Microsoft Announces “WebsiteSpark”

Up until yesterday, Microsoft had two “Spark” programs:

1. BizSpark – a program for startup businesses
2. DreamSpark – a program for students

Yesterday, Scott Guthrie announced on his blog the new WebsiteSpark program.  This program is geared toward independent web developers as well as web development companies.  Here is a list of what’s provided with this program:

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

Like the other Microsoft “Spark” programs, these licenses are available for use for a total of three years without any cost.  There is, however, an exit cost of $100 once the three years have elapsed.

The only requirements for joining the program are:

1. Your company builds web sites and web application on behalf of others.
2. Your company currently has less than 10 employees.

For full details, check out the Scott’s post and the WebsiteSpark site.

TFSExamples.com – Part II

A while back, I blogged about a new site that I created called TFSExamples.com with the intent that it serve as a community-based repository for examples showing how to make use of the TFS object model.  Several great examples were added by various supporters over the last year or so.

Several weeks ago, the server hosting this site crashed and I have just now got the site back up and running again.  The down side – my latest backup of this particular site (that was actually usable) was about 14 months old.  I was able to restore a few of the examples but the site is missing several of the great examples that had been added.  I was hoping that I could retrieve some of the examples from Google’s cached web pages and/or archive.org.  Unfortunately, this didn’t work out either since I wasn’t able to find any of the missing pages cached on this site (some of the pages that I was able to restore were there, however).

I hope to recreate many of the examples that were on the site as well as add some new ones over the next few weeks.  If you have any examples that make use of the TFS object model that you would like to share with the community, please check out the links below.  If you happened to be one of the members that had added an example, and it’s no longer there, I would truly appreciate it if you would be able to take the time and re-add it to the site.

TFSExamples.com Links:

• Add New Example – displays instructions on adding a new example to the wiki
• Browse All – displays a list of all pages in the wiki
• Browse Categories – displays a list of all categories in the wiki
• Request Example – allows you to request a specific example be added to the site

Check for Warnings/Errors Check-in Policy

A few days ago a fellow co-worker asked if I knew of a TFS check-in policy that checks for Visual Studio compilation errors and/or warnings.  I wasn’t aware of such a check-in policy (although it may exist out there somewhere) so I decided to go ahead and create it (who doesn’t love a challenge?!).

When active, this check-in policy will evaluate the current Visual Studio solution to determine if any build warnings and/or errors are present.  If so, the check-in policy will fail and will prevent the code from being checked in (this can, of course, be overridden).

To enable this check-in policy:

1. Download and install the CheckForWarningsPolicy from here.
2. Right-click the desired team project within the Team Explorer client and select the “Team Project Settings—>Source Control” menu item.
3. Click the “Check-in Policy” tab and click “Add”.
4. Select the “Check for Compilation Warnings and Errors Policy” and click OK.
5. Click the “Edit” button and select whether you’d like to check for warnings, errors, or both and click OK:

Once enabled, you will see a list of policy failures in the Policy Warnings tab of the Pending Changes pane:

If you hover over the policy failure, the ToolTip will display the remainder of the filename along with the line and column number and project name of the failure.

UPDATE: You can now double-click on the policy failure to navigate directly to the location within code where the failure occurred (assuming the location information is available).

You can download the CheckForWarningsPolicy from here.