Memory Crystals

Visual Studio 2010 Announcements - Finally!

2009-10-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

I'm finally able to discuss the new Visual Studio 2010 SKU's. In an effort to simplify things, Microsoft has eliminated the Team role SKU's. No more Architect Edition, Database Edition, Development Edition, or Test Edition. There's now:

Professional
Premium - Code Coverage, Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Test, Database Tools, Code Analysis, Code Metrics, Profiling
Ultimate - includes Web and Load Testing, IntelliTrace (formerly "Historical Debugger"), Architect Explorer, UML and Layer Diagramming Tools (very cool!)

Additionally, there's Test Essentials and Team Lab Management. These are my favorites! (Although the Database Tools are a very close second!)

All of the editions will provide new tools for cloud development and new WPF/Silverlight designers. (There's also a mentiong for improved Office & SharePoint development tools, but I'll believe it when I see it. Up to now, the tooling for those products has been seriously underwhelming.)

Pay special attention to the newly announced deal here as well. It can get you upgraded!

St. Louis Day of .NET 2009 is over!

2009-09-02T18:28:00.000-07:00

It was a lot of work by just a few people, but I feel very fortunate to be one of them. We have received a lot of feedback from many participants and it is nearly all positive!

I really enjoyed meeting a lot of new people - veterans to rooks! I hope everyone else made new contacts because IMO that's what these gatherings are all about. Learning how to do something new or being exposed to new platforms and technologies is great, but there are other channels for these things (e.g. classrooms, blogs, books, and more). The opportunities to really talk to people face-to-face in our industry outside of our regular circles are few and far between.

Some personal mistakes I made:

I titled the session I was most excited about presenting: "ALM Quantified". Because I've lived with the ALM acronym for a few years now, I assumed more people would know what it was (Application Lifecycle Management). Next time I'll know better.
Another assumption was that if I put a lot of exciting sessions at the end of the day on Saturday, people would be more likely to stay throughout. It was naive to think I could push people this hard. The attendees started very early on Friday and were in session until after 5pm that evening. Many stayed several hours after in the Home nightclub and got up early again on Saturday. Thank you all for enduring and I hope you don't feel cheated of some of some great sessions.

Day of .NET 2009 Registration

2009-06-12T05:36:00.000-07:00

I'm one of the organizers of this event and we have finally announced that registration is officially open for this year’s highly anticipated St. Louis Day of .NET conference and there’s a special surprise – it’s two days! That’s right - two full days of technical content. The flyer below has the highlights and you can get all the details and sign up here: http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/.

Please join us for this awesome event and pass the word along to your friends and coworkers as well.

Hope to see you there!

TechEd 2009

2009-05-18T07:30:00.001-07:00

No really big announcements at TechEd this year, but it was still a great conference.

I worked a couple of the Visual Studio Team System booths throughout the week. It was great to talk to both the Microsoft people and those interested in ALM and the Team System products.

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend a couple of sessions due to all my networking efforts. I will likely be spending the next several nights catching up on the recorded sessions. (I love playing them back at fast speed in media player anyway!) Here are the sessions I attended in the order I liked them most:

Zen of Architecture (ARC315)
Agile Development with Microsoft .NET (BOF54)
Implementing the Entity Framework in an n-Tier World (BOF65)
Integrating Application Lifecycle Management and Project Portfolio Management (OFC03-INT)
Keynote Session
Building Rich Business Clients in WPF: Getting the Most Out of Windows Presentation Foundation (WUX305)
Adding Communication to Your Applications with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 (UNC301)
Building Custom Applications in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 (OFC325)
Microsoft Certification 101 (COM06-INT)
What's Hot with Windows Mobile 6.5 and the New User Experience (WMB03-INT)
Leveraging WPF in Windows Embedded Standard Code Name "Quebec" (WEM203)
Focus on Fundamentals in Windows Applications (Graphics, Power, Services, Profiling) (WCL305)
Metrics That Matter: Using Team System for Process Improvement (DPR03-INT)

There were other sessions I wanted to attend, but booth duty got in the way. There were several sessions on System Center, WPF, and Team System sessions, but I just had too many conflicts.

I also heard from others that these sessions were extraordinary!

