The art of simplicity

Last week Scott Guthrie announced the release of the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update. This release not only offers some really nice new features for ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and the web tooling in Visual Studio, but also adds some nice improvements to Web Deploy . (For the full list of new features, have a look at the release notes ).  What’s new? First of all, Web site projects now have the same publishing experience as Web Application projects including publishing to Windows Azure Web Sites.  Selective publish – for one or more files you can perform the following actions (after publishing to a Web Deploy endpoint): Publish selected files. See the difference between a local file and a remote file. (this even works for images!) Update the local file with the remote file or update the remote file with the local file. Apply config transformations on the publish profile next to the build profil...

One of the hardest parts of a DBA’s job, is keeping the data quality of the databases good over time. You would expect that only correct data is entered into the system, but we are all humans, so mistakes happen… A powerful tool that  can help your DBA’s detect and prevent data quality issues is Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services (DQS). DQS is a knowledge-driven solution that provides both computer-assisted and interactive ways to manage the integrity and quality of your data sources. DQS enables you to discover, build, and manage knowledge about your data. You can then use that knowledge to perform data cleansing, matching, and profiling. You can also leverage the cloud-based services of reference data providers in a DQS data-quality project. From MSDN : DQS provides the following features to resolve data quality issues. Data Cleansing: the modification, removal, or enrichment of data that is incorrect or incomplete, using both computer-assi...

For an application we build for a customer, a new feature had to be added. The application calls a 3th party web service and logs all XML messages for auditing purposes. Now the users were asking for an easy way to see these XML messages in a more readable format, preferably nicely integrated into the application. This is a perfect fit for XSL transformations, so we decided to integrate a WebBrowser control into our application and load the XMLs after applying the XSL transformation.

Last week, when listening to DotNetRocks , I heard about the TFS Administrators Toolkit . TFS Administrators Toolkit for VS2012 TFS Administrators toolkit is a set of tools primarily focused on easing the burdon of tfs admins Features and benefits Subscriptions List and filter existing subscriptions - server wide, Unsubscribe existing subscriptions. Find In Files Search for text or regexp in files (and all file versions) in source control. For more info please refer to http://mskold.blogspot.se/2012/09/find-in-files-new-feature-of-tfs.html Test Attachment Sizes List test attachment size per team project, what kind and extensions, Clean projects directly from the UI by calling Test Attachment Cleaner. For more info please refer to http://mskold.blogspot.se/2012/05/test-attachments-sizes-new-feature-of.html Update reports Push new reports from a template to selected team project. Update Work Item ...

One of the new features in Team Foundation Server 2012, is the Microsoft Feedback Client ; an easy way to allow your users to give feedback on specific functionality of your applications. This all works fine when you created a new project in TFS 2012, but what if you want to use this feature on an existing project? I f you try to open the Feedback Client for an existing project, it will fail with a similar error message: The team project ProjectName does not support Microsoft Feedback Client. The team project configuration does not contain valid entry for 'Microsoft.FeedbackRequestCategory'. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator. For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=223624 . How can we fix this? Open a command prompt Browse to the following location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE. Export the categories.xml file: witadmin exportc ategories /collection:" collection ur...

Team Foundation Server always offered a rich extensibility model. It is very easy to create your extensions. The only problem was how to get these extensions to your users. But this can change… Martin Hinshelwood started the idea to simplify this process(think ‘NuGet for Team Foundation Server Extensions’). These are the key integration points he wants to cover: TF Job – These jobs can be schedules or one off and run within the context of the TFS Server Itself. They are a compiled DLL that has to be deployed to a particular folder on the TF Server in order to be loaded and registered with TFS. TF Event Sink – Events are fired on the TF Server as a result of Work Item, Build, Source Code changes and implement the ISubscriber interface. Again they need to have the containing DLL dropped into the correct folder on the TF Server. Custom Controls – Sometimes you want to extend the UI of work items capability to display data and this requires both server side and client ...

Last week I had to serialize a class. The important thing was that I wanted to serialize all values except one. Most of the time I use the following construct: The [NonSerialized] attribute is only supported on field types, so I had to find another solution. As I was serializing to XML, I decided to use [XMLIgnore] as an alternative: