Review Tool: They added a code review feature in Team Navigator. It creates a shelveset and a code review request is sent to the reviewer. When the review is accepted, the reviewer will view notes, code differences. Comments can be associated with a specific line of code, similar to the Comments that you get in Word when you turn on change tracking.

- New diff tool – Color-coded diff tool. It is much better than what ships with Visual Studio at the moment.

- Stakeholder Feedback tool – They are extending the testing tab that you currently get when testing to Microsoft Test Manager so that it logs everything that you do in an application. A Stakeholder can capture notes, screenshots, notes, etc. Under the covers, it is doing an action recording just like MTM does. This allows you to create a test case later. It records audio and video so you can later listen to the conversation from the stakeholder or tester.

Overall some very impressive changes. It’s great to see such polished features this far ahead of their release.

TechEd - Visual Studio vNext announcements

2011-05-16T23:26:00.001-04:00

TechEd 2011 is going on right now in Atlanta. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it up there this year, so I’m catching some of it online. There were some interesting announcements during the keynote today surrounding Visual Studio and TFS as they showed Visual Studio vNext (2012?) functionality. The keynote can be accessed here: http://www.studiosevent.com/newscenter/?id=teched110516?contentID=, and you can catch other content here: http://northamerica.msteched.com/?fbid=h0s3uc4omfT

Some of the highlights:

- They are brining IT/Operations closer to development with this release. 2010 brought Architects, testers, and project managers into the team, so the next version will go one step further. Again, they are focusing on collaboration and integration to bring everyone together under one system rather than having everyone working with disparate systems. So vNext has a lot of new features focusing on Stakeholders and operations.

- They showed some great improvements to TFS Web Access interface. Up to now, it’s mostly a portal where you can go look for data. Yes, there is some functionality as you can create new tasks and such, but if you have the option between Team Explorer and the Web Interface, you’d most likely stick with Team Explorer. For vNext, they are adding backlog functionality that will help during sprint planning and execution. It looks similar to the functionality that they added in the Excel templates in TFS 2010, but with much better user experience. They also added a task board which seems to work pretty well for something that is not even in CTP yet. One thing I really liked is that the burn-down chart gets updated as you change your task board. Currently you have to wait until the cube processes as the data is pulled from Analysis Services. It looks like the Scrum community will be very-well served by the next release!

- Storyboarding tool: They added a plugin for Powerpoint that allows a stakeholder to mockup screens. It’s almost like Sketchflow, but for non-technical people. A lot of the mockups that I get are already done in PowerPoint or Excel, so this seems like a good place to start, and it will definitely be better than bad drawings. Once the mock-ups make it to the developers, you can associate them to the TFS tasks (since the PowerPoint mockups would be saved in SharePoint). So this gets everyone a little closer than before and keeps all information in one centralized place, so it will allow faster feedback between devs and product owner.

- On the Operations side, they added a Connector that integrates TFS with System Center Operations Manager. So you are able to generate bugs and send all the information (such as call stack, dumps, etc) into TFS when an issue is found.

Microsoft has been trying to bring teams together with TFS since it came out in 2005. They brought Dev and QA closer with TFS 2010 and now vNext will bring Operations and Engineering teams together. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!

Microsoft Test Manager presentation

2011-05-11T13:41:00.001-04:00

Last night I presented an intro to Microsoft Test Manager at the local SQL Group (OPASS). It was a really good crowd of about 45 people and they seemed to really enjoy the presentation. There were a couple of shorter presentations before mine, one by Idera on SQL Doctor, and one by Plamev Ratchev (local SQL MVP) on SQL Server vNext. There were a mix of devs, DBA’s, PM’s and QA people in the audience. I had a lot of good feedback from a John, a QA person that has used both HP and Microsoft tools.

You can download my slides here: SlideShare

Presenting Microsoft Test Manager at OPASS Tomorrow

2011-05-09T10:02:00.001-04:00

I am speaking at OPASS (Orlando SQL Group) tomorrow in Lake Mary. I am talking about testing with Microsoft Test Manager.

What to expect:

- Intro to TFS
- Intro to Microsoft Test Manager
- Creating Manual Test Cases
- Running Manual Test Cases
- Data-driving your test cases
- Analyzing test results
- Coded UI Tests
- Adding Coded UI Tests to your nightly build

There’s a lot to cover and I’m hoping that people that come out get a lot out of it. I hear that there’s a really good turn-out expected. The venue has been moved to Hampton Inn (850 Village Oak Lane, Lake Mary, FL 32746).

You can register here: http://opassmay2011.eventbrite.com/

Continuous Integration & TFS @ BarCamp Sarasota

2011-05-02T00:39:00.001-04:00

This weekend I did a talk at BarCamp Sarasota where I introduced the concept of Continuous Integration and how to set it up with TFS 2010. It was interesting as it was a mixed audience of about 50% Microsoft devs and 50% of other technologies. I’m used to presenting to a mostly Microsoft crowd. The talk went well and people seemed pretty receptive to it and saw the benefit of doing CI builds and setting them up properly.

Here are my slides: http://www.slideshare.net/EstebanFG/tfs-build-continuous-integration. I didn’t really do any customizations since it was a 1/2 hour talk, so there’s no code to show.

This was a really well-run event, it was my first BarCamp and it is a very interesting concept. There was a ton of networking and interesting conversations going on.

BarCamp Sarasota

2011-04-29T11:14:00.001-04:00

I will be at Barcamp Sarasota this weekend. If anyone wants to talk ALM, TFS, Scrum come by and say hi. It will be a great event and I’m looking forward to going back home for a few days!

Build Failure: Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets (104): The Silverlight 4 SDK is not installed.

2011-04-22T12:37:00.001-04:00

If you get this error trying to build your Silverlight application in TeamBuild: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets (104): The Silverlight 4 SDK is not installed, and you know that you have it installed on your build machine, don’t panic. There is an easy solution to this:

Go to your build definition, select the “Process” tab, and under “Advanced” change the value for MSBuild platform from “Auto” to X86

This happens when you are running your builds on a 64-bit build server. The reason for this is that the Silverlight SDK seems to have trouble compiling under a 64-bit environment, and your 64-bit build server will try to use those settings when you set it to “Auto”.

This will turn your build from to

Hitting the road–busy month ahead!

2011-04-20T13:23:00.001-04:00

This month I’ll be on the road quite a bit talking about TFS and ALM concepts. This is where you can find me:

April 22nd: Seminole State College – Computer Programming Advisory Board

April 30th: BarCamp Sarasota - http://bcsrq.com/
I will be talking about Continuous Integration with TFS (Team Build). I’d also like to get involved in discussions around agile project management(Scrum specifically), SDLC best practices, and community projects.

May 10th: OPASS (Orlando SQL Server Users Group) – http://orlando.sqlpass.org/
I will be giving a Lap around TFS and Microsoft Test Manager

Visual Studio ALM Hands-on Labs

2011-04-19T08:16:00.000-04:00

If you’ve heard about tools and features such as Microsoft Test Manager, Coded UI Tests, Project Planning, Intellitrace, Code Analysis, and Visual Studio Architecture tools, you should check out these hands-on labs published in MSDN. They will give you a great overview of these features and hopefully show you the power of VS ALM tools: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_alm_unit

New WP7 App: Scrummy

2011-04-18T17:45:00.001-04:00

Do you use Scrum? Do you participate in Release and Sprint planning sessions? Do you a a Windows Phone? If you said yes to all 3, then you are in luck! If you answered no to any of those questions, then you really need to re-evaluate how you are getting your work done. I hear that people that don’t like agile development also don’t like kittens and puppies.

So for those of you who like Scrum as much as I do, I just released a new application to the Windows Phone Marketplace: Scrummy.

What does it do? It replaces your planning poker cards with an app that lets you pick your estimate using a variety of card types:

- Sequential: 1,2,3,4,5,6,…
- Fibonacci: 1,2,3,5,8,11,…
- Doubles: 1,2,4,8,16,32,…
- Multiples 5,10,15,20,25,…
- Shirt Sizes: S, M, L, XL,…

Here are some screenshots:

You can download it here: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=26196907-7167-e011-81d2-78e7d1fa76f8

I used Mindscape Phone Elements LoopingListBox to loop through all the values.

I’m a ScrumMaster and I approve this app :)

ONETUG Nerd Dinner

2011-04-14T22:28:00.001-04:00

Tonight we restarted our monthly Nerd Dinner events at the Millennia Mall food court. It was a good group and we talked about a variety of topics: agile, RIA, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone, ORM’s. It was 2 hours of geek topics with JT (the money man), Mitch (@mitchlabrador), John (@onefloridacoder), and Vish (his first ONETUG event was Code Camp and he won an XBox). We even had a Lady Gaga moment at the end.

It’s great to catch up with people in such a relaxed environment. I look forward to the next one!

Update to my WP7 app–Baby Time

2011-04-14T09:24:00.001-04:00

After a crazy busy beginning of the year (new baby, code camp), things are finally starting to go back to normal for me. As I’m working through my backlog dating to late last year, the next item on my list was making some much needed upgrades to Baby Time, my pregnancy calendar app in the WP7 marketplace (I blogged about it here). I’ve had a lot more downloads than I expected and some of the reviews pointed out some big issues with the app. I submitted my upgrade on Tuesday morning and by the end of the day, I received feedback with one issue from the certification process. It had to do with tombstoning and recovering after opening a site on IE. I fixed the issue and resubmitted on Tuesday night and within 24 hours, the app was approved and the upgrade is posted in the Marketplace. You can download it here: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=4ff1ef81-96d8-df11-a844-00237de2db9e.

I have a couple of more apps in the backburner, which will deal with ALM stuff, hopefully coming soon.

My Talk on Continuous Integration with TFS (including custom activities)

2011-04-12T07:54:00.000-04:00

About 2 weeks ago, I did a presentation at Orlando Code Camp, titled “Continuous Integration with TFS”. My goal was to show everyone how easy it is to get started with Team Build and how you can accomplish Continuous Integration out of the box, without any customizations. Obviously, once you get your first taste of an automated build, you will want to customize it and make it even more powerful for your team, so I also showed how to created custom build activities.

You can download the materials here: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/presentationpickupview.aspx.

I only have 4 slides (2 of them with useful info) since I spent most of my time showing the Controller, Agent, Build Definition, and code. The code for my custom activity is also included. The premise is that you have a WPF application, and every time you build, you want a timestamp to be printed on an image.

Enjoy!

Using TFS Build Agents to your advantage

2011-04-11T00:31:00.001-04:00

As you may already know, TFS includes a very powerful build system called Team Build. Having looked at a few different build systems in the past, I have yet to see one with as much power and flexibility as Team Build. This being its third iterations (2005, 2008, and now 2010), it has grown a lot since it first came out. A lot of its basic functionality, such as MSBuild integration, has not changed at all, but its moving pieces and configuration have changed drastically.

