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 Friday, May 25, 2007

Microsoft (and others) had announed that its Fall Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) would be October 2-5, in Los Angeles. Yesterday, they canceled the event and are in the process of rescheduling it.

From their site:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies.

Friday, May 25, 2007 5:00:32 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -
Conferences | Microsoft | Richard Hundhausen
 Thursday, May 24, 2007

The browser support out-of-the-box for Team Edition for Testers is pretty minimal. But, you can extend this support by adding your own browsers (common ones you'll probably want to add are IE7, Firefox and Opera and there are others you can probably think of). The files which provide the configuration for the browser types are stored in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\Templates\LoadTest\Browsers. You will several files which end in the extension ".browser". These files simply contain the header information a browser sends with a request. The IE6.browser file looks like the following:

<Browser Name="Internet Explorer 6.0">
  <Headers>
    <Header Name="User-Agent" Value="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" />
    <Header Name="Accept" Value="*/*" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Language" Value="{{$IEAcceptLanguage}}" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Encoding" Value="GZIP" />
  </Headers>
</Browser>

If you aren't sure of what information to enter in this file, simply open up your favorite browser that isn't in the list and go to http://www.ranks.nl/tools/envtest.html and grab the appropriate values! Use the IE6.browser file as a template. For example, if you wanted to add support to test Opera you might add the following and save it as Opera.browser:

<Browser Name="Opera 8.0">
  <Headers>
    <Header Name="User-Agent" Value="Opera/8.00+(Windows+NT+5.1;+U;+en)" />
    <Header Name="Accept" Value="text/html, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-bitmap, */*" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Language" Value="en" />
    <Header Name="Accept-Encoding" Value="GZIP" />
  </Headers>
</Browser>

There are obviously other values you can place here and some of this will be dependent on your locale, plug-ins you have loaded and other environmental factors. Once you save this file, you should be able to go in and create a new load test and Opera 8.0 will now show up as an option in your browser mix list.

Thursday, May 24, 2007 1:44:13 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -
Development | Team System | Visual Studio 2005
 Sunday, May 06, 2007
Learning a new language isn't always fun, especially Javascript.  Plus, when you're working in one language, it takes context switching to flip to another, even for a trivial task.  Nikhil Kothari, an architect on the Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft, has created something called Script#, which allows you to program in C# while compiling to Javascript/Ajax.

ZDnet has a good blog post on the importance of this technology, and a brief comparison with the Google version which compiles Java to Javascript.

Sunday, May 06, 2007 9:01:24 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -
Development | Misc | Software Tools | Visual Studio 2005
 Thursday, May 03, 2007
John Paul Cook, a Microsoft MVP for Virtual Machines has an excellent article on VM Central on how to use Acronis to effectively compact your VPCs.  (The article also covers other areas of interest to VPC users.)

John is one of the few people in the MS community with a really firm grasp of virtualization technologies.  Keep an eye out for future articles!

Thursday, May 03, 2007 9:02:19 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -
Software Tools
FTP Online has started a new Team System column written by me! I'll be writing about virtually anything that comes to mind or that you want me to write about! It's a twice monthly column and I'll be looking for some good article ideas from process and methodology to the technical nuts and bolts. I only have 800 words or less so they will only be point issues and not overly in-depth (unless I do a continuing series type of thing). You can view the first column on Test Driven Development in Team System today.
Thursday, May 03, 2007 2:08:19 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [2] -
Community | Development | Team System | Visual Studio 2005
 Friday, April 27, 2007

Today's chats were well attended, with many experts and well over a hundred guests. The quests came fast and furious, with some great answers given by the experts. It seems people are really anticipating Orcas (and Rosario) for those features that didn't make it into v1.

I have captured the entire transcripts (both expert and guest chats) in this PDF document (for the 10am PST chat) and this PDF document (for the 4pm PST chat).

Note: this is the raw content, copied and pasted from each chat, so you are getting it "as is".

Friday, April 27, 2007 1:59:41 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -
Richard Hundhausen | Team System
 Thursday, April 26, 2007
When you're trying to edit an automated Team Build, you can really get stuck waiting long times for the builds to complete.  This can be very frustrating while you're going through a series of running a build, fixing an error, running a built, fixing an error...

You can really speed these steps up by following this guidance by Dave McKinstry.


Thursday, April 26, 2007 5:26:50 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -
Team System | Visual Studio 2005

Accentient is pleased to announce the hiring of Jeff Levinson, a fellow Team System MVP!

Jeff joins our team as a senior consultant, having just left The Boeing Company where he worked as a solution design & integration architect. Jeff is an experienced software developer and SDLC practitioner. Jeff holds the following certifications: MCSD, MCSD.NET, MCDBA, SCJP and Security+ and is the author of two books on .NET development. His latest book (co-author) is Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Apress 2006). He has presented at various conferences and user groups, and writes articles on all areas of .NET development.

We look forward to working with Jeff and benefiting from his vast knowledge.

Read more about Jeff on our Mentors page.

Thursday, April 26, 2007 3:11:24 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] -

 Tuesday, April 24, 2007
I've posted about this before, however, it's so important I'll repost.  If you're trying to create a listener web service for TFS events, don't start from scratch!  Use Howard van Rooijen's VS2005 template.  It will create the web services, along with the appropriate signatures, as well as convert the events to an object, so that you can effectively use it. 

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 1:06:42 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [2] -
Best Practice | Software Tools | Team System | Visual Studio 2005
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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

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