For various reasons, some of which are covered in this post and others which are not, this blog has permanently moved to:
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I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately about whether it would make sense for our application development teams to make the move to Team Foundation Git (TF-Git) as the primary version control choice within TFS. We are still using TFS 2010 as our primary TFS instance today although we have several projects in Team Foundation Service (TFService) as part of a pilot. As we make preparations to move to TFS 2013 (we have not yet decided if we’ll host TFS 2013 on premises or if we’ll make exclusive use of the TFService) we are putting some thought into whether or not we should make the leap to TF-Git.
There are plenty of pros and cons regardless of which option is chosen. For example, TF-Git is very well suited for disconnected scenarios and also provides amazing support for branching and merging code. On the other hand, TFVC provides the common “check out/check in” workflow that so many of us are used to today. It also provides the ability to place exclusive locks on files that are notoriously difficult to merge such as XML files (e.g. workflow, SSIS packages, etc.).
While it’s easy enough for me to solicit the opinions of my co-workers, I’d also like to get your opinions. To make this as easy as it can be, I’ve created a simple survey with six questions (see screenshot below).
So, please take a moment and take the survey.
We will keep the survey open for about two weeks. Once the results have been collected, I will share them on this blog.
If you’ve been waiting for the option to buy more than 100GB of storage on SkyDrive, your wait is over. You can now buy an extra 200GB of storage space for $100/year. As you can see in the screenshot below, the space you purchase is added on to whatever you already have (in the Total Space column).
The current price per GB is $0.50/year vs. ~$0.60 per GB/year for Google Drive. Not a huge difference but a little less. Though Google Drive makes up for part of this by providing the first 15GB free (vs. 7GB for SkyDrive).
Also, if you buy one of the new Surface 2 devices, you will get 200GB of SkyDrive storage free for two years.
Until recently, if you wanted to develop for Windows Phone, and actually run your apps on your phone (as opposed to the emulator) you had to register for a $99 (USD) Windows Phone developer account. This cost has always been a substantial barrier to entry for many would-be (Windows Phone) developers. That is, until recently.
Recently, two things have changed to make this much better.
First, the $99 registration amount has been changed to $19 (annually). This price is much more reasonable for most people (though free, it could be argued, would be even more reasonable :-). The $19 price was originally a temporary promotion but, according to a tweet from Todd Brix (General Manager of Windows Phone Apps and Store Team), Microsoft is keeping the price at $19.
Second, Microsoft made a change that I hadn’t noticed until recently. Originally (before ~August 6th), you couldn’t deploy apps under development to your phone unless you had registered for a Windows Phone developer account (back to the $99/year cost again). Now Microsoft has made a change that allows any Windows Phone developer to push up to two apps to a single phone with no cost. If you do have a Windows Phone developer account, you can push up to 10 apps to as many as three phones.
Combining these changes along with Microsoft’s outstanding development tools give developers practically no reason not to developer for Windows Phone.
This post is a couple of days behind but I thought I’d go ahead and put out a few links to help spread the word a little more :-). 
Today, the Community TFS Build Extensions on CodePlex released an update to the Community TFS Build Manager VS2013 add-in. If you spend any time at all managing multiple build definitions, build results, and/or build servers, then you need to give this add-in a try.
Last month, Microsoft announced that it had completed its acquisition of InRelease – a release management product built for Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) by InCycle Software.InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview is the essential suite of release and deployment tools available to automate deployment of applications across the desktop, the server, and the cloud.
TFS Agile Poker is a free cross-platform tool for distributed and co-located teams to point (i.e. estimate) your Team Foundation Server backlog. TFS Agile Poker can be used with Team Foundation Service or or your on-premises Team Foundation Server 2010 or 2012 installation using theTFS OData Services.
Although Microsoft is definitely late to the distributed version control (DVC) game, they’re pretty much in the game now and their DVC offering is only getting better. In order to provide distributed capabilities within its current version control offering, Team Foundation Server, the Visual Studio team had to make a decision: build something brand new (possibly proprietary) or build on one of the standard DVC platforms. They decided to go with the latter and build upon Git. A great decision as far as I am concerned.
Before we get to the Visual Studio offering, let’s take a look at CodePlex. If you’re not familiar with CodePlex, it is Microsoft’s free open source project hosting site. Here, you can create projects to share with others around the world as well as download open source software. In March, 2012, Microsoft made available the capability to create Git-based repositories within CodePlex. With this, developers now have the capability of choosing between a centralized version control repository, a la TFS, or a distributed version control repository via Git (or Mercurial, which actually came before Git but isn’t nearly as popular).
