The art of simplicity

Microsoft announced some important improvements in the Visual Studio 2012 Web Deploy . I noticed that when you install the new Windows Azure SDK for Visual Studio 2010 , you will also get the same updates for the Visual Studio 2010 Web Publishing Experience. These updates include some of the following  features: Updated Web Publish dialog Support to import publish profiles ( .publishSettings files ) Support to configure EF Code First migrations during publish Support to create web packages in the publish dialog Publish profiles now a part of the project and stored in version control by default Publish profiles are now MSBuild files Profile specific web.config transforms After installing the SDK, you get a new Publish dialog: You can now import a .publishsettings file(provided by many web host sites and by Windows Azure) and you can also manage your publish profiles. One of the things I like the most is that these publish profiles are now st...

When you try to add items to TFSsource control, it automatically excludes certain folders and files: But what if you want to change the default list of excluded folders and files? In Visual Studio 2010 you can do this by changing the following two registry keys: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\AddOptions\ExcludeMasks HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\AddOptions\ExcludeMasks Add or remove some items from the list separated by a semicolon. Next time you’ll open Visual Studio, the list will be changed.

Last week at Community Day 2012 , in his session Little productivity tools every professional developer should know about , Dennis Doomen shared a great tip about one of the cool features inside OneNote.  OneNote automatically does an OCR scan on anything you inserted into OneNote. Right-clicking on any picture or screenshot you inserted. Select “Make Text in Image Searchable” and then make sure the correct language is selected. Now, you can copy text from the Picture. Simply right-click on the picture, and select “Copy Text from Picture”. To make this even cooler, OneNote will index all OCR results and make them available through the search function.  Simply enter your search query in the search box on top right, and OneNote will automatically find all instances of that term in all of your notebooks. It even highlights the search term in the image! Thanks Dennis for the great tips!

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices team released a new document about ‘Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 RC’ . “This guide describes how testing has been changing over the years and how the testing infrastructure you can build with Visual Studio 2012 RC will help you achieve continuous delivery of your software projects. This guide provides an end-to-end walkthrough of the testing scenarios supported by the Visual Studio 2012 RC infrastructure. It will help testers and developers use Team Foundation Server effectively as an application lifecycle management solution for testing and supporting products. This guide helps you Understand how testing is changing with the new tools available to testers. Set up the testing infrastructure. Use the tools for unit testing. Understand how the lab environment works and how it supports a project. Understand the power of the manual testing tools. Learn to use the tools for auto...

The moment you think you’ve seen all possible NHibernate errors, a new one pops up . A colleague asked me to have a look at a query he created using the QueryOver syntax. But instead of getting the correct results, the query failed with the following error message: “Possible non-threadsafe access to the session.” I was 100% sure that we were working on a single thread, so I had no idea what caused this error. Even stranger is that when I switched from an  IStatelessSession to a normal ISession, the error disappeared… The NHibernate JIRA brought the solution: In a stateless session, queries load objects in a two-phase process: in the first phase, a temporary persistence context is populated with empty objects; in the second phase, the objects' member data is read from the database. If an object contains an association or a collection, the query performs a recursive call to the session's get() method. This clears the temporary persistence context. If the p...

For a recent project we hired a design agency to help us create and design an attractive user interface for our users. So after some meetings with our end users, a few weeks of designer magic, the big moment was there, they going to present us ‘THE DESIGN’. So I entered the meeting full of anticipation, eager to learn about the cool things the designers have created. So after a few PowerPoint slides, we got to see nicely designed and polished screens of our user interface, followed by the obvious question; “And guys, what do you think?”. There wasn’t much we could say, it certainly looked nice and the whole design was finished. But it doesn’t seem there was much room left for discussion or change. After leaving the meeting, I didn’t feel satisfied. Although the result looked good, something was missing… Last week at NDC I had to think again about this meeting when I was following the Creating User Experiences: Unlocking the Invisible Cage session by Billy Hollis. In this sessi...

If you missed our session at Community Day 2012 or you want to get the slides, I’ve uploaded the presentation to Slideshare. I want to thank Gill and co for the speaking opportunity and Kristof Mattei to help me making this a great session! Git(hub) for windows developers View more presentations from bwullems .