The art of simplicity

Microsoft has partnered with the folks at http://www.symbolsource.org/ to offer a really simple way of publishing your sources and PDB’s along with your NuGet package. Up until now, there really wasn’t a great way for package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. The user would have needed to download the sources separately from wherever the project is hosted, making sure that they exactly match the state of the binary. They would also need to locate the matching PDBs. That’s pretty hard to get right, and most users would generally not bother. Now with almost no additional effort, package authors can publish their symbols and sources, and package consumers can debug into them from Visual Studio. For more information, check out David Ebbo’s blog .

During the Easter holidays I’m trying to catch up with all the great content that was announced at MIX 11. Two very interesting improvements that Windows Phone users and developers can expect with the new Marketplace and App Hub in the Mango timeframe is focused on enterprise development. The first one is the Beta Distribution Service. This allows developers to distribute pre-certified apps to an access-controlled set of beta users. How does it work? The developer selects a list of up to 100 testers.( This number will probably change). Developer sends an email to the designated testers that includes a private deeplink that points to the app in the Marketplace. This allows only the testers to access and download the content since the app is not discoverable in the Marketplace via Search. Only testers selected in the App Hub based on their Windows Live ID can test the app and provide feedback for 90 days. The beta cannot be updated. If you have multiple updates based...

Are you using Team Foundation Server and MS Project Server today? Want to learn how you can make these 2 products work together? You can now try the Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack yourself. Just download the new virtual machine that is now available .  It has everything you need to start working with the integration between Project Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1. A lot of work by a good group of people has gone in to get this VM out and now it should be super easy to learn & play with the integration. Not only is everything setup and configured already (which is half the battle when trying out new things) but you also get: Four hands on labs that walk through the main scenarios that are supported by the integration. Tons of sample active directory users that are available in both Team Foundation Server and the Project Server Enterprise Resource Pool that allow you to setup lots of different scenarios. Sampl...

Today I’m giving a session at TechDays Belgium , were I have the pleasure to announce the first release(actually 1.1) of the Ordina TFS Monitor tool.  TFS Monitor is a free Windows Phone 7 application that I have developed together with the Ordina ALM team. With TFS Monitor all the data available inside your Team Foundation Server environment becomes available anywhere you are. Use your Windows Phone 7 device to connect to the Ordina TFS server and get always the most up to date information. Thanks to the support of push notifications, you even get notified when important events happen inside the TFS environment. Features The current version of the TFS Monitor app offers the following features: Real time push notifications of TFS build, checkin and workitem events Overview of your projects List of work items Work item Details List of builds Build Details Events overview Screenshots Download TFS Monitor for free here or use the Windows Phone marketplace. More in...

If you have installed the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update , you’ll get a new project template called Intranet Application. The main difference between internet and intranet application templates is the way how users are authenticated. Let’s have a look at the difference compared to the default (Internet) template. Start by creating a new ASP.NET MVC 3 web application. Select the Intranet Application as template. You’ll see that the Intranet application is a practically empty web application with a home controller and Windows authentication in the web.config.  Now before you can start using the Windows authentication you’ll need to do some extra configuration: If you are using IIS Express(recommended) then follow these steps: Right click on the project in Visual Studio and select Use IIS Express. Click on your project in the Solution Explorer to select the project. If the Properties pane is not open, make sure to open it (F4). In the Properties pane for your proj...

Last week Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1. This is a platform update that is a set of new features that provides additional functionality for top customer requests and important scenarios. The features that are enabled in this update are: Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) State machine workflows New classes added: StateMachine , State , FinalState , Transition , StateMachineStateQuery , StateMachineStateRecord Getting Started Tutorial: How to Create a State Machine Workflow Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Introduction to State Machine Hands On Lab State Machine Activity Designers State Machine Workflows WF4 State Machine User Experience SqlWorkflowInstanceStore support for SQL Azure The scripts that create the persistence database are mo...

As a consultant I’m mostly assigned on jobs in the architect role. So I’m actually talking against my own function here. Nevertheless I want to share my opinion. During an intake I had a discussion with the interviewer(never a good idea) about the role of an architect. In their organisation an (application) architect only creates the software architecture and then throws his solution over the wall to the development team. What’s even worse is that the original architect takes only a cursory glimpse at the progress from time to time. This made me wonder how they knew that their software architecture was working as expected. Apparently that wasn’t important, it is up to the development team to implement the architecture ‘correctly’. A successful software project requires the initial vision to be understood, communicated and potentially evolved throughout the entirety of the software development lifecycle. For this reason alone, it doesn't make sense for one person to create that ...

At the MIX 2011 a lot of announcements were made. So it’s my duty to highlight some of the stuff that is coming to us in the near future. No long explanation, just everything you need to know about ‘Mango’: General update is schedule for the fall all existing phones and new phones will get the update 16 additional languages will be supported more countries where we can create apps (from 30 to 38) more countries where we can buy apps (from 16 to 35) Marketplace / Search better apps list: filter by letters (like with the contacts) new search button to search for a particular app better marketplace more information with less confusion (music and apps are no longer mixed) search for podcasts new “related” pivot item when seeing an app for related app we can integrate an app with the search feature of the phone Web Experience the update include IE9 the core engine is the same code base that the on...