Fast forward about ten months and Microsoft announces Git support for Team Foundation Service (TFService, their hosted TFS offering). This update provides a 100% compatible Git repository option for TFService. Not only does this provide typical Visual Studio developers with a great DVC option for TFService it also makes the TFService option much more attractive for non-Visual Studio developers by providing simpler integration for tools such as Xcode.
Along with Git in TFService, Microsoft also provided the Visual Studio Tools for Git. This extension provides Git integration within Visual Studio 2012. If you plan to utilize Git-based repositories within Visual Studio 2012 then you will need to install this extension. Something to note is that this extension allows Visual Studio to work with any standard Git repository such as GitHub, not just TFService.
One of the biggest Git-/Visual Studio-related questions I get today is, what is the difference between the Visual Studio Tools for Git and Git-tf?
The Git-tf command line tools were announced in August, 2012 with the intent of giving developers the capability of using a local Git repository for development that could then be synced up with a TFS repository. In simple terms, you can use Git-tf to clone TFS into a local repository which could then sync your local commits back into TFS. Essentially, it provided a bridge between TFS and clients and/or developers that preferred to work with (or could only work with) Git. Until now, this was essentially your only option for using TFS with tools such as Xcode.
Visual Studio Tools for Git is a Visual Studio Extension (not a set of command line tools) that provides a set of context menus exposing typical Git operations such as Clone, Push, Pull, and Fetch. If you prefer to work within the Visual Studio IDE (as opposed to the command line) then you definitely want to install this extension.
The graphic below depicts the tools you can use to access TFVC as well as TF-Git repositories from various clients. There are two items to note with this image:
I have been developing on a Dell XPS M1530 laptop for nearly 5 years now. It has been nothing short of a great laptop. However, as you can guess based on its age, it is a bit dated by today’s standards. A couple of months ago, I acquired a Microsoft Surface Pro (128BG version) and had been wondering if it might be beefy enough to replace my Dell.
Last week I had the opportunity to try my Surface Pro out in a development scenario so I thought I’d give it a try. I installed Visual Studio 2012 w/Update 2, ReSharper (the latest version), and StyleCop. I also included the latest suite of Telerik controls for Windows Phone 8. I then spent two full days working on a new Windows Phone 8 application (for an internal innovation event at my place of employment). In short, here is what I discovered:
Based on this experience, I decided it was time to switch to the Surface Pro as my full-time computer/tablet at home. However, since I had no desire to stare at a 10” screen for hours at a time, I decided to get a USB 3 dock to connect to my other peripherals. After some initial research, I ended up selecting the Toshiba Dynadock Docking Station (PA3927U1PRP). This particular model had everything I was looking for: good reviews from other customers, support for USB 3, dual monitor support, and a headphone jack in the front of the unit. A co-worker has been using a Targus USB 3 Dock for a couple of months now with good results as well. I ended up choosing the Dynadock mainly for its form factor.
In the screenshot below, you can see the Surface Pro on the right with the Dynadock between the surface and the two monitors. I have a wired keyboard and mouse connected to the dock along with speakers and a subwoofer (5.1 surround sound is supported) and the two monitors (one is connected via HDMI and the other DVI).
So far I have been very happy with this setup. At one point, I had a Netflix movie playing on the left monitor and a Hulu show playing on the right monitor with no distinguishable degradation in video performance (the sound from each show was mixed as well without any noticeable “garbling”).
One other item of note… When using Windows 8 (Surface Pro or any other laptop/workstation) I highly recommend getting a copy of Stardock’s ModernMix. This application is a must have when using multiple monitors and it’s only $4.99 (USD) so it’s very affordable. ModernMix allows you to run Windows 8 Store apps in a “windowed” environment giving you the ability to move Windows 8 Store apps from screen to screen. Without ModernMix, your Windows 8 Store apps are pretty much isolated to running on a single screen – and only if you’re not currently interacting with the Desktop.
It is still too early to determine if this setup will end up being ideal but, so far, I am enjoying having better performance than I was having with my previous laptop and now I’m ultra portable in that I only need to unplug the USB connector from the Surface Pro (and power plug, if it’s plugged in) and I’m ready to go.
If it doesn’t slip my mind, I will report back in about six months or so with an update on how, or if, this configuration worked out.
