September 2006 Entries

Google Analytics - Geo Map Overlay

So, after posting about v2.0 of my blogiversary, I wanted to check out my stats on Google. When, I looked at the amount of dots on it, I was pretty impressed about the location of the 10 heavy hitters. City Country # Visits London United Kingdom 20 Bangalore India 17 Bellevue, Washington United States 14 Des Moines, Iowa United States 12 Warszawa Poland 11 Hyderabad India 11 Singapore Singapore 11 Madrid Spain 9 Bombay India 9 Buenos Aires Argentina 8 I was surprised to...

posted @ Saturday, September 30, 2006 1:31 PM | Feedback (611)

Blogiversary v2.0

That's right!  It's been two years since I messed up my first blog setup!  And from the stats from FeedBurner, looks like I grew from a year of 1 (me) in 2004 to 50 (hey, bots count!!).  During this time, you've stuck me my rants, some-what-useful posts and most of all, my poor writing skills (I'm a web developer, not a writer!). In all, I would like to thank you my three readers (including myself) and 47 bots for sticking around and listening.  I promise that this next blogging year will be even better!

posted @ Saturday, September 30, 2006 12:48 PM | Feedback (611)

Team Foundation SP1

Microsoft has released a beta version of SP1 for Team Foundation Server through Microsoft Connect.  In SP1 there are a lot enhancements to the system, specially when it comes to performance.  The TFS team has updated a lot of the sprocs dealing with version control, workitem tracking and the datawarehouse components. In this post, Brian Harry has listed some (if not all) of the bug fixes in TFS SP1.  Check it out if you have time.  Also, go and sign up to get SP1 (for both TFS and VS2005) and try it out...hopefully on your TEST TFS box!

posted @ Thursday, September 28, 2006 9:29 PM | Feedback (611)

Dominic Turns 6 Months

It's hard to believe that it's been six months since Dominic joined our family.  Man, have we really gone six months without sleep?  In these past six months, we've (my wife and I) have learned that although we love each other very much, it's nothing compared to the love we have for him.  I count the hours until I can get home from work to spend time with him...just to see him smile, or say 'goo'. I just can't wait to find out what the next 6 months will have in store for us.  Hopefully in a couple more weeks,...

posted @ Thursday, September 28, 2006 9:19 PM | Feedback (611)

Unit Test Framework Comparison

Roy Osherove has a great comparison of the popular unit test frameworks for .NET (MbUnit, NUnit and Team System Unit). I have to agree that for general testing purposes the standard is NUnit.  Once you've grasped NUnit, MbUnit is a logical transition.

posted @ Saturday, September 23, 2006 9:58 PM | Feedback (612)

ASP.NET 2.0 Web Project Performance Optimization

Check out this great post by ScottGu on optimizing web project performance within VS2005.  Tons of great information on how minor tweaks can make the project experience a lot better.

posted @ Saturday, September 23, 2006 9:45 PM | Feedback (612)

Surround SCM & CruiseControl.NET

Quick question: Are any of you using Seapine's Surround SCM along with CruiseContro.NET within your CI solution?  Just want to know if there are some things I should look out for if going with this approach. Thanks!

posted @ Saturday, September 23, 2006 5:37 PM | Feedback (555)

Tulsa TechFest 2006

I will be presenting on the new runtime features of ASP.NET 2.0 at Tulsa TechFest 2006 on Oct. 14th. My good friend, Tim Gifford will also be presenting on FitNesse. There are a ton of other great speakers (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, Ron Jacobs, Mark Miller, ect.) that are the main headliners. If you're going to be around Tulsa, OK on that day, come check it out! It's FREE!

posted @ Saturday, September 23, 2006 5:12 PM | Feedback (611)

Interop Forms Toolkit

Do you have legacy VB6 applications that need a little .NET in them? Don't want to mess around with the fun of COM interop?  Now, you don't have to with the Interop Forms Toolkit! The toolkit allows you to have a phased upgrade of your VB6 applications to .NET by allowing your to have both VB6 and VB.NET forms running within the same VB6 process. I downloaded the toolkit earlier this week to check it out and I was pretty impressed in how it made the accessing of .NET objects within VB6 pretty easy.  Go check it out!

