The art of simplicity

Recently I needed to check whether full-text search functionality is installed and enabled on a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database . An easy way to do this is by using the FullTextServiceProperty property. FullTextServiceProperty is a T-SQL function which return information about full-text service installed on the related Microsoft SQL Server instance. You can use FullTextServiceProperty t-sql function especially to check whether fulltext search component is installed on the current SQL Server instance and get the status of the full-text service. FullTextServiceProperty function uses the property name as an input parameter. There are 2 properties available that can be used with fulltextserviceproperty function: IsFullTextInstalled : If you pass this property as an input to the FullTextServiceProperty the returned value will be an indicator whether full-text component is installed on the related instance of Microsoft SQL Server instance. Possible return values are 1, 0 and NULL...

For the people who never look at the NHibernate trunk , since December 2009 a new and improved Linq provider is available. Using the new Linq provider is pretty simple. It all hangs of a Query() extension method on ISession, so you can do things like the following: 1: from c in session.Query<Customer>() select c I tried it out for some time and every query I could imagine worked. Great work!

·When you use reflection to load and run assemblies, you cannot use language features like the C# += operator or the Visual Basic AddHandler statement to hook up events. This MSDN document ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228976.aspx ) shows how to link an existing method to an event by getting all the necessary types through reflection and how to create a dynamic method using reflection emit and link it to an event. A sample: 1: // Load an assembly, for example using the Assembly.Load 2: // method. In this case, the executing assembly is loaded, to 3: // keep the demonstration simple. 4: // 5: Assembly assem = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); 6:   7: // Get the type that is to be loaded, and create an instance 8: // of it. Activator.CreateInstance has other overloads, if 9: // the type lacks a default constructor. The new instance 10: // is stored as type Objec...

If you are using the great Scrum For Team System template inside Visual Studio 2010, there are some important things to remember. First of all, try to use the included ScrumMaster WorkBench tool. This makes managing releases, sprints, sprint backlog items, … a lot easier. If you are not using this tool, it’s important to know that the template is really peculiar on how you structure your iterations and link them to workitems. If you do this incorrectly, you end up with empty reports. To make sure that everything works correctly, structure your workitems like this: Release Work Items (Level 2) Must be associated to iteration path nodes at the level two branch depth. Sprint Work Items (Level 4) Must be association to iteration path nodes at the forth level depth. Team Sprint Work Items (Level 5) Must be association to iteration path nodes at the fifth level depth

The long waited release of Enterprise Library 5 is available on the Codeplex site. Although the current feature list looks not that different from previous versions, a massive refactoring is done on all the Application Blocks to work with Unity and  dropping the old ObjectBuilder library. Also the configuration tool is now implemented in WPF . Another nice addition is the new  programmatic configuration support via fluent interface which make writing configuration in code more intuitive. This is especially useful if you want to get rid of the massive amount of XML configuration and start introducing some Convention over Configuration . You can download Enterprise Library 5 from here .

On Tuesday, April 27, I’m giving a live webcast about Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 . During this webcast, you will discover that combining Visual Studio Team Foundation Server with Visual Studio, you can apply proven practices to manage your application's lifecycle, from understanding customer needs through code design and implementation to deployment. You can use the instrumentation in these tools to trace requirements to checked-in code, builds and test results. More information and registration here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032447674&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

In TFS 2008 you could export and import workitem types using the witimport and witexport tool. In TFS2010 these tools are gone and replaced by the witadmin tool.