Microsoft Thrive

I recently heard about a new site from Microsoft called “Thrive” and finally checked it out.  Here’s a quick blurb from the site:

We’ve heard from lots of developers that times are tough. You’re doing more with less, applying your skills more broadly, and maybe even learning new tools. That’s why we created Thrive – a one-stop community hub that offers job postings, technical content, and community resources. So whether you’re seeking new ways to differentiate yourself on the job, or you need to re-tool your skills for that next big role, Thrive has the resources to help you get there faster.

There is quite a bit of information available on this site and the jobs listing seems to have quite a few available positions listed.  If you’re looking for a job or simply looking for developer-related information to help you maintain your edge, this site is worth a look.

At first glance, this seems like a nice attempt to provide developers (who make use of Microsoft-based development technologies) with a single site for information.  If I were to have any criticism, it would be that the “Community” section of the site doesn’t seem to provide any (obvious) way to actually communicate/collaborate with other developers.  Maybe this is coming down the road or maybe that’s not the intent.

Not that I’m complaining because any source of reliable, useful information is a good thing :-)

Silverlight 3 Ships

I don’t normally post about Silverlight since I tend to focus on Team System so much.  However, lately I have been spending a lot of time with Silverlight since I will be doing a presentation on it at our internal user group later this fall.  As such, I noticed that Silverlight 3 has officially shipped.

Here’s a short list of new features available in v3.0:

• Ability to run Silverlight applications “out of browser”
• H.264
• Navigation Framework
• DeepZoom
• SaveFileDialog (yeah!)
• WriteableBitmap
• Pixel Shaders
• ClearType (again, yeah!)
• Hardware Acceleration
• New Controls
• UI to UI Binding (third yeah!)
• New REST Networking Stack
• Mouse Wheel Support
• And much more…

You can read more about the details here.

Quick Links:

• Developer Runtime (pc, mac)
• SDK (link)
• Visual Studio Tools (link)
• Expression Blend RC (link)
• July Toolkit (link)
• What’s New In Silverlight 3 Wiki [update]

Omaha Team System User Group

Yesterday was a long day that ended on a great note – the Omaha Team System User Group meeting.  Mike Douglas, from Deliveron Consulting Services, presented on Installing and Configuring Team Foundation Server 2008.  Here is the synopsis:

This presentation provides an overview of TFS 2008 and demonstrates best practices, lessons learned, and “gotchas” installing and configuring TFS 2008.  The overview explains the architecture and components of Team Foundation Server 2008 and recommended server configurations.  The demonstrations will include using the Best Practice Analyzer, setting user permissions and using the TFS Admin Tool, and creating and configuring a team project from start to finish.  The configuration process will include recommended settings, source control folder structure, and creating appropriate notification.  The presentation will conclude with techniques and lessons learned for troubleshooting problems with installations.

Mike covered a lot of information in an hour and 45 minutes answering lots of questions along the way.

The meeting was co-sponsored between Farm Credit Services of America and Deliveron Consulting Services.  Deliveron provided the food and some great giveaways (including an Xbox 360, TFS books, and some gift certificates).

The slide deck from last night’s presentation is available here.

Visit the Omaha Team System User Group web site for more information or contact me if you have any questions.  We hope to see you at the next meeting!

Visual Studio 2010 - Beta 1 Available

As of today (May 18th, 2009) Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (various SKUs) and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 have shown up on the MSDN subscriber site. Here is a quick list of what shows up for the Enlish language (I'm not sure what other languages, if any, are yet available):

• .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 (ia64)
• .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 (x86 and x64)
• .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 (x86)
• .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1 (x86 and x64)
• .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1 (x86)
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 1 (x86) - DVD
• Visual Studio 2010 Remote Debugger Beta 1 (x64)
• Visual Studio 2010 Remote Debugger Beta 1 (x86)
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 (x86 and x64) - DVD
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Team Suite Beta 1 (x86) - DVD
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Test Load Agent Beta 1 (x86)
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Test Load Controller Beta 1 (x86)

I do not know when the beta will show up on the public download site but I wouldn't think it would be too far behind. I am looking forward to seeing what changes/features have made their way into the beta (and what features were left out/removed).

Now, off to download...

Deleting Work Items in TFS – a UI

If you work with Work Items in VSTS/Team Foundation Server then you’ve probably had the desire to delete a work item at some point.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Just right-click a work item and select… wait, there’s no Delete option?  That’s right – the Team Foundation Client does not include any functionality for deleting work items from TFS.

Although it’s a tad inconvenient, you can delete work items from TFS by installing the Team Foundation Server Power Tools  (October 2008 release or greater).  Of the many features available as part of the power tools, there is a command called destroywi that can be used to delete work items.  For example, to delete the work item ID 1234, use the command:

tfpt destroywi /server:tfs-dev /workitemid:1234

Although this is a relatively straightforward task to perform, not everyone is comfortable with the command line interface not to mention you have to look up the work item ID(s) ahead of time.  To ease the process a little bit, I created a simple UI that sits on top of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools that allows you to easily select a Team Foundation Server and Project to query from.  You can run an existing query to display a list of work items from which you can select one or more work items to be deleted.  You can also enter the work item IDs directly (as a comma-separated list) if you prefer.

