Silverlight in the Capital – with Scott Barnes

Well – July looks like being a massive month for Silverlight here in Canberra! Not only do we have Jordan Knight in town to present the fantastic Silverlight in a Day training session, but Scott Barnes – Microsoft Product Manager for Rich Client Platforms will be in town! I’ve been talking with Adam Cogan who runs the Canberra .Net User Group and there looks like being a special out-of-band user group meeting to give Scott the opportunity to talk to us about all things Silverlight. It’s not too often we have somebody directly involved in the product team in town so bring your questions and suggestions!

Mark these days in your calender now – and if you haven’t registered for the Silverlight in a Day be quick, we’re almost out of seats!

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When: 18th July (0900 – 1700)

What: Silverlight in Day

Where: Cliftons Canberra

Cost: Free!

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When: 28th July (Lunch: 1230-1330,  Evening: 1630-1830)

What: Scott Barnes on Silverlight

Where: Microsoft Canberra

Cost: Free!

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Make sure you don’t miss out on either of these events and rsvp now by emailing me, or for the .Net UG head over to the SSW site to register!

Canberra VSTS UG – July Meeting

It’s been about a month since I posted a call for speakers for the Canberra VSTS user group. Since then we’ve been receiving registrations and working on a speaker backlog to keep the group rolling. Next month presented a really good opportunity to take advantage of having one Australia’s VSTS MVP’s in town and we jumped on it. So without further delay I present the first Canberra VSTS UG Meeting!

When?

Tuesday, 14th July 2009

0810 – 0830: VSTS Breakfast

Share a bite to eat with the Canberra VSTS group. Bring your VSTS queries and triumphs and share them! Quiz your peers on how they are getting the most out of VSTS, and maybe pick up some ideas you can take to work with you.

0830 – 0930 : Session

Where?

Microsoft Canberra

Level 2, Sydney Ave

Barton (map here)

Session Abstract

Anthony Borton looks at the recently released Microsoft Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Beta 1 product and how it can drastically reduce the “find and fix” time for bugs that are raised by your testers. Today, significant time is often wasted trying to reproduce bugs with limited success and labelling bugs as “No-repro” can be frustrating for both testers and developers.

Microsoft’s new Test and Lab Manager Application allows testers to create, manage and execute tests quickly and easily in a dedicated user interface. Using Test Cases, Test Suites and Test Plans, testers will find the new features allow them to better participate as a full team member in Visual Studio Team System.

The session will touch on the following features of the Visual Studio Team Test 2010 product.

• Microsoft Test Runner
• Microsoft Test and Lab Manager application
• Bug Reporting and Data Collectors
• Unit Testing
• Coded UI Test
• Web Test
• Load Test

Go into the draw to win

As an added benefit of attending this meeting, you go into the draw to win a full retail copy of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite Edition with 12mth MSDN Premium Subscription.

Attend and Win!

Free Silverlight in a Day in Canberra – Date and Location Update

I’ve posted previously about a free Silverlight training session in Canberra, and am happy to know post an update confirming that we’ve locked it in for the 18th of July! Details below….

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Silverlight Designer and Developer Network Presents

Free Silverlight training day in Canberra!

Register your interest now!

• Cost: Free!
• Venue: Cliftons Canberra @ Level 2, 10 Moore St. City
• Date: 18^th July

What will be covered?

The day will be instructor lead – with the trainees following along each and every step. Yep that’s right – no boring reading and doing labs… everything is run through by the instructor. In our experience this method simply rocks. Also, we hate PowerPoint slides – so we’ve kept them to an absolute minimum. Be ready to jump straight in to the goods.

• Introduction to Silverlight and XAML
• Expression Blend
• Control Templates
• Networking
• Media
• Plus more… (like animation etc)

If that sounds like a lot to cover in one day, then you’d be right… we’ll be setting a cracking pace. Each lab will be made available as a handout which you can go over later.

The day is aimed at those who have never used Silverlight before but have some familiarity with web technologies. This includes both designers and developers.

During the session there will always be two specialists available to help you out if you get stuck (the third will be up the front directing the class).

What do you have to bring?

It’s really quite easy… NOTHING. You will be provided with a machine with all the required software and course material.

This day is simply not to be missed! Next time you can almost guarantee we won’t be able to do it for free. So get in fast to secure your spot!

Want more info?

Check out the Silverlight Developer and Designer Network website, email me on stephen.godbold @ readify.net (by removing the spaces) or leave a comment!

Level 2
10 Moore Street
CANBERRA   ACT   2601

2010 Build Basics – The Build Report and Build Configuration

While I’m working through the upgrade of dependency replicator to 2010 (beta 1) I have a CI build setup to give me feedback on how my check-in’s are going. This is maybe a bit of overkill, being that it’s a one man show but one of the things I was really keen to see was the new build report. I’d seen it in videos, and a little in the CTP but a bug that existed made it pretty hard to get at (I got white screens pretty consistently.