Tough Lessons Learned as a Software Project Manager (DPR307)
Patterns for the Rest of Us (DPR401)

Microsoft put on a great conference and I appreciate their efforts immensely.

Thank you to INETA for hosting a great party at Chaya on Wednesday and everyone for attending that event. It was great talking to all of you.

MIX 2009 Part I

2009-03-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

MIX was a great event again this year! I was only there for Wednesday and Thursday in order to save some money. It was great to hang out with our local Microsoft guys (Denny, Clint, and their other brother Clint). I also said a brief hello to Microsoft (and former Quilogy guy) Jon Box. Finally, I spent a significant amount of time with Quilogy's own Mark Riemann, SSE's Kevin Grossnicklaus, and Winchester's Derek Jerrell.

My notes:

Deborah Adler's keynote was fantastic! She basically reminds developers and designers to focus on the user experience and make the technology and aesthetics secondary.
Scott Guthrie's keynote was primarily focused on the new Silverlight and Blend features.
Blend 3 (preview available):
SketchFlow!!! You can make your comps in layered .psd files and import them into a flowchart that can show simple animations and transitions. You can package up this "working" prototype and send it to a client for interactive playback AND annotation!
Silverlight 3 (beta available) looks pretty good finally! It still doesn't hold a candle to WPF, but it has enough maturity now to view it as a real option for application development.

Useful sessions I attended:

"What's New in Microsoft Silverlight 3.0" (Wednesday) - This session was a great run-through of several new features in Silverlight. Joe Stegman covered the very cool new video features including the adaptive video and effects. He also covered the interesting out-of-browser and cross-browser functionality.
"Live Framework and Mesh Services: Live Services for Developers" (Wednesday)
"Using Microsoft ASP.NET MVC to Easily Extend a Web Site into the Mobile Space" (Thursday)
"Improving UX Through Application Lifecycle Management" (Wednesday)

VERY cool, but not very useful, session:

"Using Total Experience Design To Transform The Digital Building" (Thursday)

All of these conferences and events are about networking. All of the presented sessions are available online, so I focused on attending sessions where I knew the presenter. If you are disappointed that you didn't get to go, because you thought this would be a great jumpstart to your training, do not worry. These conferences are a terrible way to learn something, but the sessions are great for exposure. (You can play these back at double-speed in Windows Media Player and probably do 3x the number of sessions in the comfort of your own home.)

The presentation of the Winchester Ballistics Calculator was alright. They had the Partner Showcase area in a terrible location where very few people walked by. It didn't help that our presentation was first thing in the morning, so people didn't really show up until afterwards for Thursday's keynote. The whole Partner Showcase was really disorganized as far as where we were supposed to be and when. Most importantly though, it will be available on video through the MIX site.

I am going to continue going through the various session videos and I will post my reviews of those as well. I will also add more notes on the conference in the coming days, but I gotta get back to work!

VSTS 2010 CTP Expired?!

2009-03-06T10:42:00.001-08:00

Is your Visual Studio 2010 CTP expired? Here's how you can reactivate it.

First, download the bits again. You can use your original .exe and .rar's if you kept them. Extract them to the desired location, BUT DO NOTHING ELSE. Just extract the files.

Second, open the .vmc file in Notepad (or other text / XML editor) in order to view the XML. Find (CTRL-F) the XML element named "</mouse>". Immediately after the mouse element end tag, insert the bolded XML you see below.

<integration>
   <microsoft>
   <mouse>
      <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
   </mouse>
   <components>
      <host_time_sync>
         <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
      </host_time_sync>
   </components>

TFS31004 - Cannot connect to TFS

2009-01-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

I recently had one of my developers tell me they were having trouble connecting to TFS. He had no problems connecting while at work, but then he took his laptop home to do some work. (Before you send me hate-mail, I didn't ask him to work any OT from home.) At home, he was unable to connect to TFS, so he deleted the server from Team Explorer and tried to re-add it. At this point, he got a dialog reporting a TFS31004 error. It's important to note here that his laptop was NOT joined to our domain. I'm happy he came to me early on because I knew I'd seen this error before so it didn't take me too long to find a fix. Scotty Wakefield's blog had a posting with exactly what we were looking for.

