Dries Marckmann

Visual Studio Team System 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010: already in love with all the new features!

Dries Marckmann — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:33:22 GMT

An exhausting day at PDC... Here are the sessions that I did:

Keynote: Windows Azure
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010
ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features

WF 4.0: A first look

I really love the new features of VSTS and TFS; I can hardly wait to start using them...

I will not go into a lot of detail here, instead I will highlight a couple of the main features and hope it will incourage you to go and view the session online.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010

Cameron Skinner put it real nicely with 4 key points all getting rid of things we do not like as Developers. VSTS 2010 is focussed on making the developers happy...

No More 'No Repros'

Basically focusses on getting more complete data from the testers to make it easier to sea where/why/when a bug occured. What do you think of a Manual Test Runner with a recorder to capture a video which can be viewed by the developer? Or what about a System Info tab in the workitem? Or a Debug History window, where you can 'debug' the code on the server from the nightly build as if it were happening live?

These things really are going to make the developers life a lot easier.

No More Broken Builds

This is a developers dream come true: being unable to break the build. No more buying cake for the team...

Made possible by:

Gated Check-in, which is more a TFS feature than a VSTS one but who cares. If set up on the server, you cannot check in changes if these changes break the build.

Test Impact Analysis, which is a feature that analyses a changeset to see which test is most likely to be affected by the change, so you can start with that test.

No More Butterfly Effects

This is all about preventing code rot.

Builds may fail by a violation of your architectural design. You can make a .layer diagram and the actual solution is tested against this design.

The Architecture Explorer generates a diagram of the actual architecture of the solution and you can drill down into great detail in the diagram as well as jump to the code.

A sequence Diagram can also be created, making it easier to see where the butterfly might cause a storm.....

No More Regression

There is a new kind of test: The CodedUI test with a recorder for Web and it will be there for WinForms as well as WPF. Silverlight is regretably not planned yet.

Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features

Protect Code Quality

Gated checkin

Buddy Builds or private builds: run on the server but without checkin

Workflow based build creation. Basically something like finalbuilder.

Parallel build tasks

Parallel Development

Branches have become real entities instead of folders and they are hierachically linked. The relations can be viewed visualy as well.

You can track changesets, workitems and annotations through merges; again with diagram.

Rollback is finally here..

Managing Projects

New excel workbooks, excel report generation from Query.

Workitems link and hierarchy improed

Query improvements

DataDude and VS Developer Edition will be merging

Dries Marckmann — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:32:01 GMT

I just read the DataDude blog and look and behold in VS 2010 the DB Pro and the Developer edition will be one. And even better news: as of today the developer edition MSDN subscribers will have access to the database edition as well. This really solves a dilemma for us at work.

We do not really have a DBA in place and the developers have to do the database work themselves. This is not ideal, but I think it is a rather common practice in the business. And we were still in doubt whether to buy a database edition license for each developer or have a single database license on a server or shared workstation somewhere. The first option is great, but expensive. The second option a lot cheaper, but far from ideal (read: not workable).

Now we wait untill Microsoft will also merge the Tester edition (although the workstation option works much better for this edition).

Read on here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/archive/2008/09/29/team-developer-team-data-team-developer.aspx

SQL Profiler makes debugging easy...

Dries Marckmann — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:48:10 GMT

... if you make it easy on yourself.

I was searching for a particular statement hidden in a Stored Procedure, but all I got was tons of statements that were irrelevant to my problem.

The problem with SQL Profiler is that it can give you lots of information, but it is not easy getting the right information. The Standard (default) template for a SQL Profiler trace doesn't capture the statements inside a stored procedure. To do this, you will have to choose a different template: the TSQL_SPs template.

But even with the right template it could be hard to find a specific statement caused by a specific application.

By default .NET applications show up in the Profiler with the ApplicationName '.Net SqlClient Data Provider'. It would be so much easier if you could just filter on 'My Application'. Well, you can.

Change the connectionstring for your application. Add 'Application Name=My Application;' and the ApplicationName will now say: My Application.

You can now filter Sql Profiler to show stored procedure statements of your application only and for your database.

For an explanation of all the different Sql Server Profiler templates you can go here: http://www.extremeexperts.com/SQL/Articles/TraceTemplate.aspx

Missing Connectionstring for DBML

Dries Marckmann — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:16:02 GMT

I encountered a problem today which in the end had an easy solution, but nevertheless took me over an hour to fix.

Our project had been running for weeks without any problems, but today it suddenly failed with the message:

'ProjectDataContext' does not contain a constructor that takes '0' arguments.

The Connection setting was empty and I couldn't re-select the Connectionstring from the App.Config. If I changed the 'Application Settings' to false the project did build but this wasn't the setting it used to have.

In the end my Settings.settings file was corrupt. Trying to open the settings file gave me the error: "Value does not fall within the expected range".

