My Blogging in 2011

 

Lately I haven’t had the time to blog, so I thought I could wrap the year with some of (my) blogging from 2011. A kind of retrospective

March

Restarted blogging (third round) on this domain with the Bootstrapping my blog. Round III post

April

Visual Studio and TFS Books.** **if I wrote this today I would necessarily have to add Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio: From Concept to Continuous Feedback (you can read my review on Amazon) and probably Professional Scrum With Team Foundation Server 2010 (which I haven’t read)

Organizing your build definitions in folders – A great team explorer addon to allow you to view your build definitions in an hierarchical manner. A must if your team projects have a medium to high number of build definitions.

Improving Visual Studio source offline support with TFS – Some nifty Visual Studio addon to allow you to put TFS in offline mode without having to restart Visual Studio

OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010: Beta now available – Wrote about the OData Service for TFS. Since version 1.0 has been released.

Getting updated info on TFS and Visual Studio with little effort – How to easily get up to date information and Visual Studio and TFS for people with little time

TFS and Windows Phone 7  and TFS Phone Explorer. Another TFS client for WP7 – Two WP7 clients for TFS. Since two new clients have been released ThinFS and TFS On The Road (haven’t tried them).

Controlling Lab Management VM Placement Policy – How to change the way Lab Management decides which machines will host the VMS

Getting Visual Studio installation directory – How to get the installation folder for several Visual Studio versions

Getting Visual Studio version of a Solution file – How to determine the Visual Studio version that created/can open a given Visual Studio solution file

These last two posts, were written to document some little info that I would later use on a Community TFS Build Extensions activity for building code with devenv. I thought this was of little interest but worth documenting. Quite to my surprise, everyday someone lands on one of these posts through search engines. Looking specifically for these info.

MS Test Manager– Registering why a test is blocked – How you can declare in MS test manager that a test is blocked and why it is blocked.

May

Look the good news that MS Teched US is bringing us for Visual Studio – When the news about Visual Studio dev11 were still scarce, some news were announced at Teched US.

TeamCompanion 4 has been released – Announcing version 4 of Team Companion. The best way to interact with TFS using Outlook. Meanwhile version 4.1 , 4.2  and 4.3 has been released.

Help Improve Visual Studio performance – How to help Visual Studio team to improve it’s performance by installing an add in. This is no longer necessary, since then the team already collected enough information, and it has been used to add performance gains to dev 11.

Test Manager fails to load after installing Test Scribe – If Test Manager no longer loads after installing Test Scribe, this is how you can fix it.

June

My upcoming talks for June – Some public presentations I was going to do in June.

ALM Rangers shipped Lab Management Guide and ALM Rangers shipped Build Customization Guide

Node.js on Azure or the importance of knowing history – Some mini rant (minus the rage ) and a swim down memory lane. With a lot of people buzzing on running javascript on the server as if it was some grand novelty. IIS supports if for well over a decade.

July

Give Feedback to the Visual Studio Team – How you can (in even more ways) give feedback to the Visual Studio team in order to influence the things that get implemented in the product. (still valid today ).

August

Team Foundation Build: Enhancing the experience with built-in custom editors – How you can improve Team Build usage with little effort by using the built-in editor for better data editing (eg: source control picker to easily enter a file in source control).

Team Foundation Build: Reducing the amount of log of your own activities calls – How to fine grain the amount of logging when customizing/writing a build template definition.

September

Meanwhile… – While everyone was busy downloading the Windows 8 preview from Build I was busy downloading the dev11 preview.

Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions–September Release – In September we had a release of the Community TFS Build Extensions. A bunch (bunch is an understatement they are over an 100 probably) of activities for Team Build. In December we were also greeted with a new release which shamefully I haven’t blogged about. The December release also moved from the activities only foray and has added Community TFS Build Manager which is a wonderful tool that will allow easier management of your builds. (for example the ability to see all running builds on your controller(s) which right now it’s not possible in Visual Studio and you had to resort to a power shell script to do it).

October

Team Build: Building code with Visual Studio – How to build code with devenv if you have project types that are not buildable with msbuild. This was the post that explained the activity that I’ve build and has been included in the Community TFS build extensions.

November

Using Team Foundation Server Registry–Part I The concepts and Using Team Foundation Server Registry–Part II the API – How to access the TFS registry (read,write and manage permissions) and how you can leverage this in Team Build by using an activity that has been included in Community TFS build extensions.

 

This has been my 2011 blogging. A total of 29 posts