Martin Kulov's Blog

Team Foundation Power Tools for VS2008 is out.

MSSCCI Provider is also updated for 2008 object model.

Merry Christmas and Happy New 2008!!!

From Brian Harry's blog:

New in this Release

• Find in Source Control tool is an addition to the Team Explorer menu that provides the ability to locate files and folders in source control by the item’s status or with a wildcard expression.

• Open a selected folder in Windows Explorer straight from Team Explorer. This feature allows you to jump straight to the mapped folder location from within Source Control Explorer.

• Quick Label feature that allows labels to be easily applied to a given selection of files and folders in the Source Control Explorer.

• Build Notification tool that runs in the Windows task bar notification area monitoring the status of the build definitions you have specified. It can be configured to show notifications when builds are queued, started, or completed for multiple build definitions spanning multiple Team Foundation Servers.

• Additional TFPT.EXE commands for configuring Team Explorer connection settings (tweakui) and for destroying Work Items and Work Items Type Definitions (destroyWI, destroyWITD).

• Updates to the TFS Best Practices Analyzer for use with a Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server deployment.

• The Process Template Editor is updated for use with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server. It also has several improvements, including: the ability to launch standalone w/o a Visual Studio installation, performance improvements, improved discoverability and bug fixes.

• Bug fixes and removal of Power Tools that are now included within Team Foundation Server:

• Annotate and Treedif are now included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer; however, Annotate remains is still available in the command-line tool (TFPT.EXE).

• TestToolsTask is included in Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server as part of Team Foundation Build.

Labels: TFS

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:58 AM |

I have been invited to talk at BASTA! Spring 2008 edition between 25-29 February 2008. I am going to talk about what testing tools are available in Visual Studio 2008 compared in different editions and how to use these tools in real life production enviroment.

My session is part of the special VSTS day at BASTA!.

Other speakers that I would love to meet again are Hadi Hariri, Dino Esposito and meet for the first time the fellow VSTS MVP Neno Loje.

Please, drop me an email if you plan to attend BASTA and we can have few beers there :)

Labels: BASTA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:09 AM |

Microsoft is releasing a new server for searching your documents called Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. As the name implies this server will be delivered FREE to everyone.
Here are some of the features that I would like to highlight:

Search Center. Empower your people to quickly find the information they need through a familiar, web-style search interface and easy-to-use query syntax. Re-configure the layout of Search Center elements without writing any code.

Localized Interface. (No Bulgarian unfortunately)
Out-of-the-box Indexing Connectors. Index content on file servers, web sites, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server public folders, and Lotus Notes repositories.

Search iFilters. Index a wide variety of documents and file types using an interface common across Windows Desktop Search, Windows Vista, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

Relevance Tuning. Retrieve the most relevant results across a diverse set of 3rd-party line-of-business systems and content repositories from a single search query. Use a ranking engine developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Windows Live Search.

Security-Trimmed Results. Ensure people only find information they should have access to by automatically trimming search results based on the identity of the user at query time. Access control lists (ACLs) for content on file shares, SharePoint sites, and Lotus Notes databases are automatically captured at index time.

Crawl Rules. Specify unique crawl inclusion / exclusion behaviors and authentication credentials for specific content sources

You can find the complete list here.

The current release is Release Candidate. Make sure you subscribe after download to can get notification when the final version is released.

Download Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express Release Candidate.

Labels: Search

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:57 AM |

Galcho puts a very useful set of SQL 2008 Webcast sessions on his blog.
It is very good list that can boost your SQL 2008 knowledge very fast!

Labels: SQL

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:29 AM |

The Visual Studio 2008 Rhythm Training VPC is a sample VPC with latest tools and frameworks from Microsoft. I found it pretty usefull if you have to make presentation or just play with the tools. This VPC does not contain TFS. A separate VPC with TFS 2008 installation will be released soon.

All programs in the VPC are patched with all updates as of 11 December 2007.

NOTE: This VPC images will expire on March 8, 2008.

The Visual Studio 2008 Rhythm Training VPC contains a pre-configured installation of Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, and the Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit. The training kit includes 20 hands-on-labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos for technologies such as LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET Ajax, VSTO, the .NET Compact Framework, and more.

To login to the VPC, use the following username and password:

UserName: administrator
Password: pass@word1

The VPC takes about 15GB space.

 

UPDATE: There are new VPC images that will expire on 31st Dec 2008.

Username: TFSSETUP, password: P2ssw0rd

"This virtual machine is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Build 2008, Team Explorer 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and all necessary prerequisites. In addition, it has been updated with Office 2007 SP1, current Windows Updates as of March 25, 2008, and the December Release of the TFS Power Tools. Team Foundation Server is installed in workgroup authentication mode and thus does not require a domain controller. "

A separate downloadable set of 38 hands on labs and sample data is available also.