If you don’t follow the various ALM Rangers Solutions, you should! If you do, then you already realize there is a lot of content put out by the various ALM Rangers project teams. In fact, there is so much information provided by the ALM Rangers that they have provided a Windows 8 app to help navigate the ever-changing waters of available content – the ALM Readiness Treasure Map.
[If you’re running Windows 8, click the above image to install the app now]
Although version 1 of the app has seen a lot of use, there is much room for improvement. That said, there is currently a team of ALM Ranger pirates currently hard at work on implementing many of the proposed enhancements for version 2. One enhancement in particular is the ability to track the status of each guidance document (referred to as jewels within the app) as you make your way through the treasure map.
If you take a look at one of the proposed screen mock-ups below (click here if you’re interested in seeing the rest of the mock-ups), you’ll notice just after the title the text “1/15 completed”. This implies that you have flagged one of the guidance documents within this section as having been read. With this update, we plan to track three states in regards to document status, including:
QUESTION: We have gone back and forth on whether or not a guidance document should be automatically flagged as having been “Started” once you click on the link within the app to view it. As you can see in the mock-up above, there is a context menu that allows you to manually flag a document as having been “Started” (amongst other states). We are considering making this an app preference where you get to decide how it works. However, we don’t want to make something that should be simple, complex. If you have a strong opinion one way or the other, let us know in the comments below.
As a document’s status is updated, the app will utilize the built-in data roaming features of Windows 8 to synchronize the status across your Windows 8 devices. So, if you start viewing a document on your Windows 8 laptop and move to your Windows 8 tablet, the correct document status will appear on the tablet as well (assuming you’re using the same Microsoft Account on both devices).
The following details outline the changes to be made to the source code to support the tracking features described above.
TreasureMapDataModel.xml
DB.cs
Status.cs
public enum Status {
NotStarted = 0,
Started = 1,
Completed = 2
}
Guidance.cs
This is a new class used to encapsulate some of the logic necessary to set guidance status as well as return various guidance status based on categories and projects. This class would be surfaced through the DB class because a) it is always in scope (via the App class) and b) this would allow the StatusManager class to be provided with a reference to the DB class which has references to the categories and projects needed for status counts.
Properties:
These properties would be calculated once (via the private methods below), during the initialization of the StatusManager class. After initialization, they would be kept up to date as the SetStatus method is called. This alleviates the need to continually walk the data hierarchy as the counts are displayed via data binding.
Methods:
[-] = Private; [+] = Public
Projects.xaml
If you happen to 1) work with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Service (TFService) or another publically accessible TFS server and 2) own a Windows 8 Phone, then you will want to check out the tfs live app for Windows Phone. The tfs live app provides quick, at-a-glance totals for the various types of work items you’re most interested in.
When you install the app and run it for the first time, you will have to configure the app to connect to your TFS server:
Although a template has been provided for the server URL (as shown in the above image), it is not the best template to follow if you’re connecting to a TFService instance. In this case, use the following template:
https://{account}.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection – replacing {account} with your specific TFService account name.
Once you have successfully logged on, you will need to select a project name, role, and a couple of other options:
The selected role determines which queries will show up on the main screen. The roles that can be selected from include:
The image below shows the screen for a Developer role:
Tapping on any of the query icons (on the screen above) will open a custom query (based on the specific type of query being ran) in the web browser displaying the appropriate work items. This experience is less than ideal but it does work. I would really like to see the query results come back to the phone and displayed in a list that, when tapped, would then open the web-based query to view the full details.
That said, I still find this app highly useful for keeping up to date on newly assigned and/or modified work items. Some suggestions I might offer to the app developer would include:
A PowerPoint slide deck with further details is available from the author here.
The latest update for Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012, Update 2, has been released. There is a lot of new functionality included in this release and rather than duplicate all the details here, I’ll simply refer you to this post on the Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog as well as this link.
I would like to point out the download links:
When you download the update for Visual Studio 2012 and/or TFS, you will notice the installer is quite small (1.3MB or less). This is because the installer is just big enough to kick off the installation process which will first download only the components required to update your machine in its current state. This saves you from having to download installation files that you do not need.
However, there are reasons where you might want to download the full installation package before updating your system – e.g. if you plan to share the installation files with other people in your organization. Luckily, this is a relatively easy process.
To pull down the entire installation set, simply run the update with the /layout switch. For example, the following command will kick off the download process for the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 install files:
C:\Downloads>VS2012.2.exe /layout
When you specify the /layout switch, you will be prompted for the folder where you would like the installation files to be downloaded to:
Clicking on Download will start the download (‘Acquiring’) process:
Once downloaded, you can start the installation by running VS2012.2.exe in the download folder.