Today we are going to take a look at Build Agents and Build Controller. Not much changed in the way that builds were executed through agents between TFS 2005 and 2008. TFS 2010 introduced the concept of Build Controllers, which are responsible for managing one or more Build Agents in order to work through a build queue. This illustration from MSDN describes the relationship between a Team Project Collection, a Build Controller, and a Build Agent:

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd793166.aspx

The way it works is that a build controller is assigned to a Team Project Collection. If a new Team Project Collection is added to TFS, that collection, you would assign one or more controllers to it, but you cannot assign a controller to more than one collection. The build controller can live on any machine, but it’s always a best practice to keep it on a separate machine than the TFS Server. The Build Controller processes the defined workflow and then hands off the “heavy” work to the build agents, but the only one that communicates directly with TFS is the build controller. You can have as many build agents assigned to a build controller (across as many machines as you’d like) and each build agent can only be assigned to one controller (again, no sharing).

Ok, so now that you know all you ever need to know about controllers and agents, what is the best way to take advantage of this architecture?

Use a specific agent for a build definition
When you define a build, you can find the “Agent Settings” section under “Advanced”. Under that section, you can specify which agent should run a build for that definition. The property is “Name Filter” and it has an asterisk by default, which means that any available agent should be used, you can change that to any of the agents on the drop-down list”. This will ensure that only the selected agent will get picked for that build. I’m not a huge fan of that setting since it can create a bottleneck, but it’s good to use in environments when only a specific agent has been setup to take care of a specialized activity.

Use Tags to determine which agent to use
Each build agent can be tagged with any combinations of keywords that make sense in your environment. These tags can be used by the controller when deciding what agent a specific build should be sent to. To get to the agent properties, you right-click on the “Builds” item in Team Explorer and select “Manage Build Controller”, select your agent and select “properties”. On that screen you can add any tag that you’d like.

In the sample above, I’ve selected the tags “Silverlight” and “x86” for my agent “Test”. These tags don’t have any logic behind them, they are just metadata and I can choose any meaning for them. In this specific scenario, it means that my agent has all the required bits to be able to compile a Silverlight application and that it is running on an 32-bit build machine. Looking at the previous image, we can see that we have 2 properties on our build definition that relate to this:
- Tag Comparison Operator: Can be set to “MatchExactly” or “MatchAtLeast”
- Tag Filter: List of Tags that should be used when finding an agent
These two properties work together to figure out which agent to use. This can be a very powerful way to balance the load between all my agents in order to not create a bottleneck and at the same time make sure that the right software is installed on the machine hosting the agent in order to guarantee a good build.

Build in Parallel
If your build requires that you build across multiple platforms (x86/x64) or configurations (Release/Debug), you can parallelize your build and take advantage of idle build agents. There’s a great post on it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimlamb/archive/2010/09/14/parallelized-builds-with-tfs2010.aspx

Now that you have these tools available in TFS 2010, use them to your advantage to speed up your builds or make them a lot more powerful than they were before. As you outgrow your current agent setup, re-think your configuration and add/remove hardware as needed. Make use of virtualization as much as you can, as these agents should be easy to swap in and out of rotation.

TFS Reports – Tfs_Warehouse database

2011-04-06T08:07:00.001-04:00

When TFS 2010 was released, the TFS database structure was changed to accommodate the new concept of Collections. They also changed the warehouse database – the place where data from project collections is gathered (and optimized for reporting). That database houses the data the will later be processed into the Analysis Services cube.

If you upgraded from TFS 2008 to 2010, you will now have 2 similar (but very different databases): Tfs_Warehouse and TfsWarehouse (without the underscore). TfsWarehouse was used by 2008 and is no longer used by 2010. Any data in that database is stale as of the moment that you upgraded TFS. If you have any reports that read data from the warehouse, you should point them to Tfs_Warehouse.

Unfortunately, some of the MSDN documentation does not reflect this. Today as I was refreshing my memory on reports, I ran into this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb649551(v=VS.100).aspx. It shows this query:

SELECT Person.Person, [Work Item].System_State
FROM   [Current Work Item] INNER JOIN
       [Work Item] ON [Current Work Item].[Work Item] =
       [Work Item].__ID INNER JOIN
       Person ON [Current Work Item].[Assigned To] = Person.__ID

The query is not valid in 2010. This is the equivalent query in TFS 2010:

SELECT Person.Name, [Work Item].System_State
FROM   dbo.DimWorkItem as [Work Item] INNER JOIN
       dbo.DimPerson as [Person] ON [Work Item].[System_AssignedTo__PersonSK] = Person.PersonSK

You should browse through the tables in Tfs_Warehouse to acquaint yourself with the data. It is really straight forward to join the tables together, but definitely different than it was in 2008.

A look at Microsoft Test Manager

2011-04-05T00:02:00.000-04:00

When Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010, they also released a not-often-talked-about tool called Microsoft Test Manager. It is a tool geared towards testers and it allows you to define test plans and manual test cases. You are also able automate those manual test cases through the use of recording. So what? You could probably do the same thing with other tools, right? What makes this tool so powerful is its integration with TFS and how it allows TFS to gather an enormous amount of information as a tester goes through their testing process. Such things as pass/fail metrics, requirements test coverage, integration with lab management are just a few key reasons why everyone (not just testers) should take a look at this tool. You can perform UI tests on all .NET technologies (wpf, asp.net, winforms, Silverlight, etc) and pretty much anything that renders to a browser.

So here is MTM in action:

Start –> Programs –> Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 –> Microsoft Test Manager
You first have to connect to a Team Project, the same way that you would connect to it when you connect to TFS from Team Explorer. The UI looks like this:

You are able to create a new test plan (left pane) and create test cases under that test plan (right pane). If you have existing test cases from another test plan, you can add them to your test plan by selecting “Add” instead of “New”. If you look at the top menu, you can see 4 options: Plan, Test, Track, and Organize.

Plan
- Test Case management – Add new test cases or assign existing test cases to a test plan
  - Test Configurations – Create multiple configurations for all the test cases that should be executed. Configurations are comprised of a combination of Browser and Operating System. This later integrates with Lab Center (future blog post). Basically, it lets you tell TFS that certain test cases should run on a specific environment, and test cases are sent to a virtual machine matching that environment.
- Test Settings – Name, description, iteration, environment, diagnostics settings (what should be gathered), manual vs automated, and more.
Test: Once you setup your test plans and test cases, it’s time for you to run the tests. This is what the Test case screen looks like:

After saving the test case, you can run it. When you hit the “run” button, you get a sidebar that includes the test steps:

At that point, you can step through the test steps, capture screenshots, capture video, and record all your actions. Your actions can be recorded and re-played on following iterations. You can data-drive your test-runs so that specific data gets populated on your application each time you run the test. Those actions can later be used when setting up coded UI tests. If a tester finds an issue while stepping through the test cases, they can easily generate a bug from that screen.

There’s a lot more to it, but I just wanted to give you a glance at it and hopefully peek your interest enough that you will want to try it. In order to get MTM, you must have either Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio Ultimate Edition installed on your machine.

There are some walkthroughs on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182620(v=vs.80).aspx

Generating multiple versions of ClickOnce applications with Team Build

2011-03-30T15:57:00.001-04:00

It is very common to have a need to run multiple versions of a ClickOnce application, each pointing to different environment (Dev, QA, Prod, etc). There are plenty of resources on the web that show you how to do this manually (for example, this one: http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/clickonce-installing-multiple-versions-concurrently/). Basically, you have to change the assembly name and the product name. But what if you need to do it as part of your automated build in TFS?

Let’s start with what happens when you change these properties in the IDE…all these settings are part of the project file (YourProject.csproj). The project file is just a big xml file that contains all the information that your project needs in order to build your application. My first inclination was that I can tell Team Build to run the msbuild task with the the /p:AssemblyName=NewName switch, but this will only work if your solution only has one project in it, otherwise that switch will try to overwrite all your assemblies with that name, and of course you will run into invalid references and a broken build.

So the next option is to add a custom build activity and make it part of your build process. This may sound difficult, but it’s really straight forward. Here is a nice series that takes you to the process of customizing Team Build 2010: http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/04/20/Customize-Team-Build-2010-e28093-Part-1-Introduction.aspx

So assuming that you read that or that you know how the process works, this will make sense. You need to start by creating a class library and you can start implementing your activity. Here is how I did it:

I have two imput arguments: AssemblyFilePath, and NewAssemblyName. Those two parameters should be set in the build template so that this activity know what to act on. You could hard-code those values, but ideally, you are building your activities so that they can be reused by other build processes.
Use LINQ to XML to parse through the project file to find the AssemblyName element
Updated it and save the file again.
You then open up the build template and drop this activity right after the workspace has been created and the build does a GetLatest.
I don’t check in my changes, as I only want them to be applied to my build, so the code changes will be wiped out during the next build.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Activities;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;
using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace Esteban.BuildTasks.Activities
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Updates the assembly name that will be generated when a project is built. 
    /// <remarks>
    /// This is useful for click-once applications targetting different environments. 
    /// </remarks>
    /// </summary>
    [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)]
    public sealed class ChangeAssemblyName : CodeActivity
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// The path to the project file.
        /// </summary>
        [RequiredArgument]
        public InArgument<string> ProjectFilePath { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// Assembly name that should be used.
        /// </summary>
        public InArgument<string> NewAssemblyName { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// The workspace that is used by the build
        /// </summary>
        [RequiredArgument]
        public InArgument<Workspace> Workspace { get; set; }


        protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)
        {

            var projectFilePath = context.GetValue(this.ProjectFilePath);
            var workspace = context.GetValue(this.Workspace);
            var newAssemblyName = context.GetValue(this.NewAssemblyName);

            //Get the local project file.
            var localProjectFilePath = workspace.GetLocalItemForServerItem(projectFilePath);

            if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(localProjectFilePath))
            {
                //Clear the read-only attribute on the file
                if ((File.GetAttributes(localProjectFilePath) & FileAttributes.ReadOnly) == FileAttributes.ReadOnly)
                {
                    File.SetAttributes(localProjectFilePath, File.GetAttributes(localProjectFilePath) & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly);
                }

                XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(localProjectFilePath);

                var assemblyElement = (from item in doc.Elements().Descendants()
                                       where item.Name.LocalName == "AssemblyName"
                                       select item).Single();
                
                assemblyElement.Value = newAssemblyName;

                doc.Save(localProjectFilePath);
            }
            else
            {
                throw new BuildProcessException("Project file was not found.");
            }
        }
    }
}

Orlando Code Camp–Recap

2011-03-29T13:11:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, March 26th, we held our 6th annual Orlando Code Camp at Seminole State College. The event was great, with our best attendance ever, awesome speakers and sponsors, and unbelievable support from our volunteers and ONETUG board. This is my recap from the event, as seen from the organizer’s perspective.

Preparation

This was definitely the most organized Code Camp that I’ve been a part of. We had a lot on our plates, starting with an overwhelming amount of sponsors. Our Director of Marketing, Brian Mishler worked throughout all of last year building relationships with our sponsors and all of that hard work paid off when it was time for our Code Camp. We had a lot of responsibility to these sponsors to make sure that we did all we could to get them exposure for their great support. JT (our treasurer) made sure of that with signs, staying in touch with sponsors, and managing the money so that we spent it wisely. John Smith, our VP, took care of our website (along with our Silverlight SIG), speaker glasses, plaque, bags, and a ton of other stuff. I took care of shirts, schedules, communications, shopping, and again, a ton of other stuff. Our Silverlight SIG (Z, Bob, Brian, and Joe) really came through for us on the website and the awesome WP7 app. We have a great foundation to build on, and we should have more and better features, along with a revamped UI at our next event.