Labels: Visual Studio 2008

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 6:40 AM |

The preview version of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions is released. The Extensions are a new set of tools and controls that will be added onto existing release of ASP.NET with .NET 3.5. This will make possible for web developers to get the latest updates on ASP.NET without having to wait 1-2 years more for the next release of .NET Framework.
It also includes ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3, which you can also download as a separate file here (you do not need to download it if you have ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview installed already).


What’s in the Extensions Release?

ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC provides model-view-controller (MVC) support to the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime, which enables developers to more easily take advantage of this design pattern. Benefits include the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns, as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD).

The ASP.NET MVC Toolkit provides HTML rendering helpers and dynamic data support for MVC.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data
ASP.NET Dynamic Data helps developers build a fully customizable, data-driven app quickly. It provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid data driven development without writing code, yet it is easily extendible using the traditional ASP.NET programming model.

ASP.NET AJAX
New additions to ASP.NET AJAX include support for managing browser history (Back button support).

ADO.NET Entity Framework
ADO.NET Entity Framework is a new modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. Benefits include easier to understand and easier to maintain application code that is shielded from underlying database schema changes.

ADO.NET Data Services
ADO.NET Data Services provide new services that find, manipulate and deliver data over the web using simple URIs. Benefits include an easy and flexible way to access data over the web, while enabling the separation of presentation and data access code.

Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET
You can integrate the rich behavior of Microsoft Silverlight into your Web application by using two new ASP.NET server controls: a MediaPlayer server control that enables easy integration of media sources such as audio (WMA) and video (WMV) into your Web application, and a Silverlight server control that allows an ASP.NET page to reference both XAML objects and their event handlers.

Labels: ASP.NET, LINQ

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:41 AM |

Web Access Power Tool for Team System is just released. Brian Harry just announced the awesome news. As I said in my previous post - these guys at MS do not sleep. And it is 4am already and I can hardly catch up with the news.

Message to the Visual Studio product team at MS - guys, please take a break; we need to sleep :)

Here is the feature list (first one is my best friend) and VSTS Web Access 2008 Power Tool download page:

New linkable web pages - This is, perhaps, the coolest feature in the release. It allows you to easily link to work items, work item queries, work item query results, Changesets, File/Folder history, file differences, file contents and annotated views of files. This makes TSWA a far more powerful building block for integration with other applications. In fact, we've already started work to leverage this from notification emails so that you can get a richer experience. Because the notification emails are user configurable, you can read Neno Loje's poston how to modify work item alert emails to use TSWA links. Look forward to some future suggestions on how you can customize your checkin notification to get a richer experience using TSWA. See Buck's post for details on how to use the new TSWA links.

Custom work item controls - Web Access now supports custom work item controls. Now it is possible to create a rich client version and a web version of custom work item controls and have your fully customized experience available no matter which interface your users access. You'll find documentation for writing custom controls in the SDK folder under you TSWA installation folder.

Team Build support - Web Access has been updated to support several of the new features in TFS 2008 for build automation. Most importantly, it allows you to view the queue of builds and queue new builds.

Performance improvements - Every release of Web Access includes more performance improvements. The more we use the tool internally, the more we learn about it. Every time we find issues, we fix them and release them to you as soon as possible. The big performance improvements in this release are around server memory consumption.

No more TSWA users group - The 2005 Power Tool required that you manage a user group of web access users for security reasons. We've improved the server side impersonation and directory management to eliminate the need for this. TSWA can now manage access securely just using the permission settings you already have and no longer requires a "special" restricted group. This should make managing TSWA easier.

Documentation - It's not extensive but should be enough for you to find your way around TSWA. You'll find it located here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892990(VS.90).aspx

Labels: TFS, Visual Studio 2008

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:57 AM |

Three weeks after releasing Visual Studio 2008, Jeff Beehler announced the release of "Rosario" November CTP, the next version of Visual Studio.
I guess Microsoft product teams does not get any rest. Neither do we, because of them :)

Below are the set of features that this CTP includes. My favorite ones are the Historical Debugger and support for Windows Installer XML (WiX) technology!!! More on the first one - in some other post.

We are living in interesing times...

Architecture Edition

• Visualizing Interaction Sequences between Service-Oriented applications


• Using the Distributed System Designers and the Web Service Software Factory to build


• WCF applications


• Designing and Visualizing Interactions between classes

Development Edition

• Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with Rule Sets


• Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger


• Identify the test impact of code changes


• Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Test Edition

• Planning a testing effort


• Executing manual test cases

Team Foundation Server

• Managing user stories with the Agile Process


• Managing features with the CMMI Process

Download documentation only here.

Labels: Rosario

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 1:26 AM |