At the MIX 2011 a lot of announcements were made. So it’s my duty to highlight some of the stuff that is coming to us in the near future. Next to all the new functionality I’ve blogged about before, there is also some very interesting news in terms of licensing and offering: The extension of the expiration date and increases to the amount of free storage, storage transactions and data transfers in the Windows Azure Introductory Special offer. This promotional offer now includes 750 hours of extra-small instances and 25 hours of small instances of the Windows Azure service, 20GB of storage, 50K of storage transactions, and 40GB of data transfers provided each month at no charge until September 30, 2011. More information can be found here . An existing customer who signed up for the original Windows Azure Introductory Special offer will get a free upgrade as of today. An existing customer who signed up for a different offer (other than the Windows Azure Introductory S...

At the MIX 2011 a lot of announcements were made. So it’s my duty to highlight some of the stuff that is coming to us in the near future. New & Updated Windows Azure Features An update to the Windows Azure SDK that includes a Web Deployment Tool to simplify the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites. This new tool integrates with Visual Studio 2010 and the Web Platform Installer. Get the tools from Download Windows Azure SDK . A community technology preview (CTP) of Windows Azure Traffic Manager , a new service that allows Windows Azure customers to more easily balance application performance across multiple geographies. To get the CTP, see the Windows Azure Traffic Manager section of Windows Azure Virtual Network . A preview of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming capabilities, which allows developers to upload IIS Smooth Streaming-encoded video to a...

Together with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1 Microsoft also released the TFS Project Server Integration Feature Pack(what a name!). You can download the feature pack from the MSDN subscribers site. This feature pack enables teams to work together more effectively by: Providing up to date insight into portfolio execution, alignment with strategic objectives, and resource utilization of software development projects by leveraging the quantitative data stored in different systems. Automating the exchange and sharing of project information across teams and improving coordination between teams using disparate methodologies, like waterfall and agile, via common data and agreed upon metrics. Enabling development and project management teams to use familiar tools to collaborate and communicate project timeline and progress such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Project, and SharePoint. As I got some questions about the licensing aspect, here is what you...

Interested in developing for the Windows Phone but you don’t know where to start? I found this material , created by Rob Miles, it’s an introduction to Windows Phone development for anyone learning to program. It contains 8 sections with labs, PowerPoint presentations, demos and detailed notes. So if you really want to start from scratch, a must read!

With the renewed interest in jQuery and AJAX,  we sooner or later need to check some JSON results. Just opening the browser and typing the url will not result in some JSON  directly in the browser(with the exception of Chrome). Enter JSONView which allows you to simply display JSON results directly in the browser. Normally when encountering a JSON document content type "application/json", Firefox simply prompts you to download the file. With the JSONView extension, JSON documents are shown in the browser similar to how XML documents are shown. The document is formatted, highlighted, and arrays and objects can be collapsed. Even if the JSON document contains errors, JSONView will still show the raw text. Note that this is a Firefox add in. To get a similar experience in IE to you can add a Mime type mapping in the registry: Create a new application/json key in: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\ContentType\ application/json Add a string...

I created a page route to integrate my MVC application with a WebForms page that exist in my project: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); // register the report route routes.MapPageRoute("Reports","Reports","~/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx"); routes.MapRoute("Default","{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }); } This works when browsing to the specific url’s. However, I noticed this route created a problem whenever I use an  Html.ActionLink in my Views: <%: Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home") %> When I load the page in the browser the link appears like: http://localhost:12345/reports/test?action=Index&controller=Home Unfortunately I can't place the route at the bottom, since the webform route has more specific par...

Last week I noticed the release of a nice Team Explorer extension, the Build Explorer . This tool allows you to organize your build definitions in a very simple way. By following a specific naming convention for build definitions parts of the name are presented as folders. So, for instance, a build definition called ALM.TFS.Gated would be rendered as: The “.” is a separator character (and is configurable, of course). The source code are published at http://tfsbuildfolders.codeplex.com .

For one Team Project in Team Foundation Server, we noticed that every build definition we created failed with the following error: “TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \TestTeamProject\New Build Definition 1: TF214007: No build was found with the URI vstfs:///Build/Build/56720. Either the URI does not exist, or domain\tfsserviceuser does not have permission to access it.” If you read the description, there are 2 reasons why this can happen: The build URI does not exists. (Every build gets a unique URI assigned.)  The user does not have the permission to access the build definition» We solved the issue by adding the tfs build user to the TeamProject’s [Build Services] group. Still a little bit weird because I didn’t had to do this for other projects…

In a WP7 application we are building we have a databound pivot control: <controls:Pivot x:Name="Pivoter" Title="{Binding Title}" TitleTemplate="{StaticResource PivotTitleTemplate}" HeaderTemplate="{StaticResource PivotHeaderTemplate}" ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource DisplayItemDataTemplate}"> </controls:Pivot > The Items property we are binding to is an observablecollection . When the page is displayed it creates all of the pivot items but the first item does not get created unless I scroll forward and back to it. It has an entry in the scroll list but no PivotItem control. I couldn’t find a good reason what causes this, but I have a workaround. By setting the pivot-controls SelectedIndex to 1 in the page-loaded-event, it magically started working. Its not an ideal solution, but it works.