On the developer's machine, open a command prompt and enter control keymgr.dll
A dialog titled Stored User Names and Passwords should appear. Find the entry in the listbox matching the name of your TFS server. Click the Edit... button, verify your username, and retype your password. Click OK and then Close to exit the dialog. Try again to connect to TFS.

St. Louis Day of .NET

2008-11-06T07:29:00.001-08:00

I'm one of the organizers and presenters at the St. Louis Day of .NET. On Saturday, Dec. 13, please come check out the large variety of sessions we will have available and walk out with more knowledge (and some cool prizes). The majority of the presentations will cover products and technologies covered at the recent PDC.

St. Louis Day of .NET

Hope to see ya there!

2008-11-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a Live Meeting presentation on the following today. I hope you guys can join. Sorry for the late notice! :(

"Crack the code on better ROI with in-house development projects
Do you create or integrate applications for your organization? Successful software development requires transparency and structure. Although most of your team understands the value of formal process and advanced tools, it is often difficult to justify their costs.

Quilogy can recommend custom activities for ALL roles on your development teams to improve project quality and overall success. Our deep experience can help you efficiently plan, develop and test your custom development projects and get more value out of your investments in process and tools.

Quilogy has been developing software for nearly two decades and has parlayed that knowledge into a set of codified rules for application lifecycle management. Join us as we take a hard, quantitative look at how your business can save money, improve quality, and reduce time to market. We’ll show you how to get started; you just have to take the first step."

We will eventually post a link to a recording of this presentation as well.

Intro to SharePoint & SOA

2008-08-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

I've been developing and configuring SharePoint for about 4 years now. I was involved with the MOSS 2007 TAP Program and used it to gain an all-expense paid trip to Europe to train others upon its release. Let me start off by saying 'I love the product'. It integrates well with Office products and if my contacts on the product team are telling the truth, this will improve immensely in "Office 14". The document management capabilities are the best I've used in a web-based solution. Finally, it has a fairly simple object model that make it easy to interact with.

However, one thing I've learned is SharePoint is NOT a development platform - nor do I believe it is truly intended to be - nor do I believe it should ever be. SharePoint is a 'portal' application. (See here for the community definition.) It is intended to be a central access point to other applications. What I have been guilty of and what I continue to see others fall prey to is the temptation of developing even the smallest applications within SharePoint. Most often these applications take the form of complex web parts with lists as data sources or ASP.NET web pages stored in various locations within the SharePoint database or file structure. Often, this tight-coupling to the SharePoint server breaks SOA tenets and/or wreaks havoc on any kind of flexibility requirements. (The ALM difficulties of developing and deploying apps in SharePoint also indicate the need for small one-man efforts.)

Resources from Redmond Developer Magazine:
Platform Rising
SharePoint Does It All

Forrester Report (this one costs money folks!):
Now Is The Time To Determine SharePoint's Place In Your Application Development Strategy

Having said all of that, I truly believe SharePoint is integral to any SOA initiative in Microsoft-friendly enterprises. Its use of web services to provide access to its object model is extensive. The various ways SharePoint provides access to external data is also SOA friendly. Like Microsoft CRM provides services to expose its related entity data and Team System provides client object model access to work items, etc., SharePoint should act as a way to have your other applications interact with your documents, simple lists, and even kick off workflows.

Sidebar: Speaking of workflows, I've also seen too many developers go straight to Visual Studio to develop workflows. SharePoint Designer reminds us all of FrontPage, but there really is a lot of power there. When the workflow becomes complex enough to really warrant Visual Studio development, try to build custom workflow activities. These activities can then be used throughout your enterprise. Workflows that map critical business processes should be treated like any other application and not be tightly coupled to SharePoint. Host the workflow in a service and let it call into your custom database, document library, etc. (I've talked to developers that have made state machine workflow versions of existing sequential ones as if the fact that it is a state machine somehow will improve the end-user experience. When writing methods, some logic is easier to do recursively than iteratively and vice-versa. The same is true for state machine versus sequential workflows.)

So, keep your portal a portal. Build your web applications in ASP.NET and put a hyperlink to them in your portal pages. Don't struggle trying to get AJAX or Silverlight to work in SharePoint, thereby adding significant time and complexity to your efforts. Do it faster and keep the larger enterprise in mind outside of SharePoint. As developers and architects, it's important we keep the business needs in mind and not simply push products and technology to its limits because we can get away with it.

