The great news just keeps on coming from Microsoft. After a flurry of Team System announcements and downloads recently, we have yet another set of Power Tools to play with. These tools are designed specifically for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects and provide the following capabilities: - View class library projects on the Application Diagram (AD)
- View references to class library projects as connections on the Application Diagram
- Create class library projects from the Application Diagram
- Create references to class library projects from the Application Diagram
- Synchronize properties between class library projects and their representative applications on the Application Diagram
- Create and use class library applications and references on the System Designer (SD)
Fantastic. We haven't seen much out of the Architect tools, except for the SDM SDK in quite some time. I'm looking forward to it. Download the CTP here. Note: you will also need to download Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. If you have any feedback on these tools, please visit the Architecture & Design forum.
Gert Drapers, the PM for Database Professionals announced that the first set of Power Tools should be released by the end of this week. With that in mind I wanted to blogging about some of the cool new features. Today's blog is on the new Regular Expression builder.
This allows you to choose your regular expression and and preview the result of the expression! Very cool. Here's a tip to add to the list of regular expressions:
Navigate to the AppData\Roaming Folder (this will be different depending on what O/S you're using - for Vista it's C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming) and you'll find a file called RegExHelperConfig.xml.
Add a new record (for example, to add something simple like area code) with the following:
<Record Key="21" DisplayName="Area Code" Regex="[0-9]{3}" />
You can also add a new element which shows up when you click the Insert Element button by inserting a record in the syntax element section of this same file. Then you can distribute this file to all of your developers and they'll have the updated contents!
I believe that at the end of september (I didn't get an exact date from Apress) a Second Edition of Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System will be released with approximately 100 new pages of content devoted just to the Database Professionals Edition of Team System.
NBusiness is an Entity Definition Language focused on the creation of business entities. Basically, you use a construct called E# to build a code file, which is then 'compiled' into C#. Basically, NBusiness acts as a domain specific language for the creation of business entities. Below is an example of some E# code. It's still a bit stinted in the structure, but it 'feels' like English to me, much like an internal DSL in Ruby. (Even node the TRIVIAL creation of security around roles near the bottom of the example.) It seems people are really getting into the Domain Specific Language thing... But not the way Microsoft seems to be going. Microsoft seems to be focusing on the big, graphical DSL model. It'll be nice when they get there, but meanwhile, they're being left in the dust by the folks just creating very clean, very fast DSLs for a particular domain. Nicely done, guys! family BeerBase.Business
{
entity Address as EntityBase, EntityBaseCollection, EntityInfo, Scripts
{
field auto id int AddressId;
field string Street1;
field nullable string Street2;
field string City;
field string PostalCode;
field int RegionId;
relationship Kegbots with Kegbot on AddressId=AddressId as child;
relationship Companies with Company on AddressId=AddressId as child;
relationship Region with Region on RegionId=RegionId as parent;
validate Street1 required;
validate City required;
validate PostalCode required;
validate RegionId required;
validate City minlength 2;
validate Street1 maxlength 50;
validate Street1 minlength 3;
validate Street2 maxlength 50;
validate City maxlength 50;
validate PostalCode maxlength 16;
validate PostalCode minlength 5;
authorize allow * retrieve;
authorize allow Administrators delete;
authorize allow Administrators create;
authorize allow Administrators update;
}
}
If you're involved in creating a social web site, please heed the lessons in The Del.icio.us Lesson, an excellent blog post by Bokardo. I won't steal his thunder, so you'll want to go read it yourself. But the teaser is... He lists 4 solid things to think about when creating a new social networking site. Things that Del.icio.us does exceedingly well, and the social sites that are failing do NOT do well. Have a read!
Umbraco looks pretty amazing! It may not have the following of Dot Net Nuke, but it looks to be a lot more open to web standards. I've tried many times to really like DNN, but it just pains me that I don't have really clean CSS control over things. I suppose it's because I haven't gotten my head around it fully, so I'm sure I'm missing something. But don't tell me to use their non-standard (although open source) theming system. That just doesn't sit right. Anyway, back to Umbraco. it appears to have support for web standards, full API, and a very extensible platform! I haven't looked at it in too much detail, but at least its something new! Something outside the standard DNN, Rainbow, Joomla, and Drupal CMS systems. Once again, I'm no expert at any of these, but I'm always on the lookout!