Interested in learning F#?  This will become your first learning source: the Try F# website ! TryF# is a new tool from Microsoft Research Connections that enables the learning of the F# programming language in an interactive browser-based environment. TryF# makes F# accessible to users with Windows and Macs when using common browsers, and the team are actively working on Linux support as well. TryF# also has an online training tool to introduce users to F# and it provides a portal for information about the language and its growing community, linking them through Facebook and Twitter. Go to www.tryfsharp.org

One of the criteria to publish your application to the MarketPlace is that you include a screenshot in PNG format with dimensions 480x800 pixels. And yes, it must be exactly this size. So I used the free snipping tool inside Windows 7 to take a “Window snip” from inside the emulator. Unfortunately this snip wasn’t the correct size. Don’t open Photoshop or Paint.NET and start resizing your image. Instead hover over the emulator and click the zoom icon that appears on the right. Change the zoom level to 100%  and capture the image again. This gives you a pixel-perfect image to upload to MarketPlace. Note: An even simpler solution is downloading the WP7 screenshot tool .

When trying to deploy a WP7 app  inside Visual Studio to the device, it suddenly started to fail with the following error: “Error - This operation returned because the timeout period expired.” Same problem when using the deployment tool. Restarting my phone, restarting my pc,… nothing worked. So I started to think what was different then before. I realized that my Wi-Fi connection was enabled on the Phone. Could that be the problem? So I disabled Wi-Fi again, tried to deploy and indeed this time it worked!

While debugging my Windows Phone 7 app in the emulator, each time the application was tombstoned or closed, the following exception was raised: An error occurred while accessing IsolatedStorage. at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageSecurityState.EnsureState() at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.get_AvailableFreeSpace() at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageSettings.Save() at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageSettings.TrySave() at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageSettings.SaveAllSettings() at MS.Internal.FrameworkCallbacks.ShutdownAllPeers() The error is clear, there is a problem with accessing the IsolatedStorage. But why? If I didn’t debug the application or when I deployed to a real phone, I never noticed the issue. So I hope it’s related to a bug in the emulator. .. Anyone out there who is having the same problem?

As an application architect, Visio is just one other tool in my toolbox to express application designs and architectures. After re-installing Visio I noticed that some shapes I was using before were gone. I knew that I downloaded them from somewhere but no idea where I got them. Visio shapes are stored in what is called Microsoft Office Visio stencils. (If you search on Visio stencils, you’ll find a lot of free shapes). The one I was interested in was part of the Microsoft Exchange stencil, available for free here . After downloading, execute the file. A folder is created with 2 files(MicrosoftExchangeServer2007_Icons.vst and MicrosoftExchangeServer2007_Icons.vss). Copy these 2 files in your local My Documents\My Shapes folder. In Visio, click File, click Open, and then go to your My Shapes folder. Open the MicrosoftExchangeServer2007_Icons.vst file. The shapes will appear in the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 stencil in the Shapes pane.

With the large amount of updates and new tools that Microsoft keeps throwing at us, you sometimes miss one. One recent updated that I just noticed, was an update of the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit. You can download the Training Kit by going here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en Or if you want to view it online, you can go here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/VS2010TrainingCourse All content has been tested to work with Visual Studio 2010 SP1. The setup scripts for all hands-on labs and demo scripts have also been updated so that the content can easily be used on a machine running Windows 7 SP1. And finally a list of the new content: Silverlight 4 Hands-on Lab - Migrating a Windows Forms Application to Silverlight Hands-on Lab - Migrating an ASP.NET Web Forms Application to Silverlight Hands-on Lab - Working with Panels, XAML and Controls Hands-on Lab - Silverlight D...

Building WP7 apps is fun and challenging. Every tip that can help improving the application experience is welcome! Jeff Wilcox, the creator of the 4th & Major app , published a checklist with some great tips focussing on the Windows Phone user interface.

The Azure Drive feature gives you access to data contained in an an NTFS-formatted virtual hard disk (VHD) persisted as a page blob in Azure Storage. Important to notice is that although you can access the drive using normal IO code, it is NOT a shared disk between all your Windows Azure instances. Only a single Azure instance can mount a page blob for read/write access as an Azure Drive. However, multiple Azure instances can mount a snapshot of a page blob for read-only access as an Azure Drive. Mounting a VHD as an Azure drive The VHD for an Azure Drive must be a fixed hard disk image formatted as a single NTFS volume. It must be between 16MB and 1TB in size. A VHD is a single file comprising a data portion followed by a 512 byte footer.  When uploading a VHD it is consequently important to remember to upload the footer. Furthermore, since pages of a page blob are initialized to 0 it is not necessary to upload pages in which all the bytes are 0. This could save a significant am...