Why Team System?

2008-05-11T10:53:00.001-07:00

I'm a HUGE fan of Visual Studio Team System. I think the software development industry is in major need of a more structured and disciplined approach. Developers have long enjoyed the freedom afforded them by the nascent technology. Hackers were crucial in the early days of the computer revolution. These lone rangers were the innovators researching the technology before business even understood how they would use it.
However, now the tide is turning. The majority of custom application development done today is commissioned in order to answer a market need. Line-of-business applications are assembled by many people working together in a variety of roles. As the size of development projects has grown, so has the need for improving process and tools. In the past, these things were arguably overhead that slowed down the innovation.
I think it's imperative our industry embraces this trend. I want to push innovation as much as the next futurist. However, business people and general consumers look at software as a necessary evil to get things done or something they are forced to use due to company policy. While underground R & D and hacker innovation was enough in the past, today's larger efforts require the support of businesses and end-users.
I think Microsoft Visual Studio Team System seeks to address this need. Giving development teams the platform for process and the tools they will need to improve communication for distributed development, mitigate risks to promote project success, and reduce the cost of development and maintenance.
Visual Studio Team System is made up of several SKUs. The sheer number of features in the total product is as intimidating as the price tag. If you haven't looked into the various parts, here is breakdown of what I like about each one:
Team Foundation Server 2008
By far the most critical piece of VSTS, the server component replaces your crappy source control software (you are using source code control, aren't you?) with a truly enterprise-ready system. How do I know your source control system is 'crappy'? You are most likely either using SourceSafe or some open source system and getting exactly what you paid for.
Additionally, the metrics capturable in the Team Foundation Server data warehouse will give you quantitative metrics exposing exactly what's going on in your projects. This includes work item and bug tracking as well as tracking the quality of your code and automated builds.
(Note: This product works well in a Java-based environment as well!)
Test Edition 2008
The most likely product to change your current development process and improve the quality of your projects. Test Edition adds to the automated unit test capabilities in Visual Studio Professional Edition by giving you the ability to incorporate manual tests, recorded web tests, and load testing into your project. The most useful feature is code coverage (also available in Development Edition). Even if your application passes all of the tests written for it, that statistic likely means nothing if the code covered by those tests is 25%. Test runners simply publish their test results to a build and optionally include code coverage metrics produced by any combination of manual or automated tests.
Database Edition 2008
For a variety of reasons (good and bad), software applications still include a lot of business logic in the database (i.e. stored procedures, triggers, etc.). Traditionally, this code was either not kept in source control or code units were manually scripted out and saved to a shared location (often email!). By integrating with Microsoft SQL Server (support for other databases to come), this code is kept in Team Foundation Server with the rest of your source code. This script management isn't limited to your logic either. All of your database objects (i.e. tables, views, constraints, etc.) can be kept in TFS as well. This allows you to store "the truth" in TFS rather than on your production server, which often ends up out of sync with your development environments.
Another useful feature of Database Edition is test data generation. The tool can read your imported schema and generate massive amounts of test data with a simple click. Like the schema scripts above, this test data can then be repeatedly deployed as needed.
Development Edition 2008
While nowhere near as significant as the above features, Development Edition includes the aforementioned code coverage, code analysis, and code profiling. Code analysis is basically an integrated FxCop to help developers maintain some basic level of code quality. Code profiling is useful in those situations where performance is critical. Bottlenecks can be located quickly.
Test Load Agent 2008
Listed at the bottom of this list only because of its niche usage. It's actually very handy to simulate 1000's of users in a remote test environment. Additionally, the price is very competitive.
Architect Edition 2008
This is the least valuable of all of the products. (Although all that will change with the release of "Rosario".) Architect Edition will only find value in the larger enterprises where so-called "Ivory Tower Architects" work only in a strategic fashion never really dealing with lower-level details. It basically supports very high-level blueprints of applications for use during conceptual planning and initial design.

Team Build Server 2008 Requirements

2008-03-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Here are some tips to be aware of when setting up a 2008 Team Build server:

From MSDN,

In order to run tests during build, Team Edition for Testers must be installed on the build computer. In order to run unit testing, code coverage or code analysis, Team Edition for Developers must be installed on the build computer.

