Last year, at PDC, I sat down with Adam Cogan, of SSW, during an MSDN magazine party.  Feeling the guilty pleasure of totally geeking out while a decent party was going on, Adam led a group of geeks through some of his very cool software tools.  Somewhere during the discussion, he mentioned that he deploys his unit test, along with a test runner, with his shrinkwrapped application.  That got my attention, since I'd never thought of them like that.  I called him on it, and he explained.  Now, there seems to be a visceral reaction from folks against the idea.  Here's WHY it makes sense to deploy unit tests and a test runner with you application:

1. Customer - "Your stupid app lost all my contact data!"
2. Help Desk - "Maybe I can help.  Go to Help -> Analyze"
3. Customer - "OK.  I see this list of green and red dots with text."
4. Help Desk - "Can you read me the line next to the first red dot?"
5. Customer - "It says 'Can't find database at C:\myapp\contacts.mdb'"
6. Help Desk - "Hmm...  Can you browse to that directory?"
7. Customer - "No, I deleted it to have room for more mp3's"
8. Help Desk - "Oh...  That's a file required for our app to run.  Did you subscribe to our backup service?"
9. Customer - "Yes."
10. Help Desk "Good, go to Tools -> Options -> Restore Contact..."

You get the idea.  It rocks for troubleshooting those pesky support calls from customers.  For a lot more information, and a very nice screenshot, see Adam Cogan's original posting on this topic!  You can find the specific recommendation in his menu unit tests best practice. (While you're there, check out the rest of his best practices, he has a huge number of great ideas.)

Unfortunately, you cannot ship your Team System unit tests with your application.  I know there's an NUnit to VSTS Unit Test converter.  Does anyone know if VSTS Unit Tests can be converted to NUnit or MbUnit unit tests, so that all of us using VSTS Unit Tests can implement this best practice?

UPDATE:  Adam Cogan claims he got the idea from James Newkirk (of NUnit fame).  That may be the case, but I'll have to credit Adam.  He's got so many best practices on his site (see this rule that covers shipping unit tests for an example) that if he didn't get the idea from Newkirk, he likely would have thought of it himself!

UPDATE TWO:  This IS Adam's idea!  James simply wanted a distributable test harness for developers to use!  I misunderstood his first comment to me!  (By the way, if you have comments on this post, or any other, please send email to steve+comments[at]accentient.com.  We've had to disable comments until we find a way to more effectively eliminate comment spam.)

More fun with Vista.  I love the OS, and there's so much to recommend it, but I keep running into WEIRD problems!  Here's another one...  I like to listen to DotNetRocks, Hanselminutes, and other podcasts during my commute to and from client sites.  They offer downloads in both WMA and MP3 formats.  I've generally used MP3, but thought, "Hey, I should switch to WMA, since that's native to Windows Media.  Unfortunately, when I tried to drag any WMA files onto Windows Media 11 in Vista, it won't allow me to drop them onto the 'To Burn List', or add them any other way I was able to see.  However, MP3 files can be dragged onto the burn list easily.  Weird.  So, I guess it's back to MP3s. 

NOTE:  For those of you writing to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it so that it works, I appreciate it.  However, my main complaint isn't that I can't spend 30 minutes (or even 10) trying to figure it out and making it work, it's taht Vista/WM11 seems to choke on native files, but easily support MP3s.

PEX = Program EXploration (a Microsoft Research project). I'm not really sure what this is, but a fellow RD, Barry Gervin, pointed it out to some of us MVPs recently after he visited a Microsoft Research "science fair".

Apparently, PEX automatically generates unit tests, allowing developers to find bugs early. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs. Sounds too good to be true, but since it will enable "a new development experience" in Visual Studio Team System, I should probably keep an eye on it.

Maybe this will keep the TDD purists off of VSTS' back.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to recognize a couple of cool 2007 Jolt Award winners ...

• Microsoft and the VSTS/Database Professionals product group for "Database Engines and Data Tools" (read more here and here)
• Scott Ambler for his awesome book, Refactoring Databases.
• stpBA Storyboarding for VSTS 

In fact, here are all the winners.

I've been in Orlando this week, speaking at SQL Connections and have been derelict in my blogging duties, especially with regard to VSTS.

• Microsoft announced on Monday that they had acquired DevBiz (the company that produces TeamPlain), which has been the leader in browser-based access to Team Foundation Server, further boosting cross-platform access (and adoption). TeamPlain Web Access also enables a peripheral team member to browse project information and manipulate work items, source code, etc. I believe the new, official name will become "Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access" (another mouthful). This acquisition also means that we will get to use TeamPlain for FREE (assuming we have a proper client access license for TFS). Read more about the acquisition on Brian Harry's blog and Microsoft PressPass.
  
  
• Microsoft published their Visual Studio Team System "Future Releases" roadmap, even beyond Orcas. So now, we can all speak the words "Rosario" in public. Rosario is the codename for the version of VSTS beyond Orcas. The roadmap is very thorough, even listing service packs and power tools, so you know exactly what delivery vehicle your feature or fix will be arriving in.
  
  
• Gert Drapers (the data dude) announced Service Release (SR) 1 for VSTS Edition for Database Professionals. He says that it's "in the works" and will be published sometime in Q2 of 2007 (let's hope April). He lists a few of the fixes and features that will be in the SR in a recent blog posting.
  
  
• Yesterday, Microsoft announced that unit testing will become a feature of the Professional edition of Visual Studio Orcas. This has been a passionately-requested feature by everyone in the world not running Dev, Test, or Team Suite editions. Finally, everyone who has Professional edition and up will be able to write and run unit tests. What about code coverage, that's still a question.
  