Here is a screen shot of the utility after running the All Work Items query for a Demo project:

When you select one or more work items to be deleted, click the Delete button.  You will be prompted to be sure you want to delete since the action cannot be undone (i.e. it’s permanent).

DISCLAIMER: We have been using this utility in multiple production environments for several weeks now and have not experienced any issues.  However, since this utility physically deletes work items from a Team Foundation Server (via the Team Foundation Server Power Tools), use at your own risk :-)

Download the Delete Work Item utility here.

VSTS 2010 Feature List

Brian Harry has started a series of posts detailing the new features in Visual Studio Team System 2010.  In his first post, he lists the high-level features along with associated blogs that provide further details.  He will be drilling into more detail with future posts but this is a great list if you’re just wanting an idea of what’s new in VSTS 2010.

Omaha Team System User Group

Due to the recent birth of our new son, Zachary, I am somewhat late in getting this post on-line.  Although I am a little behind in getting this posted, I still want to get the word out about our last presentation at the Omaha Team System User Group.

On March 24th, Farm Credit Services of America (FCSA) once again hosted the user group meeting.  Many thanks go out to Russ Wagner for his continued help and for accepting the position as co-leader of the Omaha Team System User Group!

This meeting’s topic was presented by Jeremy Novak, a developer at Farm Credit Services of America.  Jeremy presented on a new open source product called Remote Test Runner – or, RTR. RTR was originally developed at FCSA for internal use to aid in the automation of customer acceptance testing (sometimes referred to as service-level testing).  RTR was published to Microsoft’s CodePlex site following the presentation.

Remote Test Runner is a unit test assistance tool that allows the user to exercise Visual Studio-based test classes outside of Visual Studio. RTR reports on Data-Driven tests at the data field level as opposed to the unit test method level. Failed asserts no longer abort a test.

For more details about RTR, check out this previous post or the RTR project site on CodePlex (link below).

References:

• Remote Test Runner PowerPoint Presentation
• Remote Test Runner on CodePlex
• Omaha Team System User Group

IE 8, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight 3 Beta and More

For those of you who have been following the MIX conference this week, there have been several new (final and beta) releases.  So far, the ones most interesting to me personally include:

• Internet Explorer 8 (final) – there are some great improvements in this version of IE that you can read more about here.
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (final) - ASP.NET MVC enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits:
  • Clear separation of concerns
  • Testability - support for Test-Driven Development
  • Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
  • Intuitive URLs
• Silverlight 3 Beta - this is a preview release which continues Silverlight’s track record of rapid innovation - introducing more than 50 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications out of the browser, dramatic video performance and quality improvements, and features that radically improve developer productivity.
  
  There are also several related tools/frameworks that can be utilized along with Silverlight 3 (Beta) to improve the overall experience.  Some of these include:
• Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio
• Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview
• Silverlight Toolkit
• .NET RIA Services
• Silverlight 3 Beta Documentation (CHM file)
• Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta - the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

Omaha Team System User Group

The next Omaha Team System User Group meeting is going to be held Tuesday, March 24th at Farm Credit Services of America.  Jeremy Novak will be presenting on Acceptance/Service Level Testing using Remote Test Runner.

Here are the details:

Presentation: Acceptance/Service Level Testing with Remote Test Runner – Using an automated acceptance testing framework allows you to separate the task of creating test data from the test framework.  Your business owners can concentrate on creating the test data that gives them the assurance the product being tested meets their needs leaving developers to create the associated unit tests.

This presentation will be covering a new automated testing tool for use with Visual Studio – Remote Test Runner (RTR).  RTR builds upon the data-driven testing features currently built into Visual Studio Professional and higher.  RTR provides a nice, intuitive interface for running data-driven tests, even if you don’t have Visual Studio installed.  The test results can be reviewed in a summary or detailed view.  The detailed view is similar to the output provided by FitNesse, if you’re familiar with that product.  If you’re making use of continuous integration, you can integrate the acceptance tests into your automated builds ensuring all tests are executed with each build.  If you have code coverage turned on, then coverage of your acceptance tests will be tracked as well.

Remote Test Runner will be released as an open source project on Microsoft’s CodePlex site the night of the presentation.

Speaker: Jeremy Novak, FCSA
Jeremy Novak has over 15 years of software development experience and is current employed as a Developer/Web Programmer by Farm Credit Services of America.  He is interested in learning about all things.

I hope to see everyone there!

Free ASP.NET MVC Tutorial

Scott Guthrie recently announced a new ASP.NET MVC book that he co-authored with Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, and Phil Haack.  Scott wrote the first chapter, a 185 page end-to-end tutorial that walks through the creation of a complete ASP.NET MVC application.  As part of his agreement with Wrox to write this chapter for free, he asked that they make the tutorial available as a free download.  Nice!

You can read the details in Scott’s post here.  You can download the free PDF tutorial here.