While reading my emails, I found out an email from Martin Woodward, who let me know some great new things about my first article about the TFS (Team Foundation Server - where to start?)
- The company that ships the Eclipse plug-in is called "Teamprise".
- The "TeamPlain" product is currently a web interface to Team Foundation Server from DevBiz.
- You can see a great demo, for further information about the usage of this product.
- You can download fully functional copy of the plug-in here.
Thank you Martin.
There are things you should hear to understand...
Still hearing the sounds of Tech-Ed, Eliaz Tobias, the one who was in charge of the Architects sessions, publish a post which summarize the ARCast shows that were recorded in Israel 3 months ago.
Those ARCasts recorded In Tech-Ed by Ron Jacobs.
Ron Jacobs is not only a great presenter he is also great interviewer, he knows to ask the right questions at the right time, when you actually think I would like to know ... you can be sure that this question gonna rise out immediately.
Take my advice, get some of those ARCasts to your MP3 Player and listen to this while you are walking, running, taking a bus\train or somewhere else.
Most of us want to play&test our tools before we buy it or even give our word to the managers.
If you want to play with the Team Foundation Server and the client tools but you don't want to install everything, you could test the new features and play with project site with Microsoft Virtual Lab.
The Virtual Labs is a great way to learn and understand the dedicated subject you want to study.
Take this lab for learning the VSTS and TFS rolls
(in the middle you can find: "Architecting Connected Systems: Team Foundation Server New!").
My advice, to all of you who want to learn this tool, take this lab again and again, play with the source control too, and try to configure the project site.
I really like the TFS, I think that it is a great tool which we can use to gather all our needs, it also can be customized to the team's need, but I still have some doubts on it.
Why? OK, so Everything is possible with this cool tool, but it could be hard (believe me, very hard...) sometime.
Here are my thoughts, we can easily create new working item and customizing the project work flow as you need, but what if we need to change an existing project that we already work on it?
For example, I have current project which I found that in one of my working items, I need one more (little) field, to fill for example: description of bug, I can't just do the regular download-change-upload operation, this operation works only for new projects!
I must admit, that I didn't hear about that feature before and therefore I preferred not to change existing projects, which cause me to prevent changing misbehaved items, or thinking a lot before creating new work-item.
But here I found two command line operations witexport, witimport.
witexport - export a single work item file.
witimport - import work item file.
and now you can modify existing project templates.
Anther question I asked myself is why this cool thing came only with command line tools? why should I learn all this stuff? so I've searched a little and find some great articles talking about VSTS Customization Toolkit which give us graphically manage of the process templates. no more XML Based for changing/creating work-items, we can play with this tool to see what we are doing.
I didn't play with this yet, but I read some great posts, so it sounds cool, I'll test it and let you know what I am thinking about it.
I've start learning about the Team Foundation Server (TFS), which looks as a great tool by now.
The first question every one asks me is how could I connect to the TFS, so the first and the simple way to do this is to install the TFS client (also named: Team Explorer), which can be found in the installation CD. This installation will give you the TFS Explorer window, which is pretty much the same as Server Explorer for the SQL-Server.
This is also can work as a stand alone Explorer for those of you who do not have the Visual Studio installed on their machine.
The second suggestion, for those who don't work with Visual Studio, like managers, you could see the project overview via the project portal, after all the TFS installation based on Share-Point Server.
My third suggestion is the Team Plain, here you can play with a demo, this tool provide your developers to access to the Team Foundation Server over web access. Team Plain also has new plug-in for Eclipse (someone heard JAVA?!) which also built with ... Java (I told you) and runs anywhere, even Linux, Mac OS etc.
So the Sky is the limit you can manage your projects with TFS, even when your organization is not MS-End-To-End-Based.
This cool tool ain't come for free but you can find more details in here.
For the next few weeks, I will lead a process of studying the new(some of them become old) products and technologies of Microsoft.
I am impatience to feel the new stuff, I should admit that I have a little disappointment while on some of the stuff we should do the research earlier, but hey what can I say, it is better late than never.
So what we gonna explore:
We will start with the basic of oracle 10g and the new version of ODP.NET, of course that we will finally start using VS2005 & C#, ASP.NET (2.0), we will have a deep dive into the Team Foundation Server (TFS), maybe creating some new work-items, we will create some workshops on TDD, more workshops about UI in ASP.NET2.0 using themes skins Master Pages etc.
We will write some new rules for the FxCop.
I will also do my best to focus on the WCF VS. COM+, so we could get rid of this nightmare.
I hope that we might have time to do some other workshops with C#3.0 and WPF.
We will also test and learn the GIS-Server 9.2, We are the first to do this in Israel, and even in the whole world you can count the users on one hand.
There are also some other small issues that we will handle in our process, and I let you know the important details we learn and develop.
I would like to mention my team-mates that will help our team to find the best stuff, and bring it to you: Avi Vorzel - my team leader, Nati Dobkin, Doron Yackobi, Matan Cohen, Yossi Shmueli and Meidan Alon.
I wish luck for all of us and I am sure we gonna have a lot of fun.
If there is more stuff you think I forgot please let me know.
For the last period I actually wrote some new infrastructures and upgrade some other older infrastructures.
Those infrastructures live in separate solution, and we are using it from our different projects, this infrastructure-solution output (DLLs) are also in use by other programmers from other teams.
