The art of simplicity

Last week, when I was checking the outputs of a failing build, I found another nice new feature in Team Foundation Server 2012. The build activity log is now combined with a nice xsl file, which gives you a formatted output when you open the ActivityLog.xml directly from the File Explorer. So you no longer need to open up Visual Studio to see all the things that happened. Nice!

Team Foundation Server gives you a rich set of reporting data available through reporting services and excel reports. If these out-of-the-box reports are not sufficient for you, you can always connect directly to the TFS data warehouse. Microsoft did a great job in improving the data warehouse structure to make it easy to browse through all available info and create your own queries. The easiest way to do this is by using the Analysis services integration in Microsoft Excel. Just follow the wizard and you get all the data you’ll ever need… However there is one extra step you need to do before users can complete this wizard successfully, you must grant these users read access to the databases that make up the data warehouse. You can grant access to the analysis services database, the relational database, or both, depending on what types of reports will be created. To grant a user or group read access to the analysis services database On the Start menu, point to All Progr...

Interested in testing all the new features in Windows 8 and/or Windows Azure? But you don’t want to spend a day installing all required prerequisites? Then the MSDN Virtual Labs are the solution you need. They enable you to quickly evaluate and test Microsoft's newest products and technologies through a series of guided, hands-on labs that you can complete in 90 minutes or less. There is no complex setup or installation required, and best of all, it’s free! Windows 8 Virtual Labs Lab 1 for C# - Creating a Windows 8 App Contoso Cookbook is a series of hands on labs designed to immerse you into Windows 8 app development. In this first lab in the series, you will use XAML and C# to create the application, implement navigation, download the data from Windows Azure (or load it locally if you don’t have an Internet connection), and connect the data to controls using data binding. Lab 2 for C# - Orientation, Snapping, and Semantic Zoom In this lab, you will build...

One of the optimizations you get for free in the new .NET Framework 4.5 release is Multicore JIT compilation.  Today, the assumption is that you have at least two processors. This feature takes advantage of this extra processing power by using parallelization to reduce the JIT compilation time during application startup. If you want to get all the details, check the following post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2012/10/18/an-easy-solution-for-improving-app-launch-performance.aspx Enable Multicore JIT for your ASP.NET web applications For your ASP.NET web applications it’s easy, you have to do nothing . Once your application/webserver is upgraded to ASP.NET 4.5, your application start up will go faster. Microsoft took into consideration that ASP.NET applications runs in a hosted environment, so they turned on Multicore JIT for these applications automatically. So if you're running ASP.NET 4.5, you don't have to do any extra work to turn on Multicore JIT. If you want...

The ALM Rangers have released their new Branching and Merging Guide . Release notes: What is new? The Version Control specific discussions have been moved from the Branching and Merging Guide to the new Advanced Version Control Guide. The Branching and Merging Guide and the Advanced Version Control Guide have been ported to the new document style . See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2012/10/17/alm-rangers-raising-the-quality-bar-for-documentation-part-2.aspx for more information. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording team All critical bugs have been resolved For more information on this project, please visit the Codeplex project.

Last week I discovered http://www.cqrs.nu/ ,  a great site if you are interested in CQRS and have lots of questions. “ The ideas around CQRS are fascinating, but different enough from the way we do conventional development that some questions come up again and again. This page collect a number of such questions that we've encountered, and attempts to give accurate and satisfactory answers to them.”

With the release of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012, it becomes a lot easier to use other test frameworks than MS Test. Now it becomes possible to run NUnit, XUnit,… tests directly from Visual Studio using the same tooling and interface. But how do you configure your build server to run these tests? Download the NUnit Test Adapter from the Visual Studio Gallery( http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/6ab922d0-21c0-4f06-ab5f-4ecd1fe7175d ). Install the adapter vsix on all your build servers. Add the nunit.core.dll, nunit.core.interfaces.dll, nunit.util.dll and NUnit.VisualStudio.TestAdapter.dll to a folder in source control. Set this folder as the Version control path to custom assemblies. This can be managed by clicking “Manage Build Controllers” on the Build menu. Click on properties and set the correct path in version control. Using VS 2012, edit your build definition, go to “Process”, click on “Test Source”, and then click on...