Random thoughts about development on the Microsoft platform
Recently my Outlook 2010 OST grew to over 4GB of space which made Outlook slow.
One of the biggest reasons why it’s this large is SSW’s policy against auto-archiving and never permanently deleting anything. As a result my Deleted Items folder was actually 2.1 GB!
Now, I don’t actually need all of those items as they do span back about 4 years. So the goal is to only bring down the current year’s deleted items.
I’m currently working at a client that requires some source code to compile in Unix - as their major systems are Unix based with new development being done in .NET. The great thing about the project is that they have are trying to consolidate everything into TFS as the single source of truth (it’s mostly there).
To get the unix stuff going I’ve customized the DefaultTemplate.xaml and added an extra InvokeProcess that calls a PowerShell script to copy files to Unix using Pscp (for secure remote copy), compile code using Plink (allows remote command execution over SSH) and finally copy the Unix binaries back to the build server.
The PowerShell script takes in a number of arguments like remote server details, remote paths, usernames etc. So obviously we don’t want these being set via the arguments property for the InvokeProcess activity because:
What you should do instead is to define new Arguments for your template.
The Team Foundation Server Power Tools allow you to edit templates online or offline. In the online mode, changes you make are instantly visible when you save the changes so be careful. I would advise creating a dummy Team Project to do the customizations on first before rolling the changes out to actual Team Projects. The offline mode works by saving the work item definitions locally as XML and making changes to the XML file. You will need to import the XML to the Team Project to deploy the changes.
So let’s take a look at adding a the following fields to Product Backlog Item WIT of the Scrum 1.0 template:
Note: I know Actual/Estimates aren’t part of Scrum, but the higher-ups like to track it. It’s “Scrum-But” :)
1. Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Types | Open WIT From Server
One of the best features of Team Foundation Server 2010 is the ability to customize and create your own Process Templates, Work Items and Fields. The first thing you’ll need is to install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. This will give you a menu under Tools | Process Editor to customize the templates
From here you can start modifying the Work Item Types (WIT) in existing Team Projects or create new WITs.
The most frequent requests I get from TFS users is to:
I will cover doing each in a series of posts.
Repsonding to Peter Gfader’s blog post about Microsoft ASP.NET - Too many options
I see WebMatrix as an entry level tool to get people who don’t necessary have a development background a quick way to build and customize websites (using the templates and editors) on the Microsoft platform. It lowers the barriers to entry because you have one lightweight tool (7MB + about 20 MB of dependencies) that can edit web pages and manage your SQL. If the user wants to do more than they will need to step up to the visual studio offerings like if they wanted debugging support. I think of it as a step up from Notepad :)
Not sure whether the express editions of Visual Studio were downloaded and used much as the site is a bit confusing with sightly too many product skus, and maybe this is why they made Web Matrix – to drive adoption of Microsoft Web technology for users who don’t want to pay.
Too many “Express” offerings http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
Peter is right in that Microsoft tends to suffer from too many offerings (e.g. LINQ 2 SQL & EF, Microsoft Dynamics CRM/Great Plains/Axapta/Navision/SL) and a consolidation of the tools would make sense.
Too much choice is actually bad and can be mentally exhausting