So I finally cracked it open tonight and one of the first things I noticed about my running build was the “Show Property Values” option on the log. This is a really great way to get either a general view of the tasks run during your build, or if the build is failing (as mine was – but that’s for later) to get the actual values being passed around during the build steps.

Build Log Without Parameters

Build Log With Parameters

How is this helpful? Well as I mentioned – my CI build was “failing”. It wasn’t failing per se, rather it would report that the configuration I was trying to build wasn’t valid. When checking the build definition it looked ok as “Release | x86″ but there was a key gotcha in the build configuration string. The split on the pipe value meant that the space on either side of the pipe got included in the configuration parameter, and therefore it didn’t match the “Release” and “x86″ configuration names I’d specified. I spotted this will checking the build log through the new interface. As you can see, there’s a space either side of the comma – which made me wonder.

Broken Build Configuration

It turns out the configuration to build is actually a little frail, so if you are experiencing issues with your build definition being unable to be found, the configuration to build is a good place to start. I’ve raised a suggestion on connect in regards to improving this part of the dialog to potentially load the available configs from the solution to build (if it’s available at that point) or simply applying a couple of small reliability fixes such as white space trimming. Vote for it here

VS2010 Team Build Fails on x64 Build Server – Cannot find targets

I finally got everything set up this evening in my virtual environment so that I was ready to bring across some source code and start exercising the VSTS 2010 beta bits. So I imported the source for (shameless plug) the Canberra VSTS User Group website into my development VM, fixed up the MVC issues and checked in the source skeleton. Next step, define some builds to test out the gated check in and CI capabilities – with a view to also exercising the test data collection.

No sooner had I attempted my first check in, and watched with glee as the gated build initiated correctly did my happiness turn to confusion. The build had failed with a could not find targets error…

Build Target Failure

Why would that happen I wondered? Then I realised that my build server was a Windows 7 Server x64 machine. This meant the C:\Program Files it was referencing was an x64 version. Since VS is an x86 only application the build targets live in C:\Program Files(x86)\etc.

Unfortunately at this point I can’t find a way around the issue, though it’s reported on Connect (in another guise as a C++ build target failure), so go vote the issue up and hopefully a resolution will be found. As a workaround it would be nice to be able to target either the x86 or x64 Program Files paths based on the build configuration e.g. Any CPU – use default, x86 – use C:\Program Files(x86).

For now though I guess I’ll be configuring an x86 build machine!

VS2010 – Reports not working? Enhanced security may be the culprit

Playing around with the 2010 beta bits in my little virtual server world I noticed that basically anywhere I went I’d get an IE warning about site content being blocked. I didn’t really mind, being that I don’t actually allow my virtual network to have internet connectivity. That is, until I went to play with the reporting bits and couldn’t view any of my reports!

The culprit for the consistent security warnings is IE’s Enhanced Security Configuration. This little baby is designed to stop me from hurting myself by only allowing me to view ’safe’ web sites. If you’re interested in the details – this Microsoft whitepaper will get you started in the right direction. Suffice to say, it jacks up your browser security settings to the point of disabling animations and sounds and clearing your local cache when you close the browser.

IE ESC Blocked Site Screen

So – how to fix the problem? There are really 2 routes we can take. Your configuration and exposure will really dictate which suits you. Keeping in mind of course that ESC is there for a good reason (see previously linked white paper) and you should only really be taking these measures if you have a server OS operating as a client e.g. SharePoint dev machine.
The first, and most drastic way to get your reports working is to turn the enhanced security off. This can be achieved in Server 2003 by removing the component through the Add/Remove Programs menu and in Server 2008 through the server configuration utilities IE ESC config utility.

IE ESC Configuration Utility

Obviously if you’ve got internet connectivity, and/or you really want to limit your servers exposure through your browser you’ll need to find another way. This means adjusting the trust settings in IE set it up to consider your TFS site as a trusted host. The easiest way to allow access to all your TFS based sites (reporting, web access, team site) is to add the TFS host name with a wildcard mapping e.g. http://tfs2010/* to the trusted sites collection. You can either do this on a server by server basis, or you can configure it for the domain as per the instructions referenced by this knowledge base article.

So there you have it. How to get around IE’s enhanced security and get your tfs sites up and running as they should be!

Canberra VSTS User Group – Call for Speakers!

A short time ago I was talking to a friend of mine Sean Ferguson about VS2010 and some of the things I talked about at Code Camp. During the talk we spoke about how it’s a real shame that the Canberra VSTS User Group was no longer in action. After I went home that night I decided I’d get in contact with a few people and investigate what it would take to get it off the ground again. A couple of months and a fair few emails and a website later and I’m putting out a call for speakers to get content for the re-launch of the group!

Who am I looking for?