Speaker Party

This year we decided to have the party at Liam Fitzpatrick’s in Lake Mary. It was my first time there and I was thoroughly impressed with it. They gave us the outside patio, which was awesome and our speakers really liked it as well. The food and drinks were perfect and networking/conversations were even better!

The Event

The event was a huge success, we had over 600 people there and we had a packed house of speakers and sessions. Everyone kept talking about the high quality of the presentations that were given at the event. We had so many great speakers that it was tough to decide which session to go to. The Showcase room was great as it gave people the ability to sit in one room all day and get a little bit of everything.

We were even able to get a personalized greeting from Scott Guthrie, courtesy of John Papa. I can imagine how busy he must be, and the fact that he took time out of his day to do that for us speaks volumes of Microsoft’s commitment to the community!

The food that Lou brought was awesome as always. The one thing that we missed is getting extra coffee, but we’ll fix that for next year. I ended up returning about half the water that we bought…so less water and more coffee.

We tried something new this year by lowering the bar for sponsors to get a booth and it completely paid off. Having so many sponsors there really gave the event a bigger feel to it and both sponsors and attendees greatly benefited by being able to be face to face with each other.

Of course, like every big event, we hit a few snags, but we were able to recover from them really well. We had great volunteers always willing to step up and help.

My Presentation

I gave a presentation on Continuous Integration with TFS, and I got great response from it. It was a close call, as I lost all my code and realized it on Saturday morning, but I managed to get it all back in time for the presentation. It is always great to show people how TFS is a lot more than just a VSS replacement and I think that was conveyed pretty well.

After Party

This year, we went back to Route 46 Entertainment District, just like last year. They treated us great and everyone really enjoyed it.

Overall, I had a great time. I met some great people, bonded with friends, and watched a ton of people get excited about .NET and our community. It was a great way to showcase what our region has to offer.

Orlando Code Camp Info

2011-03-23T08:02:00.000-04:00

This just went out to all Code Camp attendees:

We are just a few days away from our biggest Orlando Code Camp ever and we are really excited to have you be part of it. We have over 700 people signed up already for a great day of learning and networking. We have put together a world-class speaker lineup so you are sure to find something that you will enjoy!
Here are just a few things that you need to know before the event:
Program

7:00 am to 8:00 am	Registration and Breakfast – Cafeteria
8:00 am to 8:30 am	Opening Announcements – Fine Arts Auditorium Building G)
8:40 am to 9:40 am	Session # 1 and DNN Keynote
9:50 am to 10:50 am	Session # 2
11:00 am to Noon	Session # 3
Noon – 1:30 pm	Lunch & Meet the Sponsors – Cafeteria
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm	Session # 4
2:40 pm to 3:40 pm	Session # 5
3:50 pm to 4:50 pm	Session # 6
5:00 pm to 5:30 pm	Closing Remarks & Prize Give-away - Cafeteria
5:30 pm to 9:00 pm	After-party – Route 46

Agenda
You can find the latest copy of the agenda on our website: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/Images/OCC2011.Current.Agenda.pdf. It is also accessible if you log on to our Silverlight interface at www.OrlandoCodeCamp.com.
WP7 Application

How can Code Camp be any cooler? Well, this is how!! We are really happy to announce that we have published a Windows Phone 7 application to the marketplace. It has the schedule, your agenda, session, and speaker information. It also allows you to rate the sessions that you attend. You can download the app here: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=fd103846-d34f-e011-854c-00237de2db9e
T-shirt

As you are probably aware, thanks to Diane Leeper, we have an amazing t-shirt again this year! Get there early and pick yours up, we have limited quantities and we know that they will go fast!
The Event
We will serve breakfast pastries and coffee in the morning and we will have lots of water and sodas for you throughout the day. Speakers will be hanging out in the cafeteria area through out the day, so look for them there after their sessions. We have about 15 sponsor booths, so it will be a fun area to hang out at.
We have a great lunch planned for everyone, so make sure that you come hungry! At the end of the day, we will give away tons of prizes so stick around until the end before you run out to the after party.
We will make heavy use of Twitter to send out any updates throughout the event, so be sure to follow hashtag #OrlandoCC.
How to get there
Orlando Code Camp will be held at Seminole State College (100 Weldon Boulevard, Sanford, FL 32773).
Directions:
•From Marriott Lake Mary: Head north on International Pkwy. Take the 2nd right onto Co Rd 46A/H E Thomas Jr Pkwy. Turn right at Rinehart Rd. Turn left at W Lake Mary Blvd until College Drive and turn right.
•From I-4: Take the Lake Mary Boulevard exit. Travel east on Lake Mary Boulevard approximately four miles to College Drive and turn right.
•From Hwy. 17-92 (from Orlando): Turn left onto Weldon Boulevard. Travel about one-half mile.
•From S.R. 417 (Central Florida Greeneway): Exit at Lake Mary Boulevard. Go west two miles and turn left onto College Drive.
Once on campus, follow the signs to registration, which is the cafeteria (Building C). Here is a campus map: http://www.seminolestate.edu/media/maps/slm-campus-map.pdf
Prizes
Our sponsors are amazing and we wouldn't be able to pull off such a great event without them. We have almost $40,000 worth of software and books to give away. On top of that, there will be at least 5 Xbox Kinects given away throughout the day. So come ready to learn, have fun, and go home with lots of cool swag. We have also teamed up with FanTagz to give you a fun way to interact with sponsors and other attendees, so if you have a smartphone, download a Microsoft Tag Reader here to prepare for the event: http://www.gettag.mobi/.
After Party
Back by popular demand, we will have our after-party at Route 46 Entertainment District. The party will start right after we give away our grand prize and will be a great time, we hope to see you there!
See you on Saturday!!

The case for TFS as an enterprise ALM tool

2011-03-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

In the past few years, Microsoft has been playing catch-up in the ALM world. Their first true venture into that space was the introduction of TFS back in 2005. The first release focused mostly on developer support such as builds and task tracking. But it built the foundation for what has been released in the following versions (2008, 2010, and the minor “in-between” releases). TFS 2010 finally put out what I believe is a compelling product that rivals anything that is out there, competes with them head to head, and in many ways does a much better job than other more established packages.

Up until the 2008 release, Microsoft had been pushing the “Visual Studio Team System” name, and last year in 2010, I started seeing that changed towards Visual Studio ALM. So what was the big change? They added much better testing and virtualization tools, they revamped their build system, added more project management features through test case management. Lately I’ve seen more and more information coming out such as this: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/visual-studio-testing-tools and this: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/try/test-professional-2010-tour.

Many people think of TFS as just a source control system, but it is so much more, and if all you are using it for is to store your code, you are vastly underutilizing it and you should re-evaluate your investment (of time and money).

Visual Studio ALM includes features that address all facets of ALM, as shown on the diagram below:

Team Foundation Server is at the core for VS ALM and it serves as the main hub for all the collaboration between the different parts. TFS provides version control, work item tracking, build automation, and data warehouse. Work item tracking houses all requirements, bugs, tasks, and other artifacts that allow the entire team to communicate together within one system. The data warehouse enables powerful reporting tools which provide historical trending and visibility into overall project health. The SQL Server engine that houses all real-time data is able to provide insight into any pending or upcoming issues so that the team can make data-driven decisions. TFS also integrates with Microsoft Project and Project Server to help plan and manage projects.

So at the end of the day, why stitch together multiple disparate systems like this:

When you could have one system that encompasses and integrates all these features including automated testing, virtual lab deployment, and architectural validation (to name a few). So now your workflow looks like this:

There’s a ton of features that I’m diving into and the more I dig, the better I find it. At the end of the day, the most powerful thing that TFS has going for itself is the power to integrate so many moving parts and give you the ability to make decisions at the enterprise level. Quality is found at every stage of your SDLC, so use your tools wisely and you’ll notice a big improvement across the board!

Speaking at Orlando Code Camp–Continuous Integration with TFS 2010

2011-03-17T07:25:00.000-04:00

In addition to organizing the event, I’m giving a talk on “Continuous Integration with TFS 2010”. A lot has changed between TFS 2008 and 2010 when it comes to the build process and now it’s more powerful than ever. I will try to cover all the bases, from how to setup your builds, understanding controllers and agents, inspecting logs, build reports, and of course, how to add custom activities in order to help your team achieve success. It should be a fun talk with lots of real-world scenarios and very little theory (I may throw in 3 or 4 slides), so come and see me at Orlando Code Camp!

Orlando Code Camp–10 days away

2011-03-16T13:27:00.001-04:00

This was sent today to everyone that signed up to Orlando Code Camp so far:

Orlando Code Camp is just 10 days away!

Thank you for registering to attend our 6^th Orlando Code Camp! As you know, the event is being held at Seminole State College (100 Weldon Boulevard, Sanford, FL100 Weldon Boulevard, Sanford, FL100 Weldon Boulevard, Sanford, FL100 Weldon Boulevard, Sanford, FL 32773) on Saturday, March 26^th. We have an amazing group of speakers with sessions that you are going to really enjoy! Our tracks cover the following topics: Azure, Collaboration (SharePoint and Office), Design & Animation, DNN, .NET Fundamentals, .NET Languages, Patterns & Architecture, Services, Silverlight, SQL Server, Visual Studio & ALM, Web, and Windows Phone.

We need your input!

In order for us to get you the right lunch and t-shirt, we need you to log on at www.OrlandoCodeCamp.com and update your preferences. While you are there, check out the agenda builder that we’ve created, it allows you to pick your sessions which will make it easier for you to navigate through all the tracks once you get there.

For the first time in our 6 year history, we are hosting Day of DotNetNuke. As a special treat, the President and CEO of DotNetNuke Corp, Navin Nagiah, will give a DNN Keynote. We will have 3 rooms focusing on Administration, Design, and Development.

Prizes

We have amazing sponsors, which translates into us being able to give you amazing prizes. We have tons of prizes such as books, software, shirts, swag, a DevConnections pass, a SQL Rally pass, Xboxes, and more.

We haven’t even started the event and we already gave away our first prize! Congratulations to William Ferrell, who won a free pass to DevConnections, which starts the day after Code Camp! If you didn’t win, it is not too late for you to go to the conference at a great value, use code “onetug” to save $200 off your registration.

T-Shirt
If you liked last year’s t-shirts, you are going to love this year’s! Florida’s own UX expert, Diane Leeper has come up with an amazing design for us. Get there early, we have limited quantities!

Lunch

We will provide lunch for all registered attendees. We are welcoming Lou Tommasini to cater this year's Code Camp. If you attended our "BizSpark Day of Windows Phone 7", you'll remember Lou's food! You can find out more about Lou's offerings on Facebook, Thumbtack has some of his recipes, and last but not least, Twitter.

Hotel Info
If you need a hotel, we’ve made arrangements with Orlando Marriott Lake Mary with a special Code Camp rate of $79. You must use Group Code oneonea to take advantage of this offer, but hurry, rooms are running out! Direct link: Click Here

After-Party Information
Right after Code Camp, join us at Route 46 Entertainment District to unwind and network with fellow attendees and speakers. You don’t want to miss this!

Surface Demo

Hard Rock Cafe International will be hosting a “Hands on Surface” experience with developer Bradley Foley. Brad will talk about the V1 and upcoming V2 hardware, software, and how Surface computing is used to enhance the Hard Rock Brand experience with their customers.

