The art of simplicity

On the TFS 2012 Product Backlog page on the Web Access, you’ll find the quick add panel, a fast and easy way to add new work items to your product backlog. By default, you can only specify a Title field but it is possible to customize it and add more fields. Here are the required steps to customize the panel: Open a command line console and navigate to the Visual Studio Common7\IDE folder(or open a Developer Command prompt for VS2012). Call the Witadmin tool with the exportagileprocessconfig option to export the agile process configuration file. witadmin exportagileprocessconfig /collection:http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/defaultcollection /p:ProjectName /f:c:\agileconfig.xml Open the exported xml file and locate the AddPanel element. Add a field element that specifies the reference name of the TFS field that you want to add to the panel. Save the file Call the Witadmin tool again but this time with the importagileprocessconfig option to import t...

Effort offers a solution for the hard to (unit)test Data Access Logic in your application. Effort is basically an ADO.NET provider that executes all the data operations on a lightweight in-process main memory database instead of a traditional external database. From the Codeplex site: What is Effort? Effort is an easy-to-use tool that enables a robust way of testability for applications that rely on Entity Framework. Where does the name come from? Effort is an acronym of E ntity F ramework F ake O bjectContext R ealization T ool. Obviously it is also able to work with DbContext objects. How does it work? It emulates the relational database server with a completely .NET based lightweight in-memory database. All the data operations are redirected to it, so the tests can run completely in-process. Getting started Create an Entity Framework DbContext like you’re used to(Model First, Code First,… it doesn’t matter): Add a second con...

If you like the Windows 8 ‘Metro’ UX and you want to provide a similar experience in your web applications, go have a look at the Cosmo   Bootstrap theme. It contains a set of customized fonts, navigation bars, buttons, forms, and so on…

Despite the simplicity of Entity Framework, NHibernate or other ORM solutions, sooner or later you still have to write some SQL(unless you are using a NoSQL solution of course). If you lack some SQL knowledge, go have a look at SQLisHard.com . SQLisHard.com provides guided, interactive exercises to help you learn T-SQL against a live SQL Server database.

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Team Foundation Server 2012 introduced the concept of local workspaces . A local workspace offers several advantages compared to a server workspace.  It allows you to work offline easily. You can perform core version control operations even when you're not connected to your Team Foundation Server. By default certain types of files (for example, .dll files) are ignored by version control(this information is stored in the registry). So if you want to change the list of files that are excluded, you can change the registry key. However this is not the only way: you can also specify which kinds of files are ignored by placing text file called .tfignore in the folder where you want rules to apply. The effects of the .tfignore file are recursive. However, you can create .tfignore files in sub-folders to override the effects of a .tfignore file in a parent folder.(This is similar to what a .gitignore file does in GIT) The following rules apply to a .tfignore file: # begins...

To reorganize the disk usage on our Team Foundation Server, I decided to move the TFS cache folder to a different location. TFS uses a specific folder to cache files that are under version control on the application-tier server. By default, this cache is enabled so that users can download files more quickly from the cache instead of directly from the database. To change the cache location execute the following steps: Create a new folder on the application tier. Give the TFS_APPTIER_SERVICE_WPG local group Modify permissions on this folder . Go to the web.config path of the TFS webservices(by default this is %programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012\Application Tier\Web Services). In the appSettings section add a line that points to the folder we created: <add key="dataDirectory" value="NewCacheRootFolderLocation" /> Save the file. Do an IISReset. More information can be found on http://msdn.microsoft.com/e...