If you run across any bugs within Visual Studio 2012, TFS, or other Visual Studio products, you can submit them here on Connect.
Yesterday, Steve Guggenheimer announced //Build/ 2013. Here are the details known so far:
Date and Location
San Francisco, CA
June 26th (09:00 PDT) – June 28th (14:30 PDT)
The Moscone Center – Game Developers Conference 2013 is being held there as I write this.Registration opens at 09:00am PDT, April 2, 2013
Early bird (first 500): $1,595 // Full: $2,095
If you happened to attend //Build/ 2012 (last November) then you no doubt recall the endless joy of being bussed from one side of the campus to the other (depending on which sessions you wanted to attend). You might also fondly recall the walk back from the initial keynote in the rain and the mud :-) This year promises to be a much better experience by hosting the conference within the much larger Moscone Center. If you’re curious about the size of the Moscone Center, check out these stats. You can also get some great insight from these reviews on yelp.
About a month ago, I received a message from my sister informing me that her house had been robbed and that pretty much everything of value had been stolen. Luckily, she wasn’t home when the robbery took place so she wasn’t in any danger of being harmed. Not everything that was taken can be replaced (e.g. family heirlooms, jewelry, etc.) so we are hopeful that at least some of her valuables will be located. However, if they are located, she will still have to prove they are hers. Luckily, she had recorded the serial numbers of the items (e.g. camera, laptop, etc.). Having the serial numbers recorded does not guarantee that one will get their stolen property returned to them. However, if your stolen property is recovered, it will definitely increase the likelihood of getting your items back.
A day or two after my sister’s bad news had settled in, I started thinking about what would happen if I were in the same situation (which, obviously, I hope to never be). I could get to a few serial numbers on-line based on when I originally registered specific items. However, I did not have an official home inventory list of the valuables throughout our house. So, I decided to start the list (I spaced the task of filling out the list over the course of a couple of weeks) in Excel.
Rather than create my own home inventory list in Excel, I decided to search the available templates. Searching for “home inventory” turned up two templates:
Creating a new spreadsheet based on this template provides a great starting point for tracking the valuables throughout your house (or office or wherever you want to track an inventory). The template is easy to use and understand.
However, not everyone has Excel installed and available. No problem! With Microsoft’s SkyDrive, you can get access to Microsoft’s Web Office Applications at no charge (i.e. FREE)! If you haven’t already signed up for a SkyDrive account, I highly recommend it. The first 7GB of storage space is complete FREE, plus, you also get access to the web versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote!
One thing to consider is that the web version of Excel does not have the same rich set of templates available that you would get in the desktop version. All that means is that you have to come up with the spreadsheet design yourself. To make it easier, I’ve already created a Home Inventory Excel spreadsheet (loosely based on the template shown above) and made it publically available to simplify the process. This spreadsheet looks something like this:
Probably the biggest advantage of tracking your home inventory within a SkyDrive-based document is that if your computer is ever stolen (let’s hope that never happens!) you will still have your home inventory (and any other documents you’ve stored in SkyDrive) safe and accessible from practically any other device you have access to.
Also, along with serial numbers, descriptions, cost and value, it is a good idea to take pictures of your valuables as well. You cannot paste images into a web-based Excel spreadsheet (you can in the desktop version) but you can create a dedicated folder within SkyDrive to store pictures of your valuables (which can be linked to from within your spreadsheet). Just something else to consider when building out your inventory.
You can download the above Excel-based Home Inventory template from here.
*Full Disclosure: I’m a SkyDrive Insider, ask me about SkyDrive or learn more about the SkyDrive Insiders program here.
Two weeks ago, I posted a survey (using Excel Surveys available in SkyDrive) asking you what your preferred/primary .NET mocking framework was. We plan to use this data to help drive out which frameworks we want to evaluate further.
The survey closed yesterday and, out of 147 responses, here is how everything shook out:
147 responses may not seem like a lot and, in the grand scheme of all .NET developers across the world, it’s not. There are several ways you can look at this number: Out of everyone that viewed the survey request, the majority of them didn’t want to take the time to give their input; they don’t use .NET-based technologies and/or mocking frameworks; I just didn’t reach a wide enough audience and/or provide enough time to get the word out about the survey; or there was some other reason they didn’t bother with the survey that I’m just not thinking of at the moment.
In regards to this penultimate point above, here was my general approach for getting the survey link out:
Click here to view the full survey results.
[Updated: Fixed broken survey link]