Diamond Sponsors

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Orlando Code Camp just 2 weeks from now!

2011-03-13T10:18:00.001-04:00

I just sent this out to our ONETUG email list:

Orlando Code Camp is just around the corner!

The stage is set for the best and biggest Orlando Code Camp ever! We have an amazing list of speakers and sessions so you will definitely find something that interests you. If you haven’t signed up, this is the time to do so as we are less than 2 weeks away from the event!

We have sessions covering the following tracks: Azure, Collaboration (SharePoint and Office), Design & Animation, DNN, .NET Fundamentals, .NET Languages, Patterns & Architecture, Services, Silverlight, SQL Server, Visual Studio & ALM, Web, and Windows Phone.

As in previous years, Code Camp will be located at Seminole State College (100 Weldon Blvd, Sanford, FL 32773) on Saturday, March 26^th. Sign up at www.OrlandoCodeCamp.com!

Speakers
Come and interact with your favorite community speakers and lots of world-renowned speakers as well! We’ve been lucky enough to receive commitments from these speakers: Adam Jorgensen, Alexander Koval, Andy Warren, Brad Foley, Brad Schafer, Chris G. Williams, Colin Blakey, Cornelius Kruger, Diane Leeper, Esteban Garcia, Eugene Chuvyrov, Gifford Watkins, Greg Leonardo, Henry Lee, Ivan Farkas, Jack Corbett, Jason Milgram, Jason Rainwater, Jay Hill, Joe Brinkman, Joe Healy, John Mcfetridge, John Papa, John Wang, Jonas Stawski, Jyoti Chawla, Keith Elder, Ken Tucker, Kevin Halverson, Kevin Wolf, Konrad Neumann, Marshall Harrison, Michael Antonovich, Michael Knopf, Michael Stark, Mike Potts, Mitchel Sellers, Nathan Totten, Navin Nagiah, Nick Christy, Nikita Polyakov, Oleg Sych, Page Horton, Patrick Rourke, Plamen Ratchev, Prakash Balasubramanian, Raleigh Johnson, Ralph Williams, Rasesh Shah, Richard Dudley, Robert McLaws, Russell Fustino, Ryan Morgan, Ryan Parsley, Sam Abraham, Sayed Hashimi, Scott Dorman, Scott Klueppel, Sean Laberee, Seth Juarez, Spotty Bowles, Stan Schultes, Tim Butts, Tom Kraak, Tony Valenti, Walter Williams, Will Morgenweck, Woody Pewitt, and Zachary Gramana.

Looking through the list you are bound to find your favorite MVP or Microsoft Evangelist! Do you want to see the complete list of sessions? Register for Code Camp and try our Agenda Builder!

For the first time in our 6 year history, we are hosting Day of DotNetNuke. This will be your chance to share your knowledge, to learn, and to rub elbows. If you want to find out what is going on in the minds of the leaders of the DotNetNuke Corp., this is your chance. If you want to see the power of the internet through the eyes of DotNetNuke, this is your chance. If you want to see what all the DotNetNuke noise is about, this is your chance. As a special treat, the President and CEO of DotNetNuke Corp, Navin Nagiah, will give a DNN Keynote.

T-Shirt
If you liked last year’s t-shirts, you are going to love this year’s! Florida’s own UX expert, Diane Leeper has come up with an amazing design for us. Sign up and get there early, we have limited quantities!

*Model not included

Lunch

We will provide lunch for all registered attendees. We are welcoming Lou Tommasini to cater this year's Code Camp. If you attended our "BizSpark Day of Windows Phone 7", you'll remember Lou's food!

After-Party Information
Right after Code Camp, join us at Route 46 Entertainment District to unwind and network with fellow attendees and speakers.

Prizes

Thanks to our amazing sponsors, we have tons of prizes such as books, software, shirts, swag, a DevConnections pass, a SQL Rally pass, and Xboxes!

TFS Tip: Making a field READONLY after the work item has changed states

2011-03-12T12:29:00.001-05:00

Ever need to make a field read-only to everyone except for a specified group, but only once the work item has made it past a specific state?

You could achieve this by marking a field as read-only when it gets to a specified state. So after you enter the initial information, you move your work item to a state of Active (or you can use any other state), and within that state definition add a field rule to make it readonly. In the following sample, i'm making description readonly when the workitem is in the active state. Note that it is readonly for everyone, except for project administrators:

    <STATE value="Active">
     <FIELDS>
      <FIELD refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ClosedDate">
       <EMPTY />
      </FIELD>
      <FIELD refname="Microsoft.VSTS.Common.ClosedBy">
       <ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE />
       <EMPTY />
      </FIELD>
      <FIELD refname="System.AssignedTo">
       <REQUIRED />
      </FIELD>
      <FIELD refname="System.Description">
       <READONLY not="[Project]\Project Administrators" />
      </FIELD>
     </FIELDS>
    </STATE>

You would have to apply the same rule to all the states in your work item that should have this rule.

Team Build - Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets was not found

2011-03-07T16:09:00.001-05:00

If you ever get this error in your Build machine while building a Silverlight application through TFS:

“The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.”

You need to install Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 on your build machine.

Orlando Code Camp–Speaker Notification

2011-03-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

Orlando Code Camp 2011 is almost here. We have an awesome list of speakers and sessions and all the sponsors are coming through. This is my second time organizing this event and it has been fun putting it together. We are trying some new things this year and I hope that everyone enjoys it! This message went out to all speakers on Sunday:

Thank you so much for volunteering to speak at this year’s Orlando Code Camp. I am happy to notify you that you have been selected to speak at the event. This Code Camp is already shaping up to become our best one ever thanks to such a great speaker lineup. We have also been really fortunate to get overwhelming support from our sponsors, which is helping put together an event that nobody will want to miss!

What do we need from you:

Please log in to our website (www.OrlandoCodeCamp.com) as soon as possible and update your preferences. The most important parts are your shirt size (orders are going out this week), and the URL to your picture. If you didn’t enter your bio when you registered, we also ask that you fill that out. Tell all your friends about the event through blogs, twitter (hashtag #OrlandoCC), Facebook, email, word-of-mouth, etc.

What to expect:

We will have a Speaker/Volunteer party the night before, on Friday March 25^th at 7 pm. You will receive more information very soon, including venue information and directions.

Code Camp will start at 8:00 am on Saturday, March 26^th, with the first session at 8:30. All sessions will be 1 hour each, with a 10 minute break between them. We will have breakfast treats and a catered lunch, as well as refreshments throughout the day. Our after-party will be held at Route 46 Entertainment District, which was a huge hit last year and it will start at 5:30 pm, right after the closing ceremonies and prize give-away. Of course, we have some great prizes and all speakers are automatically entered into the drawing.

If you need a hotel, we have made arrangements with Marriott – Lake Mary, which is about 7 miles away from Seminole State College. The special rate will expire soon.

Orlando Marriott Lake Mary
1501 International Parkway • Lake Mary, FL 32746
Special Code Camp rate: $79
Group Code: oneonea
Direct Link: Click Here

If for any reason you are unable to attend, please notify us as soon as possible so we can give your spot to one of the people in the waiting list. Here is the list of all speakers and sessions that were approved. The schedule will be posted on our website in the next couple of days and all attendees will be able to create

The following speakers and sessions were approved:

Azure

Alexander Koval: Introduction to Azure AppFabric

Jason Milgram: Building Causal Games on Azure

Mike Potts: Continuous Deployment on Azure

Richard Dudley: Is Azure Right For My Applications?

Robert McLaws: Real World Windows Azure Migrations

Tim Butts: Using Lucene.net on Azure

Collaboration

Adam Jorgensen: Zero to Analytics-SharePoint Business Intelligence

Colin Blakey: Do It Yourself Microsoft Office

Marshall Harrison: Provisioning Lync Server 2010 using PowerShell

Michael Antonovich: Using External Data in SharePoint and Microsoft Office Without Code

Raleigh Johnson: Configuring Forms Authentication is SharePoint 2010

Ryan Morgan: Client Object Model Data Access for Silverlight on SharePoint 2010

Day of DNN

Navin Nagiah: Day of DotNetNuke Keynote

Day of DNN: DNN Development

Brad Schafer: Extreme DNN Development Techinques

Joe Brinkman: To the Cloud: DotNetNuke and Windows Azure

Mitchel Sellers: DotNetNuke Development: Leveraging the Core

Mitchel Sellers: DotNetNuke Performance: Diagnosing Problems

Nick Christy: DNN in a Web Farm

Day of DNN: Launch DNN

Gifford Watkins: Take This Job And Shove It: How to start a DNN company

Launch DNN Ralph Williams: Skinning 201 - Skinning DotNetNuke with Style

Tom Kraak: Intro to DNN SEO

Tony Valenti: How to Build a Basic Website with DotNetNuke

Will Morgenweck: Building Social Communities with DotNetNuke

Fundamentals

Jason Rainwater: Asynchronous Programming, Then and Now

Keith Elder: Back to the Basics: What is .Net?

Ryan Parsley: Modern Web Concepts

Scott Dorman: Memory Management Fundamentals – Garbage Collection Deep Dive

Tony Valenti: Advanced ASP.NET Debugging and Troubleshooting

Woody Pewitt: The Basics of Developing for the Web for Windows Developers

Languages

Kevin Halverson: Asynchronous Programming in Visual Basic and C#

Prakash Balasubramanian: C# 4.0 Overview

Seth Juarez: Functional C#

Spotty Bowles: Visual Basic Language Features in 2010

Zachary Gramana: Using C# as a Scripting Language

Patterns

Eugene Chuvyrov: Introduction to Reactive Extensions (Rx.NET) for Windows Phone 7 and the .NET Framework

Jay Hill: Applied Object-Oriented Design Principles

Jay Hill: Fluent Interfaces in C# & VB: What, Why & How

Page Horton: Decoupled UI

Page Horton: The Flexible Distributed Business Layer

Scott Klueppel: .NET Parallel Programming Patterns

Services

John Wang: Intro to Open Data Protocol (OData)

Keith Elder: Demystyfying Windows Communication Foundation 4.0

Patrick Rourke: Configurable Apps with the .NET 4 Workflow Foundation

Robert McLaws: Liberating Corporate Data with Entity Framework 4 and OData

Stan Schultes: RAD Development in VS2010 using EF4 with WCF Data Services and SL4

Cornelius Kruger: Using Silverlight with Prism 4 to build Enterprise MVVM Applications

Silverlight

Greg Leonardo: Dynamic Prototyping

Greg Leonardo: Silverlight LOB

John Mcfetridge: Silverlight for Line of Business ..Case study

John Papa: Silverlight Futures

Michael Knopf: Connecting the Dots: how to build a real-world Silverlight app

SQL Server

Adam Jorgensen: Zero to Cube - Introduction to Analysis Services

Andy Warren: Introduction to SQL Server Statistics

Jack Corbett: Introduction to SQL Server Profiler

Michael Stark: SQL 2008 geo data on a Window Phone 7 Bing Map

Plamen Ratchev: Zen and the Art of Writing SQL Query

Walter Williams: Using SQL Server Compact Edition in a .NET application

Visual Studio & ALM

Esteban Garcia: Continous Integration with TFS 2010

Jyoti Chawla: Application Lifecycle Management using Visual Studio 2010

Oleg Sych: Code Generation with T4 and Visual Studio 2010

Sayed Hashimi: Visual Studio 2010 SP1: What’s new for Web Developers

Sayed Hashimi: Web Deploy: Seriously You’re Still not Using This?