If you’ve done something interesting with VSTS, fixed a tricky issue or just have some ideas around how to get things done with any of the parts of the VSTS product suite then I’d love to hear from you.

What’s the format?

I’m looking at either formal presentations or community discussion facilitation. If you’ve got something that fits into either of these categories – make sure you contact me!

I’ve never presented before…

No problems! First time presenters are more than welcome – and are in fact, encouraged. I’m happy to help out with content and presentation reviews, and put you in touch with people with years of presentation experience if you’re after advice. The best advice I ever got was to jump in. Presentation is an extremely rewarding endeavor both personally and professionally.

How can you contact me?

There’s a couple of ways to get in contact with me. You could head over to the canberravsts.org website and use the contact form, leave a comment on this blog or contact me directly via email.

FREE Silverlight Training in Canberra

Ever wondered what this Silverlight thing is about? Have you dabbled in Silverlight, but want some more structured learning to help you move forward? Perhaps you’ve even built a site, but want to make sure you’ve covered all the bases…

If any of these sound like you and you’re in Canberra then I’ve got good news! Following the success of the free Silverlight in a day sessions around the country I’m in discussion with Jordan Knight from the Silverlight Designer and Developer Network to get one of these sessions run here in Canberra.

What do you need to do? Right now I’m taking expressions of interest. If you’d like to attend, please email me and let me know. 

Well…. What are you waiting for?

TFS and Excel – Did you know?

One of my favorite integration points for TFS is Office. Seriously! I find excel the most intuitive and natural way to work with my iteration plans, bug lists and perform general task management. Having talked to a few people about this recently it seems that a lot of the TFS and Office integration is going unused, so I decided to start a living post to catalog some of the Q & A I come across to hopefully increase the use of some of my favorite features….

1. Excel as a task entry system

Excel works really well as a list management tool. What people don’t realise is that it can also be used to create lists for publishing to TFS, and it’s really quite simple.

a. Connect to your team project in Excel and get a list of work items from a query (n.b. you can also pick the ‘Input List’ option here which will open an empty list for entry).
b. Note the empty line at the end of the list marked with a *
c. Start entering your data into the empty line, and be sure to fill out all mandatory fields (you’ll get a prompt later if you don’t, so it’s not a show stopper)
d. Once you’re done entering your new tasks, hit publish to push these back to TFS.
e. If you get a prompt regarding required fields, update your data and try publishing again.

That’s it! You’ve just added a list of work items to your Team Project!

2. Excel, TFS and Concurrency

I was doing a pre-presentation review last week, and a discussion started about the Excel and TFS concurrency model. During the discussion I was asked if 2010 addresses the issue of ‘last-in-wins’ concurrency that exists in 2008. This seemed a little strange to me as I wasn’t aware of the issue but I answered that it did – as I had seen the resolution dialogue in 2010.

Having answered the immediate question, I decided that I’d find out exactly what the case was in 2008 as looking at the work item tracking tables I didn’t see a reason that work item version changes couldn’t be identified between fetch and publish in Excel. It turns out that the concurrency model for 2008 behaves the same (on the surface at least) as that in 2010.

The behavior is that when you publish back to TFS a conflict check occurs. If a non-blocking conflict – users have edited different fields in the same work item, is detected an auto-resolution will occur and the publish will complete. If a blocking conflict – users have edited the same fields in a work item, is detected then a conflict resolution dialog will be shown. This dialog allows you to select the change you want to keep, and then to continue with the publish operation.

Conclusion

So, there’s a couple of features around Excel and TFS integration that I’ve been asked about recently. If you have any other questions on any version of the integration (including any for any of the other Office integration points) leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to get an answer!

Code Camp – VS2010 Q & A

There were a couple of questions I didn’t answer on the spot during my presentation so I thought I’d throw the answers up here for those who are interested. I’m sure there were more questions than just these, but thanks to it being early on a Monday and not having had my daily caffeine ration – they have slipped my mind for now.

If you did ask a question, and I haven’t covered it please send it through (stephen.godbold @ readify.net) and I’ll update this post with the answer.

Q: Does the manual test runner work for WinForms apps as well as web?
A: Yes. Amit Chatterjee has indicated there is support for Web, WinForms and WPF.

Q. Can you build a fully automated test from a test automation strip recorded by the manual test runner? e.g. Something to use as a basis for load tests.
A: Yes. Test automation strips can be turned into Coded UI tests which can be run in a fully automated fashion. These can also be associated with a data source, to provide coverage of a set of scenarios. See here for how to create a coded UI test (from scratch) and here for how to set them up with a data context.

Q: Will the automation work with javascripts actions? Currently Team System 2008 does not support this.
A: Yes. The recording with faithfully reproduce javascript initiated actions of both synchronous and asynchronous nature. Thanks go to Mathew Aniyan for his prompt reply on this one!