Hey! This is a neat little easter egg in dasBlog. Whenever you type dasBlog it automatically inserts a hyperlink to the site. I wonder if it works for das Blog and DasBlog, as well.
Head to Vertigo and run the Family.Show demo of WPF and Silverlight. It's a trivial download, and shows off some of the power of both technologies. You can find it here. You can also download the source at CodePlex!
SharePoint features are an incredibly useful way to deploy chunks of functionality to web sites. Although they can be difficult to grok at first, once you do, they make a lot of sense! Scot Hillier, a very well known SharePoint expert has begun a CodePlex project titled SharePoint Features, which aims to provide some extra functionality to SharePoint. He's kicked off the project by contributing some really cool stuff, including a Debugging Feature, a Log Viewer Feature, and a Theme Changer feature. He's also got loads more up there! Have a favorite feature you've built? Contribute! I haven't checked out what license they are released under, but they're worth checking out!
Not only did Microsoft just recently post Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) a few days ago, but yesterday Microsoft made a CTP of the next generation of Visual Studio Team System (codename Rosario) available for download. Craziness ... which do I spend my time with? It's like having two mistresses to pick from. Anyway, here are the details, if you want to start playing with Rosario: (keep in mind that it won't ship until some time [6,12,18?] months post Visual Studio 2008, so at least 2009): Finally, and most important, provide feedback to the team using http://connect.microsoft.com.
Over the past few years, a few of my clients have deployed Team Foundation Server Proxy to improve the performance of their remote/distributed teams. It boosts network performance by caching copies of source control files in a remote location, local to the developer needing the files but away from the main source control location. In short, the proxy helps each user avoid a costly download of the files to their workspace across the slower connection. So why wouldn't this work for Team Build? In today's VSTS chat, I asked if anyone had done this. I should have expected that Buck Hodges would have, and even blogged about it.
Still trying to decide if Team System is right for you and if you can afford it. I would say you can't afford *not* to have it. Check out this list of case studies from other companies and teams who agree with me. Thanks to Rob Caron, for putting together this consolidated list of the "top" Visual Studio Team System case studies. They support a wide range of propositions by showcasing real customers who have gone through the adoption process and have great stories to tell.
Microsoft just released their Team System Web Access Power Tool (formerly known as TeamPlain). This is a Web interface to Team Foundation Server. If you have team members that don't want Visual Studio/Team Explorer installed on their desktop, but they still want to participate with the project lifecycle, this is a great, web-based approach to getting everyone connected quickly/easily. Here are some of the features: - Add new work items or edit existing ones
- Work with any type of work item, including custom ones
- Add new work item queries or edit existing ones
- View, download, upload, check-in and check-out documents on SharePoint team portal
- View reports, export as PDF or Excel
- Browse source control repositories, download files, view changesets, diffs, histories, and annotated views
- View build results, start or stop builds
- Search for keywords in work items
- Authentication Modes: Integrated Windows Authentication or Forms Based Authentication (Recommended to use with SSL)
Read more about it in Brian Harry's blog posting.
Nice work Microsoft. The download page just came online today. You can download Installation Disc Images, VPC Images, or Express Editions. 
There's even a link to download the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 at the bottom of the page.
Don't get me started on Project... OK. Get me started... I hate how MS Project refers to People, your TEAM, as "Resources". :-( However, I'll keep my mouth shut, since I want to mention a one thing related to Team System. First, if you're entering work items in Project you'll have to enter the "Resource" name as a string, and you won't have a drop down to select from (until you have entered the name at least once). This is in contrast to Excel, where you get a drop down of all the available people to assign the task to. It's frustrating, but there's a reason. Project supports assigning multiple "resources" to a task, while TFS supports only one person on the Assigned To line (by default).
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