Sean Laberee: Microsoft Visual Studio IDE Tips and Tricks

Web

Ivan Farkas: Unified Web and Mobile Web Applications with ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery Mobile

Ken Tucker: Intro to MVC 3

Nathan Totten: Introduction to Facebook Development

Oleg Sych: Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data

RASESH SHAH: Enabling Payments on your WebMatrix Powered eCommrce Sites

Sam Abraham: NuGet, Microsoft ASP.Net MVC 3 and WebMatrix

Design & Animation

Chris G. Williams: Making Games for Windows Phone 7 with XNA 4.0

Diane Leeper: Animating in Blend: It's ALIVE

Diane Leeper: Design for Developers: Bad Design Kills Good Projects

Henry Lee: Windows Phone 7 Animation

Konrad Neumann: Being a Designer in a Developer's World

Nikita Polyakov: Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend

WP7

Henry Lee: Learn to Use Accelerometer and Location Service (GPS) in Windows Phone Application

Joe Healy: Consuming Services in Windows Phone 7

Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 1)

Kevin Wolf: Work From Anywhere = WFA (Part 2)

Nikita Polyakov: WP7 Marketplace Place and Monetization

Russell Fustino: Making (More) Money with Phone 7

Pointing a copied Iteration Backlog.xlsx to a different Team Project

2011-03-05T20:39:00.000-05:00

If you ever copy the Iteration Backlog.xlsx file from one Team Project to another (usually because you are upgrading an old Team Project to the TFS 2010 templates), then you probably get one of these errors:

"T80076: The data in the work item is no valid or you do not have permissions to modify the data. Please correct the problem and retry."

"TFS208103: The initialization of the workbook to connect to Team Foundation Server was not successful...."

You need to reconnect the spreadsheet to the right place.

There’s instructions on how to do that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452586.aspx (almost all the way down), look for “To bind the Iteration Backlog workbook to the Iteration Backlog query”.

Coming soon: Orlando Code Camp 2011

2011-02-28T00:14:00.001-05:00

Orlando Code Camp is right around the corner in just under 4 weeks. This year, the event is going to be bigger than ever. Our team has been hard at work for the last couple of months organizing the event. Putting together an event like this takes a lot of work and a lot of help and I’m really lucky to have an awesome team around me. We have most of our sponsors in place, a great venue at Seminole State College, our website is up and running (thanks to the hard work of the ONETUG Silverlight SIG), we have the food all set from Lou of Orlando, and a ton of other details that will make this our best Code Camp ever! During this event, we are also hosting Day of DNN, which will help us reach out to a broader audience.

TFS Tip: Viewing all files checked out to a specific person

2011-02-27T16:03:00.000-05:00

If you ever want to know what files are checked out to a specific person (under one folder, branch, team project, or your entire collection), this is what you need:

You need to install Team Foundation Power Tools, you can then go to any folder in Source Control Explorer and right-click -> "Find in Source Control" -> Status -> Select "All Checked out" or "Display files checked out to". You have to enter the username in domain\user format.

Dude, where’s my code? Changeset tracking to the rescue!

2011-02-25T15:26:00.001-05:00

There’s a new feature in TFS 2010 that I’ve mostly ignored but I think is super powerful. The new “Tracking Changeset” window gives us a visualizer that shows us exactly what code branches your changeset has made it to. Not only that, but there’s also a way to look at a timeline that shows you when your code was merged to each branch, in a visual way, of course!

So how does this work?

Well, if you have a branch that was created in TFS 2010, then this is turned on automatically. If you created your branch prior to migrating to TFS 2010, you need to turn this on, it’s pretty easy to do:

From Source Control Explorer, right-click on your parent branch and select “Branching and Merging”, and then “Convert to Branch”
On the “Convert to Branch” dialog box, enter a description and click Convert

That converts your “old-style” branch into a TFS 2010 branch, and now you open up whole set of new branching features. For example, you can now right click on that branch again, and instead of the “Convert” option, you now see a “View Herarchy” option. Selecting that option gives you a nice diagram showing you your branches and how they relate to eachother:

That’s cool, but really not that exciting…It just shows that I have a main branch, that is the parent for a development branch and a couple of releases.

So now let’s look at changeset visualization:

If you right click on your development branch in Source Control Explorer and look at history, there’s a new icon on the toolbar called “Track changeset” . Note that this icon is always available, but if you try it on a folder that is not a branch (a TFS 2010 branch), you will get an errror: TF247005: At least one changeset cannot be tracked because an item is not contained in a branch. You need to identify a container folder and convert it to a branch. So if you select that option on a Branch folder, you will see this:

The diagram shows that I checked in Changeset # 16 into my Development 1.1 branch, I merged it to Main with changeset # 17, and then moved it to to my release branch as part of changeset #18. On top of that, I can double-click on the changeset item on the visualizer, and it will give me changeset details. You also get an option on the toolbar called “Timeline Tracking”. It gives you a different view of your changes:

This shows you the same information as the previous chart, but in a timeline way. So now you know exactly when each changeset was merged (In this sample, i moved it all around the same time, so you only see one date, but you would see a bunch of different dates at the top if you all your merge operations were done over time).

Ok, so it gets even better. Since TFS allows you to associate a changeset to a workitem, you can do the same type of tracking from your workitem. To do this, open up a workitem that you know is associated to a changeset. Click on the Track Work Item icon and you get this in the Hierarchy Tracking view:

This tells me that as part of my workitem, I’ve checked in changesets 16, 21, 24 into my development branch and then merged them to main as part of changeset 17 and 22. Note that the asterisk next to the 22 means that not all changes have been merged yet. It then says that I merged changes to Release as part of changesets 18 and 23.

Now let’s look at the Timeline:

This shows me all my changes sets and when they got merged to each branch. It shows that changeset 24 was checked in to the development branch but it hasn’t made it to any of the other branches.

Before there was a way to see this, but you had to dig for it. It’s just so impressive how much work TFS is doing behind the scenes for us. So next time someone wonders whether their code made it to another branch, use the tools and find the information pretty quickly and easily!

TFS Trick: Allow only a specific group or person to create work items

2011-02-10T08:29:00.000-05:00

There are instances where you only want a specific group of people to create work items in TFS. For example, maybe just the Business Analyst group can create stories, but then anyone should be able to update them. The easiest way to do this is by setting permissions on the initial transition on the work item definition – from blank to Open/Active or whatever your first state is:

You can do this in using the TFS Power Tools WIT editor, or you can just easily open your definition in notepad and make this change:

Controlling Data Warehouse refresh in TFS 2010

2011-02-06T17:26:00.000-05:00

TFS 2010 added some new options to control how and when the data warehouse and Analysis Services cube is refreshed. From your TFS Server’s Application Tier, browse to this site: http://myTFSServer:8080/tfs/TeamFoundation/Administration/v3.0/WarehouseControlService.asmx, click on ChangeSettings, and from there you can enter the Setting ID and the new value. These are the available settings that you can change:

RunIntervalSeconds – Frequency in which TFS Warehouse data is synchronized. This is not analysis services, this is the table that the cube gets its data from.

IncrementalProcessIntervalSeconds - Frequency with which Analysis Database is updated. This is the one that you are most likely going to change if you want your data to be more “up to date” in your reports. Just make sure that it’s not a lower number than the “RunIntervalSeconds” value as that would be pointless.

FullProcessIntervalSeconds – The cube gets fully processed once a day by default, but you can change this setting to get it to run at a different interval.

DailyFullProcessingTime – Time of day when full cube process should start. Make sure that this doesn’t land in the middle of the day as full processing takes a big performance hit.

MaxParallelASProcessingCommands – Max number of commands that can run in parallel in Analysis Services.

AnalysisSchemaUpdateWaitSeconds - used by Analysis processing jobs trying to acquire an exclusive access to the warehouse resources during the Schema Change stage.

SchemaUpdateWaitSeconds - How long a job will be waiting in the Running state for the exclusive access to call IWarehouseAdapter.SchemaChange().

DataUpdateWaitSeconds - how long a job will be waiting in the Running state for another adapter making Schema changes or for Analysis Processing job changing Analysis Database schema.

WarehouseCommandSqlTimeout - used for acquiring an exclusive access to a warehouse resource

AnalysisServicesProcessingTimeout - How long to wait for an Analysis Services processing call to complete.

Recovering documents from a deleted Team Project portal site

2011-02-04T16:24:00.001-05:00

I’ll preface this by saying that up until the point that I needed to do this, i knew very little about the database structure that supports SharePoint.

I intentionally deleted the SharePoint portal used by one of my Team Projects. The reason for it was that I wanted to implement a brand new structure, along with a new Dashboard to support TFS 2010. I backed up all the documents that I thought needed to be saved (so I thought) and went about deleting and deploying the new SharePoint project with the new structure (future blog post on that).

Early the next day, I realized there were some documents that I never backed up…so this is how I recovered from that. Note: there may be better ways to do this using SharePoint tools out there, but I don’t know any of them, this felt intuitively right…

I restored a copy of the wss_Content database in the TFS SQL Server from the previous night. Looking through the table structure, I found 3 tables that seemed interesting: AllDocs, AllDocVersions, And AllDocStreams.

After poking around the tables, i came up with this:

select * from AllDocs
where DirName like 'Sites/MyTeamProject/Requirements'

That gave me a list of all subfolders within the document library that I wanted to restore. I grabbed the each ID from that query, and used it to find all the child documents this way:

select a.LeafName, Content from AllDocStreams ds inner join 
AllDocs a on ds.Id = a.Id
where ds.ParentId = '{my guid}'
and ds.DeleteTransactionId = 0x

This gives me a lits of all the document names, and their byte array for all documents within each directory. It also gives me back only the ones that were not deleted previously (I don’t need to restore those).

Then I wrote a very quick utility to extract them:

            using (SqlConnection c = new SqlConnection("Data Source=.;Initial Catalog=wss_restore;Integrated Security=SSPI;"))
            {
                c.Open();
                using (SqlCommand co = new SqlCommand("select a.LeafName, Content from AllDocStreams ds inner join AllDocs a on ds.Id = a.Id where ds.ParentId = 'C075EE6D-C04E-4444-8765-F6CC54768AAC' and ds.DeleteTransactionId = 0x", c))
                using (SqlDataReader r = co.ExecuteReader())
                {
                    while (r.Read())
                    {
                        byte[] arrAttachmentData = (byte[])r["Content"];
                        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(arrAttachmentData, false);
                        //StreamWriter s = new StreamWriter(mem);


                        FileStream fs = File.OpenWrite(string.Format(@"c:\temp\{0}", r["LeafName"].ToString()));
                        ms.WriteTo(fs);
                        //fs.Write(ms.GetBuffer(), 0, ms.Position);
                        fs.Close();


                    }
                }
            }

And that’s it…once I had the docs locally, i was able to easily upload them to my new SharePoint portal.

Could not load type 'System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule' from assembly 'System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'.