In our project-solution we use file reference to those DLLs, using the copy local option, which should cause a copy of the DLLs to the bin directory in the project-solution.
This kind of copy should occur every time we build the project and the DLL in the bin directory deferred from the DLL we referenced to (origin path of the DLL).
Most of the time I am working on at least 2 different solution (1 for infrastructures and 1 for my project) and I found out that sometimes after compile my infrastructure-solution and then compile the project-solution the Copy-Local = true does not really copy the file.
The result is that you are thinking that you are working on version x.y.z.12 but you are actually working on version x.y.z.11. Believe me it could be very frustrating.
Steps to cause the copy-local to work:
1) Delete the DLLs from the bin directory (project-solution).
2) Build the (project-solution).
I've searched some further details an found this Jelle Druyts's post talking about the same behavior and found the same solution (=none).
Finally, I have my own mediocre solution, while working in solution with file reference that are enable that copy local, add the solution pre-build script for deleting all the files from the bin directory.
Any other answer (at least those I've heard) to this problem would be build-time-consumers.
Last week my good friend (and also team-mate :) Doron (aka Control-Master), found strange behavior at the DataGrid Component (.Net 1.1). While playing DataGrid he suddenly see that after postbacks the Grid data disappears (looks like we don't use view state while we actually do). The first thing was the view state of course which looks fine, after a deep dive into his code he found out that he has some code that happens before the Load method which access the DataGrid Items property, causes the DataGrid to lose its Data.
I take this code step ahead while checking this functionality with the .Net 2.0 GridView, which does not have Items property, instead it uses the Rows property.
This little difference made me believe that our feature won't reconstruct but I was wrong, this happens again in .Net 2.0.
So, I took deep dive into the .Net components using reflector but couldn't find something useful to tell.
I will keep reading about this, what do you think? is it a bug?
Yesterday I complete my weekly-blogs-time reading, I saw Oren's post: So when is it a good time to develop infrastructures ?! and I wanted to pay a special post for that kind of question.
First, if you didn't read his post, it is about time, I think that everyone who likes coding ask himself this question, and some other questions such: Why should I code at home, When should I see my wife and kids (for those of you who married), or What should I do to get home earlier. of course that we all enjoy our work and most of us could code till they sleep, and even then they still thinking about better architectures, algorithms etc.
There are many good answers to that issue (read the comment), but I would like to give here my way of thinking and hopefully hear your comments, of course that there some of you who would say that they couldn't afford it but as I will explain later it is like gold mining, where the gold is promised.
IMHO, if you and your company could afford it you should start thinking about a new (small) team for infrastructure/API. such team should get requirements from all other projects/teams and "help" the others to see their project from high-level, outer-perspective, neutral-domain.
I know that such team may look unprofitable but when you build such team you can gain many advantages:
1) This team will test new frameworks & tools.
2) Your DBA-s will be in that team, for better DB-infrastructures.
3) Your best designers/architects (for those infrastructure will be there).
4) Your other teams would reduce their time-schedule.
5) You won't have to implement your ideas all by yourself. those Ideas/API/Infrastructures will get better maintenance.
GAT&DSL Notes:
Microsoft new tools (GAT&DSL) are kind of tools that shouting architecture, I see those tools as efficient ways to guide projects faster to the main issue, but a mediocre team would not pay much attention for such tools because they "time-consumers", in other teams (perfection seekers) this kind of tools most likely learn at home (spare time).
I also know that such "unprofitable" idea would be harder to convince the managers, especially when you are doing perfect job right now, everyone will say: "hey, but everything works why to pay for more persons?".
But like every other idea you should create solid demands, and explain your reasons (you can call this the "Why" excuse) and I am quite sure that they will understand it.
Oren:
If you want we can sit, talk and improve the demands for such team.
Readers:
What do you think? What other requirements\fields of interest should be in such team?
How would they integrate between projects?
Last month a good friend of mine (Frumi) asked me for help in one of his courses - .Net Project.
I explained him everything I could (and thought that would be needed for first project): about how to write a better code, working with delegates, implementing OOP methodology, re-factoring your code etc.
When I started to get into the project main idea I asked for a short brief about project requirements.
So, Frumi thought that it would be easier to show me a working example, as he said: "that's how he wanted our project to look like.".
I thought, why won't we use here the Reflector? not to copy the project! just to help my friend (and his other friends) to understand this one.
So, I show them the Reflector and they like this tool, they even stop asking me questions about .Net.
after a week or two, my friend came to me and ask for help, because he won't be able to submit this work at time and he and his friends tried to copy the code and compile, but it didn't work out.
So, I Google up this one: File Disassembler by Denis Bauer.
This is a great Add-in for all of you lazy students, Disassemble everything (files, dlls, methods etc.) into a file.
Installation guide:
All you have to do is to download and connect between the DLL and the Reflector
(in the reflector menu: View -> Add-ins).
My private opinion:
Don't use it for such things, not because it is inappropriate and not fair against the other students, IMHO, you will never be a good programmer if you don't have the passion to write everything on your own, that is the only way to learn new stuff.
After almost 6 hours of downloads, 3 hours of installations, my laptop which is only 1700Mhz (Sonoma), 512MB RAM, holds the latest version of the WinFX beta2.
So here are some tips for you guys:
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