Calculating the Rank of your blog posts or pages
I had an idea to have blog posts, or Rules listed not in date order, or an arbitrary order, but in some sort of calculated order. For this I would need to get data from somewhere and I fancied using; Number of Comments, Number of Trackbacks, Reddit, Digg, FriendFeed Twitter and Google Page rank. In this sample I use the term Rangler as a cross between Wrangler and Rank, but they are really Data Collectors.
How to deal with a stuck or infinitely queued build
Team Foundation Build can be a difficult beast, but not usually because of itself. Although people do experience problems when adding solutions that have been around for a while with no build run, it really does do a fantastic job.
A change for the better #3 - SSW to Northwest Cadence
Over the last 11 months, I have worked for a fantastic group of people at SSW and on a fantastic array of projects. However, the time has now come to specialise in one specific area. I have worked with Visual Studio ALM since its launch in 2005 and more recently with Scrum and the Professional Scrum Developer course that launched in April. Therefore, to this end I am leaving my job as a Solution Architect at SSW for an ALM Consultant role at Northwest Cadence . As you may or may not know, my last day at SSW is Friday 10th September and I want to express my thanks to Adam, Anastasia and the rest of the guys for making me welcome, even with the disability of being Scottish.
Running Android 2.2 (Frodo) on your HD2
While my HD2 was away getting fixed I had to slum it using an Android phone from Vodafone. It was a small cheap Vodafone 845 running Android 2.1 and you know what… I loved it.
Rangers shipped Visual Studio 2010 Database Guide
Have you ever struggled with the Database Developer (was DataDude) components of Visual Studio? Well I have…and now the ALM Rangers have released a new guide to help us all get the benefits. There is Guidance as well as Hands-On-Labs and even how to do WIX integration for deployment.
Commit to Visual Studio ALM on Area51
A few weeks ago I proposed a new community for StackExchange and it has been growing at an exponential rate. We are about half way there, but we need your help to make this community a success.
The search for a single point of truth
It may be a trivial matter to get your contacts on your phone, but if you do the social network thing, then you need to do a little jiggery pokery to get everything to sync so you have the same contacts everywhere. Over the last couple of weeks I have vowed to get them sorted.
TFS Event Handler for Team Foundation Server 2010
I am looking at re-working the TFS Event Handler and I was hoping that you would help me decide what handlers to build! [ Request an event handler ]
Active Directory Groups not Syncing with Team Foundation Server 2010
For a little while now I had been investigating an odd occurrence in Team Foundation Server. Users added to Active Directory groups have not been filtering back into the Team Foundation Server groups cache. The meant that we had to add users directly to Team Foundation Server in order to give them permission. While this was not ideal, it did not really inconvenience us that much, but we are now trying to streamline our security and need it fixed.
Changing the Team Project Collection of the Team Build Controller
When you are doing demos or training for Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS 2010) you may have multiple Team Project Collections (TPC) for different scenarios or process templates. You may even be attaching a pre-built TPC image so you can start from a particular point. If you try to do create a build you will find that it complains about there not being a Team Build Controller (TBC).
SSW Brain Quest: Team Foundation Server and SharePoint 2010 (London)
If you are unable to commit to the 5 day Professional Scrum Developer course we are holding in London, Adam Cogan is running his famous Brain Quest 1 day session on Wednesday 21st July.
Professional Scrum Developer (.NET) Training in London
On the 26th - 30th July in Microsoft’s offices in London Adam Cogan from SSW will be presenting the first Professional Scrum Developer course in the UK. I will be teaching this course along side Adam and it is a fantastic experience. You are split into teams and go head-to-head to deliver units of potentially shippable work in four two hour sprints.
Flashing your Windows Phone 6 for Dummies
The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then?
Ghost build controllers in Team Foundation Server
Have you ever seen ghost build controllers in Team Foundation Server that you just can’t seam to delete no matter what you do? Sometime there are builds left over in the system that were queued but never completed.
Why you need to tag your build servers in TFS
At SSW we use gated check-in for all of our projects. The benefits are based on the number of developers you have working on your project.
Kaiden and the Arachnoid Cyst
Some of you may remember when my son Kaiden was born I posted pictures of him and his sister. Kaiden is now 15 months old and is progressing perfectly in every area except that we had been worried that he was not walking yet. We were only really concerned because his sister was walking at 8 months.
Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution
Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small.
Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010 Done
Since I have joined SSW as a Solution Architect its Chief Architect, Adam Cogan, has been mentoring me and pushing me to do better. One of the things that I have been wanting to do since the first DDD Scotland was to present a session. For DDD Scotland 2010 Adam suggested that I submit he double session on “Better project Management with Team Foundation Server 2010”.
Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2008 to 2010
I am sure you will have seen my posts on upgrading our internal Team Foundation Server from TFS2008 to TFS2010 Beta 2, RC and RTM, but what about a fresh upgrade of TFS2008 to TFS2010 using the RTM version of TFS. One of our clients is taking the plunge with TFS2010, so I have the job of doing the upgrade.
Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010
Our client is using a brand new shiny installation of SharePoint 2010, so now we need to integrate SharePoint 2010 our upgraded Team Foundation Server 2010 instance into it. In order to do that you need to run the Team Foundation Server 2010 install on the SharePoint 2010 server and choose to install only the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies”. We want out upgraded Team Project Collection to create any new portal in this SharePoint 2010 server farm.
LinkedIn Woopsie with the Outlook 2010 Social Media Connector
I have always used the LinkedIn toolbar for Outlook to sort out, upload and sync my contacts. Because of this I have over 2000 contacts in my contacts list that I sync with my phone, Plaxo, live, Google and others.
Even Scrum should have detailed Task descriptions
When you create tasks in Scrum you are doing this within a time box and you tend to add only the information you need to remember what the task is. And the entire Team was at the meeting and were involved in the discussions around the task, so why do you need more?
Combining Scrum, TFS2010 and Email to keep everyone in the loop
Often you will receive rich information from your Product Owner (Customer) about tasks. That information can be in the form of Word documents, HTML Emails and Pictures, but you generally receive them in the context of an Email.
Silverlight 4, MVVM and Test-Driven Development
As part of his UK tour Microsoft’s Jesse Liberty will be talking in Edinburgh for an evening on Silverlight 4.
Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams
Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started!
Do you know when to send a done email in Scrum?
At SSW we have always sent done emails to the owner/requestor to let them know that it is done. Others who are dependent on that tasks are CC’ed so they know they can proceed. But how does that fit into Scrum?
Do you have a contract between the Product Owner and the Team?
Working in Scrum it is useful to define a Sprint Contract between the Product Owner (PO) and the implementation Team. Doing this helps to improve common understanding in, and sometimes to enforce, the relationship between the PO and the Team.
Upgrading Visual Studio 2010
I have been running Visual Studio 2010 as my main development studio on my development computer since the RC was released. I need to upgrade that to the RTM, but first I need to remove it. Microsoft have done a lot of work to make this easy, and it works. Its as easy as uninstalling from the control panel.
Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done
Today is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM.
Scrum for Team Foundation Server 2010
I will be presenting a session on “Scrum for TFS2010” not once, but twice! If you are going to be at the Aberdeen Partner Group meeting on 27th April, or DDD Scotland on 8th May then you may be able to catch my session.