2011-01-26T10:04:00.001-05:00

This is caused when 4.0 components are not properly installed on the IIS Server. To resolve it, you can run this command:
>aspnet_regiis.exe –iru

That exe is found here:

32-bit systems: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319
64-bit systems: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319

The required category ‘Microsoft.TestCaseCategory’ does not exist in team project ‘[projectname]’

2011-01-13T15:40:00.001-05:00

If you are trying to connect Microsoft Test Manager to a Team Project that was created with TFS 2008, then you will very likely get this error: “The required category ‘Microsoft.TestCaseCategory’ does not exist in team project ‘[projectname]’”. This has to do with the workitem categories that are used by MTM. Basically, you group different workitem types into categories, which then allow MTM (and also TFS queries) to work with specific workitem types. The easiest way to get this fixed is to export the categories from a 2010 Team Project, and then import them to your team project:

>witadmin exportcategories /collection:http://MyTFS:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /p:"Project1" /f:"C:\temp\Categories.xml"

>witadmin importcategories /collection:http://MyTFS:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /p:"Project2" /f:"C:\temp\Categories.xml"

The file looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<cat:CATEGORIES xmlns:cat="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2008/workitemtracking/categories">
  <CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.BugCategory" name="Bug Category">
    <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Bug" />
  </CATEGORY>
  <CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.RequirementCategory" name="Requirement Category">
    <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="User Story" />
  </CATEGORY>
  <CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.SharedStepCategory" name="Shared Step Category">
    <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Shared Steps" />
  </CATEGORY>
  <CATEGORY refname="Microsoft.TestCaseCategory" name="Test Case Category">
    <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Test Case" />
  </CATEGORY>
</cat:CATEGORIES>

Of course, you need to make sure that your team project has a “Share Steps” and “Test Case” workitem types defined, which you can also import from your 2010 project (witexport, witimport).

Destroying Work Item Types in TFS 2010

2011-01-13T14:29:00.001-05:00

If you have a workitem type that you don’t use or no longer need in TFS, you can destroy the type (along with all the work items of that type):

>witadmin destroywitd /collection:http://MyTFS:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /p:MyTeamProject /n:Task

Deleting WorkItems in TFS

2011-01-10T22:43:00.001-05:00

If you ever need to delete (destroy) workitems in TFS, use the witadmin utility to do so:

witadmin destroywi /collection:http://myserver:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /id:123,444,555

As you can see, you can destroy multiple work items at a time. There’s no turning back once you delete a workitem, so make sure that you really wanted to get rid of it.

Changing Work Item Field attributes

2011-01-10T22:17:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you have to change the attributes of a work item field in TFS. For example, let’s say that when you created a field, you gave it a friendly name of “ReferenceID” and now you want to add a space and name it “Reference ID”. Or maybe when you created it, you gave it a reporting attribute of “Dimension”, but it really should’ve been “Details”. One way to do it would be to get rid of the field and re-create it, but the right way to do it would be to use the witadmin command with “changefield” option, so this would change the name of the field. Note that the /n swithc is for the unique reference name.

witadmin changefield /collection:http://myserver:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /n:MyFields.ReferenceID /name:"Reference ID"

There’s a bunch of options…you can see the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd236909.aspx

TFS Licensing White paper

2010-12-27T15:28:00.001-05:00

I recently had to look up some information regarding TFS Licensing (CAL’s and SQL Server), here is the white paper published by Microsoft on it: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/B/1/7B18407A-AC79-4949-A318-A6636D96F497/Visual%20Studio%202010%20Licensing%20-%20Feb-2010.pdf

I wish it was a bit simpler, but at least the document covers all the bases.

Rolling back changes in TFS

2010-12-22T12:36:00.001-05:00

Although you cannot get rid of changesets in TFS, you can easily roll back a change if something was mistakenly checked-in. This functionality used to be part of Team Foundation Power Tools, but it is now part of the regular TFS functionality, in command-line:

tf rollback /changeset:1234

There’s a bunch of parameters that you can specify, such as version to rollback to, date, workspace, etc. Just do tf rollback /? to see all the options.

After you run the command, you will still need to check-in your changes, and you will now see a “rollback” entry in history, so like I said, you really are not getting rid of your bad check-in, just getting things back to were they were before.

Accessing TFS 2010 from Visual Studio 2008 or 2005

2010-12-03T10:33:00.001-05:00

After installing TFS 2010, in order to connect to it from VS 2008 or 2005, you must install the Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010. You can download the 2008 version here, and the 2005 version here. Note that you have to have Service Pack 1 installed before you can apply the update.

Once the update is installed, you need to disconnect from the old TFS 2008 (even if 2010 is on the same server) and reconnect. The server name should be entered in this format: :8080/tfs">http://<servername>:8080/tfs. That is assuming that you used the default port number and virtual directory.

ONETUG: BizSpark WP7 Developer Day Event tomorrow

2010-11-05T14:42:00.000-04:00

We have a sold-out event (100 registered attendees) tomorrow. Be there early to get a good seat. Breakfast will be ready at 8:30 am and the first speaker will start promptly at 9:00 am.

Event: BizSpark WP7 Developer Day
Date: Saturday, November 06, 2010 from 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM (ET)
Location:
DeVry University
4000 Millenia Blvd.
Orlando, FL 32839

Prizes: We will be giving away prizes from Component Art, CodeSmith, Steema, Syncfusion, obout, viblend, Telerik, Xceed, First Floor Software, SQLSets, Microsoft, and VSLive

For more information click here: BizSpark WP7 Developer Day

BizSpark WP7 Developer Day

2010-11-01T14:36:00.001-04:00

This Saturday (November 6th), we are hosting an all-day Windows Phone 7 Event focused on getting developers up to speed with the tools and technology needed to launch applications into the Marketplace. The event will be held at DeVry University (4000 Millenia Blvd., Orlando, FL 32839). We are going to have a ton of content which will help everyone that is trying to understand how to build Windows Phone 7 applications.

We will kick off the morning with Brian Johnson, Microsoft’s Startup Evangelist. He will discuss the BizSpark program and how your company can get enrolled in this really awesome program that gives you all sorts of free Microsoft software.

We will then move on to WP7 content by Joe Healy, Microsoft (.NET Developer Evangelist) and Nikita Polyakov (WP7 MVP).

After lunch, we will follow along WP7 samples and we will have a Windows Phone application showcase by developers from our community. Joe will also have a few phone available so you can load your app on a real phone and test it.

Breakfast and lunch will be server and we will have a ton of prizes, including a free 4-day pass to VS Live here in Orlando!

To register: http://bizsparkwp7.eventbrite.com/

Baby Time – My first entry into the WP7 Marketplace

2010-10-19T20:58:00.001-04:00

Yesterday morning, my first Windows Phone application was accepted into the Marketplace. It’s a pretty simple application that helps moms-to-be keep track of their baby’s development before they are born.

Why Baby Time?
We are currently expecting a baby girl and it seemed like every other day, my wife would ask me about which week she was on at the moment. Also, as each week passed, she would go on the web and check for the expected baby weight/length as well as what was going on this week. At the moment I was working on another (bigger) WP7 app an I thought that it would be fun to put something together for her. Once I got started, a few other ideas came to mind (such as international measures) and the app was on its way.

Technology
Earlier in summer, at Jax Code Camp, I went to a session on the Caliburn.Micro framework, and I was hooked! I worked on a couple of Silverlight apps this year where we used another framework and Caliburn.Micro just seemed like it was so much lighter to use and it was a lot easier to accomplish my “no code-behind” goal. It also has great support for Tombstoning, and a few other features. So I decided to give it a try for this project and it was a great decision.
For my controls, I used the Silverlight Toolkit (WP7 version) since I needed a nice calendar control. I used the standard Panorama control for my “week picker” and then plain standard textblock controls and buttons for everything else.
My data is stored in an xml file, which is an embedded resource, and I used LINQ to XML to load the data into my data object.

All in all, since I am pretty comfortable with Silverlight, the development experience was really good and felt very natural. Granted, this is not the most advanced application in the world, but still, i would imagine that it would’ve been a ton more work on other platforms. The hardest thing for me was to come up with my graphics, but that’s mostly because i’m very graphically-challenged :)

Some show-and-tell
As I mentioned, my “week picker” uses a panorama control. The items in the panorama are data-driven based on what weeks I have defined in my XML file. So I used the ItemTemplate to define what each item should look like and bound the Panorama Control to a List<int> in my ViewModel. Yes…simple!

        <controls:Panorama x:Name="panoWeek" Grid.Row="1" 
                           ItemsSource="{Binding WeekNumbers}" 
                           DefaultItem="{Binding WeekNumber}">
            <controls:Panorama.HeaderTemplate>
                <DataTemplate>
                    <TextBlock Text=""/>
                </DataTemplate>
            </controls:Panorama.HeaderTemplate>
            <controls:Panorama.ItemTemplate>
                <DataTemplate>
                    <StackPanel>
                        <TextBlock TextAlignment="Center" FontSize="300" Text="{Binding}" Foreground="#FF1BA1E2"/>
                    </StackPanel>
                </DataTemplate>
            </controls:Panorama.ItemTemplate>
        </controls:Panorama>

And my ViewModel property (yes, Caliburn.Micro is that cool):

        public List<int> WeekNumbers
        {
            get
            {
                return BabyData.AvailableWeeks;
            }
        }

The calendar control was really easy to use. I was not able to figure out how to hook up the control to Caliburn.Micro (I know, I’m a n00b) , so I ended up using the standard Binding sintax for that:

<toolkit:DatePicker x:Name="StartDate" Value="{Binding StartDate, Mode=TwoWay}"  />

And then to finish off, I had to send out an email and browse to my website. Note that this “magically” works because I named my buttons “Email” and “BrowseToM2E” respectively:

        public void Email()
        {
            EmailComposeTask task = new EmailComposeTask();
            task.To = EmailAddress;
            task.Subject = "Questions about BabyTime";
            task.Show();
        }

        public void BrowseToM2E()
        {
            WebBrowserTask task = new WebBrowserTask();
            task.URL = CompanyUrl;
            task.Show();
        }

Conclusion: It’s really easy to build a Windows Phone 7 application, especially if you already know .NET and Silverlight!

Here’s a quick recording of the app in action:

Upcoming events at ONETUG and the rest of the community

2010-10-18T17:04:00.001-04:00

Windows Phone 7 is our theme for the month! Here are the events planned for the next few weeks:

ONETUG EVENTS

ONETUG Meeting: Windows Phone 7 with Kevin Wolf – October 21^st
Come join Windows Phone Development MVP, Kevin Wolf as he shows us how to manage data on your WP7 application. The meeting will be kicked off by Bob Baker showing us what you can do with LightSwitch.
Register: http://onetug-october2010.eventbrite.com/.

ONETUG Meeting: Visual Studio Team – November 15^th

BizSpark WP7 Developer Day – November 6^th
We’ve teamed up with BizSpark and DeVry to bring you a full day of Windows Phone 7 training. More details to come soon. Register: http://bizsparkwp7.eventbrite.com/

COMMUNITY EVENTS

Tallahassee Code Camp – October 23^rdhttp://www.tallycodecamp.org

Tampa Code Camp – November 13^th http://www.tampacodecamp.com

VSLive Orlando – November 14^th – 17^th
The VSLive Conference is back in Orlando. Sign up with priority code “ONETUG”and save $400! For more information: http://onetug.org/files/ONETUGVSLOrlandoFlyer.pdf

Monthly Virtual Brown Bag Meetings

Our last Virtual Meeting (Entity Framework with Julie Lerman) was a huge success. You can view the recording here: https://www323.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/view?id=2C4D7R

Keep an eye out on INETA LIVE(http://live.ineta.org/Presentation/Group), where a lot of our VBB recordings will be hosted after the event!