  
• The Patterns and Practices team has released updated prescriptive guidance on VSTS. JD Meiers lists many of the improvements on a blog post and you can find the guidance itself on CodePlex.
  
  
• Speaking of guidance, Microsoft recently published a 40-page branching guidance document which does a very good job of explaing branching and merging strategies for various size teams.

I've solved the problem with the printer shared via USB on a Windows XP box!  I can now print to it from my Vista box.

I found the solution at TechArena.  You can find it here.  Basically, you need to install the printer locally first, then fake it out using a Port that points directly to the shared printer.  Then, be sure to disable the "Offline Printer" support so that it prints over the network immediately.

UPDATE:  And here's another post, which makes things a bit more clear.

I'm trying to get Vista (on my laptop) to recognize a printer shared from my Windows XP desktop box.  Unfortunately, it squacks...  Telling me that I don't have enough memory.  Now, I have 2 Gig on my laptop, and currently 1.5 Gig is free, so I seriously doubt that's REALLY the case.

I've searched and come up with a couple solutions, however, they involve hooking up my printer via an LPT port.  I don't have that cable anymore.  Who uses those things when USB is available?  Anyway, the hack is really to hook up old DOS computers to Windows XP, but evidently it works for Vista, too.  If you are running into the same problems, and are using an LPT port, check out the Microsoft KB article here.

UPDATE:  See my post here for the solution!

I'm generally involved in the .NET space, but often work with companies that have both .NET and J2EE running in their enterprise.  Because of our focus on Team Foundation Server (TFS) and VSTS (Team System), when we run into Java, it's usually getting them moved over to TFS using TeamPrise.  (See Martin Woodward's blog for more on this great product, plus some very valuable insights into TFS and software development in general.)

But sometimes the companies we work with have J2EE as their primary servers.  I only recently learned of a very interesting product called Visual MainWin for J2EE that allows a company to run their ASP.NET applications without recompilation on WebSphere servers!  Now, web developers can get all the productivity, simplicity and maintainability of ASP.NET even before they convince their IT shops to move to a Windows platform!  Combine that with TFS and TeamPrise for their Java developers, and we're talking a real Microsoft foothold in hostile territory. 

Side note:  Speaking of Java and .NET, here's a Java Virtual Machine written in .NET!    It's called IKVM.NET!

During my recent upgrade, I moved to Vista and Outlook 2007.  I have to say, I LOVE the Outlook 2007 UI.  I'm much more productive, and it introduces some very, very nice features, like overlapping calendars and integrated searching (although I still prefer X1, since it is MUCH faster and has a better UI). 

Still, I ran into this problem...  I couldn't use it to connect to my email server hosted on Windows Server 2003.  The email downloads were WAY to slow.  Retrieving 15 emails with a total of 100 kb took several minutes, and if I had an attachment larger that 1.2 MB I physically couldn't download it, since it would time out every time (after 30 minutes or so).  Yuck.

It was so bad that we gave up hosting our email on our own servers and found a service that would host all our email addresses, giving us POP3, internet access to our email, calendar and many other features free.  I looked all over for a solution to the slowness problem, including contacting Microsoft.  No one could help.  So we moved, and are quite happy with the new service.

Anyway, I've found the solution.  It wasn't Outlook 2007, but Vista, and it's a very common problem (based on Live and Google searches), without a well publicized solution.  It's the same solution as the last post. 

Go to the command line as an Administrator (in your Vista client) and execute the following command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

Works like a champ!  Hopefully, this post will help a few people before they end up having to also migrate off of Windows Server 2003 to another solution. 

PS.  This problem doesn't affect all Windows Server 2003 (Win2K3) installs, only some.  Evidently it is a hardware issue.

UPDATE:  More information here:  Outlook is slow, RSS Broken from Tim Anderson's blog.  See comments 60-64 for more information and the solution presented here.

I recently "upgraded" to Vista on my laptop.  Immediately, I noticed a few things that were very annoying...  Primarily, it was the file transfer speed between my Vista box and our Windows Server 2003 box.  What used to take about 3 minutes to download now takes well over 4 hours.  In addition, the WSS portal we use takes over 1 minute for the home page to come up, versus less than 1 second.  Yuck.  So, I have to keep a copy of Windows XP around whenever I need to download stuff from our server.  I shut down Vista, swap hard drives (laptop) and boot into XP.  Then my speeds are nice and fast again.

Microsoft recommended that I run the following command as an Admin from my Vista command prompt:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

I wish I could report that it increased my performance, but, alas, I'm still stuck. 

I love the Vista experience, and there's so much to like about the OS, but I've run into so many "gotchas" that kill my productivity that I have to recommend staying with XP for now.  At least until the first Service Pack is released, or they solve the major interoperability issues.

UPDATE:  I did a reboot after the netsh command above and NOW I'm moving quickly!  It worked!  I've still got doubts about the wisdom of moving, at this time, to Vista, but my communication problem with the server is no longer one of them!

The next Ask An Expert Live Chat is scheduled for Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 12:00 PM PDT. 
  
Mark your calendars (or click this ICS link). For more information, visit Microsoft Technical Chats.

Here's a great tool for agile development that was mentioned in a blog post below.  Go get a stack of these!  Shuffle them, pass them around, put your use stories on them, and slap them up on the board when you're ready!  Here's one more link.

Post-it® Sortable Cards only stick when you want them to! Now you have the flexibility to visualize and organize when and how you want on many different surfaces. Cards also easily sort, shuffle and stack together so you can use them again, or store them for later.