Guidance - Branching for each Sprint
There are a lot of developers using version control these days, but a feature of version control called branching is very poorly understood and remains unused by most developers in favour of Labels. Most developers think that branching is hard and complicated. Its not!
Scottish Visual Studio 2010 Launch event with Jason Zander
Microsoft are hosting a launch event for Visual Studio 2010 on Friday 16th April in Edinburgh. The have managed to convince one of the head honchos from the Visual Studio product team to come to Scotland. With Scott Guthrie last week in Glasgow and now Jason Zander , Global General Manager for Visual Studio will be arriving in Edinburgh for the Launch event.
Who broke the build?
I recently sent round a list of broken builds at SSW and asked for them to be fixed or deleted if they are not being used. My colleague Peter came back with a couple of questions which I love as it tells me that at least one person reads my email
Scott Guthrie in Glasgow
Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s.
Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?
When creating projects one of the only ways that you have of proving that it works and is a viable solution is to build it. This is easy when you only have one developer and that developer will be the only one using a solution. But what if you have 2 developers? How do you prove that one developers code works with the other? The answer is build servers. These build servers take specific code away to another computer and build it there.
Do you know that every user story should have an owner?
When you are building complicated software and working with customers it is always nice for them to have some idea on who to speak to about a particular story during a sprint.
Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 2 - For the record
At SSW we have always done Agile. Recently we have started doing Scrum and we have nearly completed our first Sprint ever using Scrum. As you probably guessed from my previous post, it looks like it is going to be a “Failed Sprint”, but the Scrum Team (This includes the ScrumMaster and the Product Owner) has learned a huge amount about working in the Scrum Framework.
Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 – The failed Sprint
I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.
When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects in Team Foundation Server 2010
Well, it depends… If you are a small company that creates a finite number of internal projects then you will find it easier to create a single project for each of your products and have TFS do the heavy lifting with reporting, SharePoint sites and Version Control.
MVVM for Dummies
I think that I have found one of the best articles on MVVM that I have ever read: http://jmorrill.hjtcentral.com/Home/tabid/428/EntryId/432/MVVM-for-Tarded-Folks-Like-Me-or-MVVM-and-What-it-Means-to-Me.aspx This article sums up what is in MVVM and what is outside of MVVM. Note, when I and most other people say MVVM, they really mean MVVM, Commanding, Dependency Injection + any other Patterns you need to create your application.
Solution: Testing Web Services with MSTest on Team Foundation Build Services 2010
Guess what. About 20 minutes after I fixed the build, Allan broke it again! Update: 4th March 2010 – After having huge problems getting this working I read Billy Wang’s post which showed me the light.
Microsoft, please help me diagnose TFS Administration permission issues!
I recently had a fun time trying to debug a permission issue I ran into using TFS 2010’s TfsConfig. Update 5th March 2010 – In its style of true excellence my company has added rant to its “ Suggestions for Better TFS ”.
Finding the problem on a partially succeeded build on Team Foundation Build Services 2010
Now that I have the Build failing because of a genuine bug and not just because of a test framework failure, lets see if we can trace through to finding why the first test in our new application failed. Lets look at the build and see if we can see why there is a red cross on it.
Solution: Getting Silverlight to build on Team Foundation Build Services 2010
This is SSW’s first time using Team Build 2010 to automatically create a Silverlight application. In the past the guys have used Cruse Control, but we want to move to a pure TFS 2010 solution. When one of our developers ( Allan ) added a Silverlight 3 project to the Solution our build server spat it out.
Upgrading from TFS 2010 Beta 2 to TFS 2010 RC done
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 RC was released yesterday on MSDN. I am happy to report that today we successfully completed upgrading our production TFS 2010 Beta 2 server, to the new TFS 2010 RC. wow.
Why I miss Orange and why Vodafone suck!
I am currently in Sydney Australia attending some training and meeting my boss for the first time. I was having a fantastic time until my wife phoned to let me know that Vodafone had called to say that the bill was over some limit and that they would be cutting my phone off if I did not contact them to confirm. Now, I had done the right thing and told them I would be abroad and where I was going, but I had forgotten to add my wife to the account. Fair enough…
Solution - IIS SMTP Service 5.5.2 rejected: need fully qualified hostname
We had a small problem today with a new site we were going live with. It was refusing to send emails in 90% of cases. Problems like these are always difficult to identify, but your first step is always to enable logging.
Solution - SEO permanent redirects for old URL’s?
From time to time, your website structure may change. When this happens, you do not want to have to start from scratch with your Google rankings, so you need to map all of your Old URLs to new ones.
Investigation - SEO permanent redirects for old URL’s?
On the project I am currently working on we want to change the nasty http://northwind.com/products.aspx?ProductId=1 to a nice friendly URL on the website. This is pretty easy and can result in nice URL’s like http://northwind.com/products/BigGreenTeddyBaresFromParis.aspx .
Outlook 2010 Beta 2 and Add-Ins: Dynamics CRM, Team Companion, LinkedIn and Plaxo
At SSW we are extensive users of Dynamics CRM. I wanted to give Office 2010 a go, but I had to make sure that the Dynamics CRM plug-in, and my other plug-ins worked.
Internet connection speed, WOW
I have been a cable customer in the UK since day one when it was Cable & Wireless. If you don’t know who they are I am not surprised: Cable & Wireless –> NTL –> VirginMedia
Create a VHD from the Windows Server 2008 R2 Image disk
Previously I created this the manual way , but if you have a fast internet connection and can take the 1.6gb download of the AIK, then this is a much easier way of getting started.
Create a VHD from the Windows 7 Image disk
This being my first week at SSW , and still waiting for my nice shiny new laptop to arrive, I am sitting here at my Wife’s laptop (which is PINK, a requirement to keep the WAF high), until it arrives.
Installing Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1
I have been trying since SP1 was released to get it installed at Aggreko, but due to our global, three time zones, development team and release schedules it has been very difficult to get some time set aside for it.
Dyslexia Awareness Week
Its “Dyslexia Awareness Week” here in the UK, and as a person that benefits from being a Dyslexic developer , I thought I should highlight the specific strengths to programmers of being dyslexic…
Deploying Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 2 - Done
Well, nothing like hitting the ground running, my first job at SSW was to join the TFS Migration Team, it was a fun experience, let me tell you how it went.
A change for the better #2 - Aggreko to SSW
In the last 2+ years at Aggreko I have worked with Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and a number of WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET projects.
Interview with Scottish Developers
I was recently contacted by Colin Mackay , the chairman of Scottish Developers about doing an interview with them. Colin has been pestering me for a while now to do some speaking engagements, but I am still not comfortable with that! (Yes, I am too chicken), so I capitulated…
Installing Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server on Windows Vista in 3 minutes
New in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to install TFS on XP, Vista and Windows 7. You can use SQL 2008 Express, so no large overhead, and the Basic version you use for this does have the reporting and SharePoint requirement that the main install does. That does not mean that you can’t upgrade later :)
Configuring Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server on Vista in 12 minutes
As Microsoft have separated Install with configuration, so I have separated my posts! You will need TFS2010 installed prior to the steps below.