ONETUG Stuff for the next few weeks

2010-10-06T22:01:00.001-04:00

Virtual Brown Bag – October 7th

We are hosting Entity Framework super-expert Julie Lerman tomorrow Thursday at noon via LiveMeeting. Register: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000181573/Registration.aspx?pageName=b8fb1wkwg0h6dfmx.

NerdDinner – October 7th

Join us at Milennia Mall at 7 pm on Thursday to talk about the Virtual Brown Bag. Also, if you have any Windows Phone 7 apps that you are working on, you’ll be able to load it onto an a WP7 device. The best app will get a prize! Register: http://www.nerddinner.com/3070

Orlando SQL Saturday – October 16th

SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and students wanting to learn about SQL Server. Register: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/49/eventhome.aspx

Windows Phone 7 with Kevin Wolf – October 21st

Come join Windows Phone Development MVP, Kevin Wolf as he shows us how to manage data on your WP7 application. Register: http://onetug-october2010.eventbrite.com/

BizSpark WP7 Developer Day – November 6th

We’ve teamed up with BizSpark and DeVry to bring you a full day of Windows Phone 7 training. More details to come soon. Register: http://bizsparkwp7.eventbrite.com/

VSLive Orlando – November 14^th – 17^th

The VSLive Conference is back in Orlando. Sign up with priority code “ONETUG”and save $400! For more information: http://onetug.org/files/ONETUGVSLOrlandoFlyer.pdf

Orlando SQL Saturday – October 16th

2010-10-05T22:57:00.001-04:00

In less than 2 weeks, our friends at Orlando PASS will be hosting SQL Saturday#49. This super successful series has been around for 3 years and it actually got started right here in Orlando. This is not just for DBA’s, if you are involved with SQL Server in any capacity, there is something for you! Check out this flyer, which explains the entire event: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/files/c79cae06-4e43-481f-a48d-1fdffb92758f.pdf.

Sign up here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/49/eventhome.aspx

I know that Andy, Jack and everyone that is helping them will make this an awesome event!

Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch Event

2010-10-05T09:50:00.001-04:00

It’s finally here!

You can sign up for the webcast here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032458870&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Writing unit test cases that target Azure Dev Fabric

2010-09-20T10:02:00.001-04:00

We are currently building an application that writes to Azure blob-storage as part of its business process. As I was writing test cases for it, my Blob-storage operations were failing because that code is now running under the context of the test case instead of my web role. So I needed a way to make sure that:

DevFabric is running when my test cases start
The DataConnectionString string is setup to hit DevFabric (I don’t really want to hit the “real” cloud for these test cases)

So I added a method marked with the “AssemblyInitialize” attribute in my Unit test project. In that method, I check to see if DevFabric has started, if it is not started, i kick it off and wait for it to run. Once that is going, I need to get the Data Connection String from my test project’s app.config file. And now, when the code to access Blob storage gets called, it will have all the information it needs in order to successfully complete the operation.

I have a lot of test cases that hit Azure, so that’s why I used AssemblyInitialize…this code could’ve been placed inside one test case or in a “ClassInitialize” method.

[AssemblyInitialize]

        public static void AzureInitialize(TestContext testContext)

            if( System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName("DSService").Length == 0)

                System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo start = new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo();

                start.Arguments = "/devstore:start";

                start.FileName = @"C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.2\bin\csrun.exe";

                var proc = new System.Diagnostics.Process();

                proc.StartInfo = start;

                proc.Start();

                proc.WaitForExit();

            CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher((configName, configSetter) => configSetter(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[configName]));

            var azureAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString");

This is what I added in app.config:

<appSettings>
    <add key="DataConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />
  </appSettings>

TF270015: 'MSTest.exe' returned an unexpected exit code. Expected '0'; actual '1'

2010-09-13T23:10:00.001-04:00

There is a problem in Team Build 2010 when executing Unit Test cases from a Visual Studio 2008 solution. The test cases run, but when MSTest tries to publish the results to TFS, then you get this error: TF270015: 'MSTest.exe' returned an unexpected exit code. Expected '0'; actual '1'. Not very informational, and pretty cryptic. Digging around a little, I found this on MS Connect: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/576322/tf270015-mstest-exe-returned-an-unexpected-exit-code-expected-0-actual-1

They have a hotfix for this, released last month: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB983504/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4749

They don’t specify where the hot-fix should run, we ran it on the build machine and everything works fine now.

Another solution to this problem would’ve been to find the MSBuild task on the build workflow and point it to the 3.5 version rather than the 4.0 that it uses by default on TFS 2010, but what we implemented seemed like a more long-term solution.

Azure Web Role – Unable to connect

2010-08-30T09:26:00.001-04:00

I was working with a Demo App and after a successful deployment to Azure (I made it past the Initialize, Starting, and now it was Running). I have a Web Role and a Worker Role. I tried hitting the website (something like http://mysampleapp.cloudapp.net) and all I got was “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”…the typical Site Unavailable message. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was and finally found that the default port for my web role was set to 8080 instead of 80. It was an easy switch by going to the properties of my role in VS 2010…silly mistake that took a while to figure out. Hopefully I save someone a few minutes with this tip.

LINQ To SQL – Audit changes

2010-08-08T23:58:00.001-04:00

I was working on a project where I needed to insert an audit record when changes to the database were made. My first thought was to use triggers, but unfortunately, the deployment model of this application made that option impossible. So then I turned to the data access layer of the application. Sure, an “easy” option would’ve been to go through all the calls to the database and add a call to the “audit” function, but that seemed error-prone and difficult to maintain. Then i turned to the Data Context, which is handled by the DBML class in Linq to SQL. The DBML inherits from System.Data.Linq.DataContext. I created a new base class called “AuditableContext” which inherits from DataConext and used it as an interception point for my calls to the Database. It was easy to switch the DBML to inherit from my new AuditableContext class…just open up the DBML in design mode and go to its properties, then set the Base Class property.

Having done that, now I had a nice interception point for all my calls. So now I created an Override method for SubmitChanges(), which gets called on any Insert, Update, Delete operation using L2S (note, that this is not called for stored procedures). In SubmitChanges() I can interrogate the changeset and pull out the fields that changed, the before and after values, and of course the table name. I also added an “AuditEnabled” property that allows me to turn the behavior on or off (it’s off by default) at the time that i instantiate the context. Here is the code that gets the changes out…it’s VB.NET, so don’t be afraid :) I simplified the code a bit for the demo, so be sure to check for nulls and apply good exception handling…this shows the logic to capture updates, but if you need inserts and deletes as well, you can follow the same pattern.

 Public Overrides Sub SubmitChanges(ByVal failureMode As System.Data.Linq.ConflictMode)
        If AuditEnabled Then
            Dim _Updates As IEnumerable = GetChangeSet().Updates
            If Not _Updates Is Nothing Then
                For Each _Entity As Object In _Updates
                    Dim _EntityType As Type = _Entity.GetType()
                    Dim _Table As ITable = GetTable(_EntityType)
                    Dim _ModifiedList As ModifiedMemberInfo() = _Table.GetModifiedMembers(_Entity)

                    For Each _ModifiedData As ModifiedMemberInfo In _ModifiedList
                        Dim _OriginalValue As String = _ModifiedData.OriginalValue.ToString
                        Dim _CurrentValue As String = _ModifiedData.CurrentValue.ToString

                        If m_OriginalValue <> m_CurrentValue Then
                            LogAudit(_EntityType.Name, _ModifiedData.Member.Name, _OriginalValue, _CurrentValue)
                        End If
                    Next
                Next
            End If
        End If

        MyBase.SubmitChanges(failureMode)
    End Sub

“Unhandled Extension Element” in WIX (Windows Installer XML)

2010-06-17T01:20:00.001-04:00

I’m using WIX to create an MSI for a web application, part of the installer needs to create the IIS settings, so i’m using the WIX IIS extensions. I started off by adding the namespace:

xmlns:iis='http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/IIsExtension'

Everything looked good, i was getting Intellisense within VS 2010, but then when i tried to build the MSI package, i got this error:

The Component element contains an unhandled extension element 'iis:WebSite'. Please ensure that the extension for elements in the 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/IIsExtension' namespace has been provided.

I took a while to figure it out…in order to fix this issue, i had to add a reference to WixIisExtension.dll to my WIX project. You add the reference just like you would add one for any other project.

How to turn on Silverlight Debugging

2010-06-16T01:14:00.001-04:00

I have a couple of Silverlight projects going on at the moment and for some reason I could not get debugging to work on one but everyone was working just fine on the other. At run-time, my breakpoints would become disabled and it would tell me that debug symbols were not loaded. It ended up being something simple that i kept overlooking. On your web application’s properties (the host application, not the silverlight app), on the “Web” tab, if you scroll to the bottom, you can check which debuggers you want to attach to your process when you hit F5. Check the Silverlight box and you are good to go…i must’ve unchecked it by mistake at some point and never realized it!

VB 2010 – List Initializer

2010-06-14T10:39:00.000-04:00

I’ve been using VB.NET for about a year now (I was exclusively a C# developer before that) and one thing that always annoyed me was not being able to initialize my lists at the time that I declared them, the way I could in C#. They added this functionality in VB 10, so this is how you do it:

Dim customers As New List(Of String) From {"Tom", "Bob", "John", "Lisa"}

Building VS2010 Solutions from TFS 2008

2010-04-30T11:15:00.001-04:00

We’ve upgraded our Silverlight solution to 4.0 so we are now using Visual Studio 2010. Unfortunately we have not had the time to upgrade to TFS 2010 yet, so we are still running TeamBuild 2008. So that means that under the covers, Team Build is still trying to use MSBuild 2008. In order to change that, you have to go into your build server, stop the service and then find the config file for TfsBuildService.exe (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\TfsBuildService.exe.config). In that file, there is a setting called MSBuildPath, which was empty, meaning that it would go to the default path for 2008. So i changed that key to:
<add key="MSBuildPath" value="c:\windows\microsoft.net\Framework\v4.0.30319\" />, which is the Release version, so just use whatever version you are running under (RC, Beta, etc).

Now, this means that even your 2008 solutions will go through that version of MSBuild, which should be ok since you can build previous versions of .NET apps with the latest MSBuild. But just in case, we left all our 3.5 apps building on one Build Server, and the 4.0 apps building on this Build Server.

Orlando Code Camp 2010

2010-04-04T21:07:00.001-04:00

I started writing this the day after Code Camp and I finally got a chance to finish it. These are my thoughts about Orlando Code Camp 2010, which was my first major event as an organizer.

I had attended all 4 of the previous Orlando Code Camps. Last year I helped run the event by taking care of website changes to the original site developed by Fabio, our former vice-president. He and the president at the time, Jessica, ran a really awesome event. Around the middle of the year they both had to step down for (Fabio moved and Jessica went off to help her entrepreneurial boyfriend), so I took over as president of ONETUG. So this year was my first time in charge of organizing the event and I knew from the start that I had my work cut out for me. By now, Orlando Code Camp had already gained reputation amongst the Florida developer community as a great event to attend. I was really fortunate to have the ONETUG board to help me. We really have a great mix of people, with each of us bringing something different to the table. Without them, this event doesn’t even come off the ground!