The Build Server components are already capable of building the vast majority of the project types. However, if you want to simply compile your projects and you don't need to run code analysis or tests, then you don't need to install any Visual Studio 2008 editions.

Additionally, if you just want to build Web Application projects:

On the computer running Team Build, navigate to the "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0" directory.
In this directory, create a "WebApplications" directory.
Place the "Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" file in the "WebApplications" directory. This file can be found in the same location on your development computer with Visual Studio 2008 installed.

Where's Waldo?!

2007-07-07T06:32:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a trend toward a serious drop in enrollment in Computer Science courses throughout America. Possible reasons mentioned in articles and blogs I've seen include:
Lazy American students - I had a professor three years ago tell me he was walking through the Fine Arts building after having been told his favorite class was going to be cancelled due to low enrollment (2 people). This was a long-running (6 semesters) class on using VB.Net to create web applications. Suddenly, it dawned on him, there were more art classes currently going on in the halls around him than there were computer science courses offered by the school!
Fears of the job market - The media (and our current President) seem to have a significant fear of technology and this is creating a perception that the IT job market is on the decline due to decreased demand and increased offshoring. The actual statistics for both do NOT paint this bleak of a picture. Many of the clients I've spoken too are moving away from offshoring software development due to communication and quality issues. (I also think many American companies are realizing their own business and/or software development process is weak. This leads to poor requirements which prevents any remote development project from succeeding. I'll talk about process in future posts.)
Poor curriculum - This was the number one reason I dropped out of computer science while pursuing my undergraduate degree (and switched to Fine Art). After 5 computer science courses, I realized I was no closer to my dream of becoming a video game programmer. My professors (and don't get me started on the problems of tenure) were doing nothing to prepare students to enter the real IT world.
My current boss seemed surprised when I told him I was hoping to pursue an MBA rather than a Masters degree in Computer Science. However, even today, when I look at the courses offered in undergraduate and graduate programs at the university level, I am very disappointed. I develop line-of-business applications by day (and video games at night). The courses offered in today's universities include: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Robotics. While these are some cool topics, they only prepare you for a job in academia. Additionally, you are likely required to take advanced physics, chemistry, a minor in mathematics. I've never used anything beyond algebra and boolean logic. Not a single university in Missouri teaches .NET!! (Although many teach Java, they also have several courses on COBOL and make you use the vi "IDE".)
Salary comparisons - Even though many colleges have finally moved their computer science departments under the Engineering schools, the profession as a whole doesn't get the respect of traditional engineering. Many companies are paying noticeably less for computer science graduates than other engineering graduates.
The poor training available is a primary cause of the salary issues as well. The demand for people is high enough that employers eventually settle for substandard resumes. Would an engineering firm even consider hiring a self-taught mechanical engineer? Yet we do it all of the time in our industry.

Some good stuff about the industry:
Always changing with opportunities for innovation - This is a very exciting industry if you love learning and solving problems. As a consultant, I'm exposed to many non-technology topics as well. I've learned about large-scale construction project management, health-care administration, and a deep look into the metrics that drive Microsoft.
Options to work remotely/from home - I don't believe this should be a regular option for those on team-sized projects, but if you are an individual consultant or working on one-man projects, working outside the office is pretty standard. (Caveat: If you are too lazy to get ready for work in the morning, you probably don't have the right work ethic to work from home anyway.)
Fun - I think talking to senior people in this industry is unlike most industries. If they have been in the industry awhile and climbed up the ladder a bit, you really get people who love their jobs. I mean really, really love them. They read up on the latest trends and experiment with new products.

There have been many studies and attempts to rectify the situation:
One of Microsoft's attempts
Some 2004 statistics posted on ZD-Net
Some really good ideas

First Post

2007-06-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally found the time and location (thanks Ian) to set up my blog! So, here goes.

I'm a software developer working primarily with Microsoft technologies, so my posts will mostly relate to my interests here. Examples will include Visual Studio Team System, .NET 3.5 (including Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation, and Windows Communication Foundation), software development processes and methodologies, and a smattering of other stuff.

Please comment on my often very opinionated thoughts and stay tuned!