posted @ Saturday, September 23, 2006 5:02 PM | Feedback (611)

Hanselminutes: Mock Objects

Well, looks like Nick beat me to the post! If you're doing Unit Testing or TDD, this is a great installment of Hanselminutes you should not miss!  Scott has always done a great job with putting just the right amount of content to keep the listener interested and productive.  This is not just me saying it, but Chris Sells too! If you want to learn more about unit testing and being test driven, you should also check out this other Hanselminute.

posted @ Thursday, September 14, 2006 12:22 PM | Feedback (612)

CruiseControl.NET Configuration Tool

I just stumbled into this project, CCNETConfig, while looking through CodePlex earlier this evening.  I have not looked into this tool (since I don't have CC.NET installed on this laptop) but seems like something that could be very useful to those using CC.NET at their shops.

posted @ Wednesday, September 13, 2006 9:53 PM | Feedback (611)

Deleting Projects from Team Foundation

I've been doing a lot of playing around with Team Foundation for the past couple of weeks and in the mean time I've created a lot of test* Team Projects. When I decided to clean up some of these test project, I thought the logical thing and went to delete them through Team Explorer.  Well, as soon as you do that, you will run into this nice little message: Use the Project Creation Wizard in Team Explorer to create a project or the TfsDeleteProject tool to delete one. Being a huge fan of the command line, this is not an issue for me. ...

posted @ Wednesday, September 13, 2006 1:55 PM | Feedback (611)

Atlas 1.0

That's right, Atlas is ready for shipping!  Of course, like many other cool-named .NET technologies, it has been renamed to something ... not as cool.  ScottGu has more info on this.  For now, here is a quick summary: Atlas parts have been named to be the following: Client-side (Javascript library) - Microsoft AJAX Library Server-side (ASP.NET integration) - ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions Control toolkit - ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Shipping date: ?  Depends on customer feed, however, it will work fully with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS2005.

posted @ Monday, September 11, 2006 10:01 PM | Feedback (567)

Continuous Integration with Team Foundation Server

Today I started to setup Continuous Integration (CI) with Team Foundation Server (TFS).  Unfortunately, TFS does not support it out of the box; however, it does support functionality for you to hook-up into event sinks for comment server operations (Checkin, WorkItem assignment, etc).  So, I Googled for "continuous integration team foundation" and ran into two really good posts by Jeff Atwood [post] and Daniel Cazzulino [post]. I particurlaly like solution that Jeff's post gives you, because he has added the page that kzu (Daniel) created and incorporated into his CI webservice.  I wanted to take the solution even further by adding the automatic addition...

posted @ Monday, September 11, 2006 9:49 PM | Feedback (612)

Team Foundation Tooling on CodePlex

I ran into Buck Hodge's post on TFS tools on CodePlex and I must say that I'm pretty impressed with the selection of free tools out there. In particular, I like the Code Review Workflow and Automaton offer.  I played with Automaton today and for what is "there" it's not too bad.  There is still some room for improvement but it gives implementers a pretty nice start to allow developers to kick start a build.  As for Code Review Workflow, that's on the books for another day. Another two projects to look at and consider are Source Code Tree Browser (this is...

posted @ Friday, September 8, 2006 2:19 PM | Feedback (611)

Quick Poll: Team Foundation Server

How many of you out there are running Team Foundation Server?  If you are, have you done anything to customize work items, policies or processes?

posted @ Thursday, September 7, 2006 8:52 PM | Feedback (611)

IronPython has gone RTM

That's right, if you've like IronPython before ... you'll love it even more now since it's gone RTM. Go get it from CodePlex.

posted @ Wednesday, September 6, 2006 9:16 PM | Feedback (611)

.NET 3.0 (WinFX) RC1

That's right, .NET 3.0 (WinFX) has hit RC1.  It's pretty much "the final product" from the sounds of it.  Go get your copy!

posted @ Friday, September 1, 2006 9:02 PM | Feedback (611)