Preparing for the event

The venue was our first concern. We knew that it would dictate the amount of people that we could accommodate and also a lot of the logistics surrounding the event. As in previous years, Seminole State College stepped up and offered us their facilities. One of our board members, James Taylor (JT2, as we like to call him) facilitated the initial meeting with John Delgado, who took me around the buildings and showed me all the rooms that would be available to us. They were going through some renovations at the end of the Fall semester, so we knew that some of the classrooms would change by the time Code Camp came along. I was introduced to Melinda White, who is one of the programming professors at Seminole State. From that point on, she was our point-person at Seminole State and helped us coordinate all the logistics for the event. She made over 15 rooms available to us, with the possibility of more rooms if needed. We had a firm commitment from Seminole State at the end of December and we were able to have all the rooms reserved by end of January (once Add/Drop had ended). As the event approached, myself and Will Strohl (ONETUG VP, ODUG Prez) met with her one more time to tour the rooms after the renovations and we were able to make some determinations based on the new room layouts and projector capabilities. Melinda was of great help guiding us through that and making suggestions on what rooms would be better suited for the event. She also took us around to talk to the Media department to make sure that we would have microphones, speakers, and the right projector configurations where needed.

With the venue in place, our attention turned to things like sponsors, speakers, food, prizes, and more. Brian Mishler, our Director of Marketing really did a great job the past few months building relationships with a lot of sponsors. We’ve had tremendous success getting more prizes than ever at our regular ONETUG meetings and that translated into a ton of support for this event. Brian contacted all our existing sponsors (and a bunch of new ones) and got us the money and prizes that we needed in order to pull off the event. We got a lot of money from DevExpress, Microsoft, Linxter, Infragistics, and KForce, and many other sponsors (in total we had 14 money sponsors and 10 prize-only sponsors). Really, the amount of support that we had in this economy was way more than we originally expected which at the end helped us spend money on things like attendee t-shirts which was not something that we had been able to do recently (More on t-shirts a bit further down). We also got some amazing prizes to give away, things such as software components, subscriptions, books, t-shirts, and of course Ninjas! A few nights before the event, we all got together at Brian’s house for a “bag-stuffing” party. The ONETUG board and a few volunteers made it all go pretty seamless and we were done in just a couple of hours!

Of course, one thing is to get a pledge for money, and another thing is to actually get the money in, and of course, spend the money wisely. Our treasurer, John Torrey (JT1…see, the #2 from earlier makes sense now), kept us in check and did a great job at sending out invoices, collecting the money, and making us aware of what we could and could not spend the money on. We had a couple of moments where we thought that we would not be able to get everything that was planned, but at the end, all our great sponsors came through and JT1 gave me the green light to buy stuff :)

The food was handled by JT2. He got us a few proposals and at the end we decided on Jason’s Deli. Mark, the manager was very accommodating and flexible and at the end ended up being a great choice. We ordered 550 lunches and we were able to cover everyone there with a lot of different choices of sandwiches. We were even able to get some gluten-free salads since I got a couple of emails inquiring about that. We also got a few proposals for breakfast. We got Panera bagels and I picked up a bunch of cream cheese, OJ, and coffee from Sam’s the day before. With such an early start, we knew that most people would get there just in time for the sessions and they would not spend a ton of time on breakfast.

Around February, I started thinking that it would be really cool to be able to get t-shirts to all of our attendees. You know, like a proper conference usually has. And not just some cheesy shirt that people wouldn’t wear, but something that people would get excited about. Joe Healy, our area Microsoft DE (and super supporter of our community) suggested that we should contact Diane Leeper. She is a designer from Tampa who is doing a great job at trying to bridge the gap between developers and designers. I was able to meet her during the regional competition of Speaker Idol in Orlando and a few emails later, she had a really cool design for us. The design incorporated the State of Florida and within it, all our speakers and their session names. Everyone really seemed to enjoy the shirts!

We worked with Kim from Dylen Monogramming to get the t-shirts and speaker/volunteer polo’s made. Kim was fast, very flexible, and gave us a great price. I was so impressed that we are actually getting my company’s polo’s made by her now.

Of course, we could not have this event without speakers. We were lucky enough to get a lot of submissions in. We had a great mix of first-time speakers, MVPs, book authors, local speakers, and a few from out of state. Topics ranged from bleeding-edge to intro-level. I think that overall we had a really great lineup and I even got a few comments from people on how great it appealed across the board. There really was something for everyone. Logistically, the toughest part to do was to trim down our session list and setup the schedule. Will was super helpful with this part. He and I spent a few nights going back and forth on this and finally came up with 12 tracks with 6 sessions each, for a total of 72 sessions. We had to make a few changes as the event got closer because of a couple of last-minute requests and cancellation, but overall it all worked out.

Our call for volunteers went great. Will was in charge of everything dealing with volunteers. We had a few of the ONETUG regulars come out and help and I even saw a few new faces. The red shirts that we got for our volunteers was a really good idea since it allowed them to get a lot of visibility and our attendees knew exactly who to go to for help. Sometimes people don’t realize how much we rely on volunteers to help out at these events and I am so glad to have had all the help. I don’t know if it was because of the distinctive shirts or just because I was in the middle of all the planning this year, but it really felt like we had a lot more help than usual. Either way, it made our jobs so much easier, knowing that things were entrusted to the right people.

So with all of that in place, all of a sudden it was the Friday before the event. There were just 3 things left on my list of things to do: Go to Sam’s to buy all the supplies for the next day, go to Best Buy to get the grand prize, and go to the Speaker Party. So I took the day off from work (I have a great client and even better partners at M2E). I set out to Sam’s in the morning and stopped by UHaul on the way there. I picked up a 5x8 trailer and hooked it up to my SUV. Once I got to Sam’s and the people saw my shopping list, they quickly hooked me up with Bud, the “Shop and Pull” guy. Now that I know about that service, I will be using it next time I have an event like this. Basically, you go online, select what you are looking for, and you stop by the next day and they have it all ready for you. Bud literally ran around the store with me picking up all the stuff that we were looking for. Within a little over an hour we had picked up everything that I was looking for, including over 1,100 soda sand 1,200 waters, lots of bananas and a ton of other stuff. Then I came home, actually took some rest, then in the evening I headed over to Tatame for our speaker party. On my way there, I stopped by Best Buy to pick up the XBox that we were giving away as a grand prize. The folks at Tatame were great hosts and all speakers and volunteers there really seemed to enjoy the event. We gave out the speaker and volunteer polo’s and the speakers that were doing the live-stream sessions the next day were able to get their laptops tested and ready for the next day. Once the festivities ended at around 11 or so, i rushed home to finish up the demo for my Azure presentation the next day (which I had mostly neglected that entire week). Once that was done, everything was all set for the event.

The Event

So after all the preparations, it was finally the morning of the event. I pulled up to Seminole State at 5:30 am with a UHaul truck full of supplies. Will had arranged for a bunch of volunteers to be there early and help us setup and they were already waiting for me when I got there. We had a little snag with the doors not being open for us yet, but Melinda from Seminole State helped us get that straightened out (yes, she was up and available at that time!). We got everything unloaded to the cafeteria area. JT1 got the registration setup, coffee was brewing, and sodas were iced down. Jessica and Brian went around campus posting road signs towards the event, while Will went to all the rooms and posted signs on each room. Once everything was setup in the cafeteria, I went around all the rooms and verified that all projectors were setup and mic’s were working. We found that we needed some video adapters and John Delgado got everything connected for us. Time flew by and all of a sudden it was 8:00 am, time for the opening announcements and for us to get everything rolling. With a packed auditorium we kicked it all off and then it was all downhill from there (well, mostly).

We had a “Live Feed” room, where we moved 6 sessions from various tracks into. All sessions in that room were broadcasted through LiveMeeting. Originally, it was going to be an MSDN event, but a few behind the scenes things led to us moving it to LiveMeeting. This was setup by Joe with help from INETA’s and Space Coast .NET’s Ken Tucker. It was the first time that this was done at a Code Camp event and the plan is to be able to give other Code Camp organizer’s a “how to” guide so they can do the same at their events.

I gave my Azure Table Storage presentation at 9:45 am in the Live Streaming room. The night before as I was cleaning up my presentation a bit, i mistakenly changed my config file to use OrlandoCC as my Azure application name. The problem is that when setting up your connection to Azure, you have to use all lower-case. So from about 8:45 til 9:30 I was frantically debugging my application getting it ready for the presentation. I had Mark (from M2E) there helping me troubleshoot it, and finally with just enough time (and BSD mixed in there), I figured out my mistake and ran into the room to setup. I had pretty good attendance onsite plus about 18 people online and overall the presentation went really well.

By this time, the event was really running itself. Everyone knew where to go, and all the kinks had been worked out in all the rooms. We had all sessions going in the regular rooms and the live room, and Speaker Idol was underway. Pretty soon it was lunchtime, which really was the last major logistical hurdle for the day. Again, thanks to everyone’s help, we got that going right on time and everything ran smoothly. We even flew in some expert help from California! About half-way through lunch I got a really cool surprise when my family came by to see me. March was probably my busiest moth ever and my wife and son were very supportive and understanding throughout. It was so cool to get to see them during the event, even if it was for 20 minutes.

During the afternoon, I managed to catch the end of some of the sessions. Then came the closing ceremony where we gave away our prizes and got to hear from our sponsors. We also had the Speaker Idol prize presentation, which was a huge hit. The event ended when we gave out the much awaited XBox to a very deserving attendee.

It took us about half an hour to clean up and load up the UHaul with our stuff (it’s so awesome when you have help) and then we headed over to Route 46 Entertainment District. Wow, this was an awesome place to have the after-party. JT2 definitely came through with this place. The food platters were great, they had a very good beer selection, and they setup a good sized area for us. The turnout was about what I had expected. We had about 50 or so people there. By this time, I was completely worn out, so I left early, around 7:30 pm or so and I know that some people stayed there until past 11:00 pm. Will and JT1 stayed behind to take care of our guests (and the check). I came home to a hyper little boy that brought a huge smile to my face and after a little while (very unlike me) I was sleep by 9:00 pm, and slept for 12 hours.

There’s still a few things to take care of to wrap up the event. We are going to post pictures this week, and speakers have sent us their presentation files to make available on the site. And sometime late summer, we’ll start all over again and try to top this year’s event.

Again, I have to thank all the volunteers and the ONETUG board for everything that they did. Especially Will Strohl, I am sure that at least once he must’ve felt like I was asking him too many questions, but the fact that he had been involved organizing events like this one before really helped me! He let me do things the way I wanted but at the same time reminded me of things that I needed to do when he saw that I was going too far off. I think that we worked really well together. Also, Joe Healy who was so supportive throughout the entire planning and the event itself. I think that we are really lucky to have him as our Microsoft Developer Evangelist here in Florida. My M2E partners (Marius and Mark) were great too, I know I was a bit neurotic as the event came close and they put up with all of that. And of course, my family was super supportive, especially the week before the event when I was really going crazy with barely any time to hang out with them! I really could not have pulled this off without all the people that helped!