I deleted the settings file, have the property sheet create a new one and the problem was fixed.

Technorati Tags: Linq,dbml,connectionstring

PDC 2008

Dries Marckmann — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:20:37 GMT

I just heard this week, I'm going to the PDC in LA!! Counting the days...

Downsides of Smart Client Software Factory

Dries Marckmann — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:00:28 GMT

I like the concept of SCSF but...

Model-View-Presenter is a must . This is a good thing, but from a business point of view (fast fast fast) I would like to be able to hack a temporary tool quickly.
SCSF still uses entlib 3.x
Guidance package gives error on VSTS for DBPro projects (see...)
Unable / not sure how to convert existing solutions to SCSF

So I'm looking for another way to create a shell application around all our companies business applications.

Smart Client Software Factory and Datadude

Dries Marckmann — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:56:06 GMT

On my machine I do not only have SCSF installed but also VSTS for Database Professionals. Unfortunately this combination is not without problems.

Every time I right-click on my dbproj I get no less than 4 exceptions.

Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.RecipeExecutionException: An exception occurred during the binding of reference or execution of recipe CreateViewCS. Error was: Function IsEnabledFor is not correctly implemented because it threw an exception.

Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.RecipeExecutionException: An exception occurred during the binding of reference or execution of recipe CreateWPFViewCS. Error was: Function IsEnabledFor is not correctly implemented because it threw an exception

Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.RecipeExecutionException: An exception occurred during the binding of reference or execution of recipe CreateDisconnectedServiceAgentCS. Error was: Function IsEnabledFor is not correctly implemented because it threw an exception.

Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.RecipeExecutionException: An exception occurred during the binding of reference or execution of recipe CreateDisconnectedServiceAgentVB. Error was: Function IsEnabledFor is not correctly implemented because it threw an exception.

I haven't got a solution to the problem yet. I have posted a issue on codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=17216

VPN and Internet at the same time

Dries Marckmann — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:56:01 GMT

Ever had the problem you wanted to use your VPN to work but still wanted to use the internet through your own network. With XP I knew you had to add a route to the routing table. So I tried that in Vista as well.

After an hour of destroying my internet connection and rebooting about 20 times I found out that it is actually really easy to set up in Vista.

Go to the "Connect to" window and choose your VPN connection. Go to the properties window for this connection and to the Networking tab. Then Open the Properties of the TCP/IPv4 protocol. Click the 'Advanced' button and uncheck the 'Use default gateway on the remote network'.

After that you still have to add a route to the routing table to get access to the remote network:

route add 192.168.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 <ip of vpn gateway> if <interface for vpn>

And there you have it: VPN and Internet through your own network.

Tags van Technorati: VPN,gateway,connection,route add,interface

Sudden Application pool shutdown / 503 service unavailable

Dries Marckmann — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:13:58 GMT

Today I suddenly had our web-site shutting down on us. It gave me a Http Error 503 while it all worked fine a minute earlier.

I checked IIS (IIS7 in our case) and I saw the Application pool had shut down. We couldn't understand how the application pool could just shutdown. This could potentially shutdown hundreds of sites in one go.

Apparently there is an option in IIS that will shutdown an application pool after 5 errors within 5 minutes, called Rapid-Fail Protection.

Disable this feature and your application pool will keep on running.

Investigating Smart Client Software Factory Part 1

Dries Marckmann — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:16:39 GMT

Investigating Smart Client Software Factory Part 1

At work we are currently developing a new tool to configure our webapplication. The data is contained in a SqlExpress database and is accessed using Linq2Sql. We are going to implement MVC in the website so it seems a good idea to implement a Model View Presenter pattern in the Config tool.

Installation Experience

I had to do 2 installations: One at work and one on my laptop to test it.
At work I run XP Pro and all went just fine with that. Just a matter of running installers for the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX), the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) and the Smart Client Software Factory - April 2008 (SCSF). And that was it...

On my laptop however, it did not go so great. I ran the GAX self-extracter and the GAT and SCSF msi's, but to no avail. I could not find the Guidance automation manager in tools menu of VS and no Guidance Automation project types in the Project template list.

The solution seemed simple: reinstall everything. But the remove option of GAX gave me the message: 'This installer requires Visual Studio which is not present on the computer. Please install it and try again'

I found a post by malcolm.ellis here and that pointed me in the right direction. I ran the self-extracter with elevated mode and than it did finish the uninstall.

After that I decided to not take any chances and ran all the installers in elevated mode. And finally it finished en look and behold: the menu-items and the project types appear as they should.

Hello World Application

As starting of without any knowledge of what to do didn't really work out. I followed the very usefull Hello World example which can be found on CodePlex.

But as I always say: it isn't fun if it isn't usefull! So soon I will extend and refactor the Hello World App to a somewhat more usefull School Admin System for my wife.