WSCF - Schema-Based Contract-First Web Services

thinktecture has released Version 0.6 of their hugely popular Visual Studio Add-In for developing web services using a contract first approach. The new version has been updated to work with Visual Studio 2005 & .Net 2.0. This version also offers a command line interface to the code generation tool. Here are some highlights:

• Full support for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0
• Generation of partial classes
• Support for Nullable types
• Support for SOAP 1.2 binding
• Pascal case conversion is now optional
• Improved support for generating code from SSL-hosted WSDLs
• The parameter ?wsdl can be configured to return the modeled WSDL
• Option for generating different styles of async calling code
• Option for generating improved data binding code available
• Option for generating List types instead of Collections
• As always - it's free!

MSBuild and Team Build Presentation

I had the opportunity to present MSBuild and Team Build to the Omaha .Net Users Group last night. We had a pretty good turn out of 73 attendees. I spent about an hour and 15 minutes going over MSBuild and Team Build and how they can drastically ease the burdon of the build process.

Here is a link to the PowerPoint slide presentation if anyone is interested.

Configuring E-mail within Team Foundation Server

We just recently updated to the RC1 release of Team Foundation Server and I had to reconfigure the e-mail settings on the server. I had to do this the first time as well when we installed the Beta 3 Refresh version.

I didn't take part in the actual installation process so I don't know if the install asks for the SMTP server and Reply To address and the person installing it for us just didn't enter it, or if it's just not part of the setup.

In any case, if you ever need to go back and change the e-mail (SMTP) server or Reply To address, you can do it by editing the Web.config file under the following web service folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\Services

Note that your installation folder could be different.

The SMTP server is configured by the "smtpServer" key/value pair under appSettings and the Reply To address is configured by the "emailNotificationFromAddress" key/value pair.

Seventeen Minutes with Bill

Just came across a cool interview with Bill Gates on the Channel 9 site last night. It gives a nice insight as to what Bill does on a day-to-day basis.

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=163166

Test Driven Development (TDD)

Today we finished a 3-day crash course in TDD. We will start applying TDD techniques on our project starting next week. It should prove to be an interesting experience being that we have several schools of thought on our development team.

I'm excited to give TDD a try so we'll see how it goes.

Goin' to Tech-Ed 2006

I just registered for Tech-Ed 2006 in Bostan, MA. It should be a great time if it's anything like last year's Tech-Ed in Orlando.

I've never been to the northeastern part of the U.S. so I'm looking forward to a little sight seeing while I'm there - as well as learning a lot about the latest Microsoft development technologies.