I stumbled across a very startling blog post by Paul Wilson while reading my feeds today. It turns out that VS2003 will not be supported in Vista and VS2005 is not yet completely supported. I guess I was naive in assuming that both would work fine on the new OS but apparently there are going to be some issues. Im not sure how this will effect my move from XP @ home, but Im absolutely positive that most of our offices are not going to make the switch in a quite a long time.

Check out Paul's blog post

It is interesting to read all of the heated comments in reference to his post.

One of the things that I have noticed about LLBLGen Pro Version 2.0 is that, post installation, the LLBLGenProDataSource control is not added to your control. In my opnion one of the most important additions to the second version for LLBL is the fact that it supports the ObjectDataSource control model, but the control is only useful in your organization if people use it in development.

The following is a summary of how to add the DataSource control to your Toolbox:

1 .Right click toolbar and choose items. (Loading the choose items dialog may take a few moments)

2. On the choose items dialog click Browse

3.Locate the SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses.NET20.dll and select open.

4. The choose items list has now been updated.

Sort the list by name and check the box next to LLBLGenProDataSource. (note both of the Datasources will select automatically).

Select OK and view the new items on your toolbar.

It turns out that we have installed the TFS Workgroup edition which translates to the fact that we can have a maximum of 5 registered users on our TFS environment. I guess I should have done a little more research into the licensing issues involved with our MSDN subscriptions but it was such an interesting opportunity to:
1. Install TFS and get it up and running with all of its individual components.
2. Convince our department that a move toward this technology would be a step in the right direction.
3. Gain access to a pilot project which would be used as both a model for future projects and a platform for learning all of the ins-and-outs of using TFS throughout the entire lifecycle of a software product.

From here, we are going to have to look at the different licensing options and choose the best option for out team. The one biggest concern that I have is that the workgroup edition will not be updateable.

More info:

Don't Install Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition!!!
MSDN Subscriptions Chart
Rick LaPlante's WebLog Post
Eric Hammersley's WebLog Post
Rob Caron's WebLog Post
Team System Licensing Whitepaper
How to upgrade TFS Workgroup Edition

Here is an older post from Scott Guthrie with several tips, tricks, recipes, and gotchas regarding ASP.NET 2.0. Topics include:

• User Interface
• Data
• Security
• Visual Studio
• Deployment
• Performance

Click here to check it out.

Ive been waiting for quite some time to hear a proposed release date for Atlas. Early users adopters will need to change some of their existing code to accomidate for some of the naming changes. See Scott Guthrie's blog post here.

Links:

• Atlas Homepage
• Atlas Overview
• Free Atlas Videos

Team Foudation Power Toys is a great collection of tools which are freely available for TFS.

Great features include:

• Annotate - IDE supported feature which allows you to view who last changed the contents of the your project's source files. Never will you have to wonder who is responsible for that ridiculous defect which you were forced to fix.
• TreeDiff - IDE supported feature which allows you to compare the difference in content between two different folders (ie. your local working folders and the server folders).
• And many more
  

Download Team Foundation Power Toys @ http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5431080

More details can be found @

• http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/09/07/74...
• http://blogs.msdn.com/csell/archive/2006/06/21/641...

There are a number of great features in Microsofts Team System Suit and Team Foundation Server components. Of course there are the obvious advantages for the automated, process level, toolset which we gain with the integration of the numerous Microsoft components (Sql Server, Reporting Services, Sharepoint Services, Visual Studio 2005), but the customization of the framework is great as well.

The obvious benefits for TFS is can be found from the top down. Upper management has a newfound lookout tower over all of their projects, project management has more control over the project, and the developers have all of the new cool tools without all of the manual work. However, the customization of the TFS work items, policies, and practices, in my opinion, is will be what standardizes its use across all the industry.

That being said, I found some great blog posts on customizing the checkin policies:

Basic overview of customizing checkin-polices from MSDN.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181281....

Marcel de Vries has a great post describing an overview of the building a new policy.
http://blogs.infosupport.com/marcelv/pages/CustomP...

Some code samples from another post.
http://blogs.infosupport.com/marcelv/pages/CustomP...

And yet another .zip containing the source and solution for a comment required policy.
http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/teamsystem/archiv...

So today I installed Team Foundation Build on our Team Foundation Server. Due to the fact that our team size is less than 25 people we decided to go with a single server installation. As of right now, we only have a single project in TFS with only 3-5 active users at any given moment. That being said, the installation for the Build server was cake which is more than I can say for all the hoops that I had to jump through in order to install of the components for TFS. After the installation, I created and ran a standard build, but the build failed.

Error Message:

Solution: , Project: <YourSolutionName>, Compilation errors and warnings

<BuildLocation>\<WebApplicationProject>.csproj(477,11): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

Turns out that this is a known Web Application Project issue.

Issue 6 - Using TFS Team Build
The May 2006 release of Web Application Projects supports building with Team Build on a Team Foundation Server (TFS). However, you will need to manually add the "Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" file to your Team Foundation Server for it to work.

1. On the computer running Team Build, navigate to the "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0" directory.
2. In this directory create a "WebApplications" directory.
3. Place the "Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" file in the "WebApplications" directory. This file can be found at the same location on your developer system that has been updated with the May 2006 release of Web Application Projects.

After performing these steps Team Build should be able to successfully build a web-project build with the new Web Application Project type.

Additionally, if you have an older version of a Web Application Project, you will need to add the WebApplication.targets line (shown in blue and bold) after the normal CSharp.targets or VBasic.targets line in your .csproj or .vbproj file (all new or newly migrated projects will have this line automatically).

<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\
v8.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" />

After copying the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file the build worked perfect.

Ever since I began working with Visual Studio 2005 I have been making all of my web projects with the Web Application Project Add-In, it seems that one can easily forget that there were are a number of known issues with this great Add-In.

I'm brand new to blogging so I get overly excited about every little tool which might possibly make my life easier. It was about a month when I had first heard about LiveSpaces, and ever since then I have completely changed the way that I interact with the Internet. Now, instead of using Firefox for viewing all of my RSS feeds, I imported all of them to my Live.com homepage, also instead of using stupid MySpace for my social-network-time-killing activities I now use LiveSpace which is great. Although I do have one huge complaint about it, it doesn't support the ability to leave a comment on someone's page unless it is in reference to a blog entry. I'm sure it won't be long until someone makes a gadget for this but until then I think its gonna be hard to move anyone over from MySpace. Enough about that.

When first contemplating which .Net blog engine to use, I basically narrowed it down to Community Server and DasBlog. Although I thought Community Server looked much better (the dasBlog themes are lacking a lot), I decided to go with DasBlog mostly because I felt that some of the features in Community Server were overkill for the kind of blog which I was looking to start.

LiveWriter offers:

1. Manage your blog(s) from a local windows application.
2. Automagically upload all local images which were locally added to your posts. (for DasBlog this needs to be configured using FTP)
3. Bult-in publishing support for DasBlog, Community Server, Word Press, of course LiveSpace, and many more.
4. An SDK for developers to extend its functionality.

Download LiveWriter (beta)

Dont know about everyone else but I can't live without my intellisense, which is why I was so distraught when I first installed Visual Studio last Nov. '05 and noticed that intellisense was not supported in .skin files. So i've basically just been living with this for almost a year ago until I saw a post on how to fix this. (You can view it here)

Steps to enable

1. Go to Tools->Options menu.
2. Pick Text Editor -> File Extesion fom a tree at the left part of Options dialog.
3. Type skin in Extesion text box.
4. Select User Control Editor from Editor dropdown.
5. Click Add and then Ok to close dialog and re-open your skin files.

Figure 1 - Adding skin entry to file extension

 
Figure 2 - Proof

Now what I want to know is: why in the world wouldn't this be the default behavior?