MS Team Foundation Server Links

I've been digging around trying to find more information on things like Visual Studio for Database Professionals, web access to work items, and other such things. I ran across a few links that may be helpful to others. Here they are:

• SCRUM for TFS


• Jeff Lynch's Blog


• MSDN Visual Studio Developers Site


• Web Access to TFS for Work Items, etc.

Web Services becoming Generic?

I read a post by Udi Dahan titled, "Generic Web Services Evolution." It is an interesting take on what is still lacking in Web Services (rich messaging...pub/sub). Structurally, web services have different roots and therefore were not made to do things such as pub/sub, but there are ugly ways to emulate that environment. One such way would be to make an async call to a "publisher" web service. If that times out, recall it. If it responds, take appropriate action. Like I said, not pretty, but would it do the trick?

Always More to Learn

My latest deep-diving has been on the SqlCacheDependency class in System.Web.Caching. It is the first time I've messed with caching at the web service level to handle lookups to SQL Server. Luckily, I'm using SQL Server 2005, so I should be able to bypass some of the older methods of hooking into the updates. Mainly, it appears the Service Broker in SQL Server handles most of the work. Nice!

We'll see how the wire-up goes. So far, it's a bit confusing on how to lazy load the cache with specific pieces of information. I'll post more later.

System.Net.Mail.MailDefinition

Ok, not a big deal here, but something I rather liked. I wanted to create a generic way to pull an email template, replace key areas with standard things like first name, company information, and other details and a coworker let me know about the .net password recovery control that does something similar. After digging in a bit, I found that it was using the MailDefinition to invoke a CreateMailMessage passing in the collection of replacements.

It was very nice not to have to write the find/replace code (even though that would be simple). There are still a few steps left to wrap the email templates table, but the basics are there to the point that we can toss a new template in a table and execute replacements on it to send some notification email messages to our clients.

One gotcha, I kept running into the following error:

Unable to read data from the transport connection: net_io_connectionclosed.

As it turned out, my particular issue here was that relay was turned off on our email server for all clients. In short, I had to open a hole to allow a certain server to access the smpt server in order to send the email.

Yahoo Go for TV

Where oh where did all my free time go? The new service from Yahoo, which allows DVR functions, looks great. I have a system that meets the specs, money to buy the extras, but no time to play. Perhaps someday in 2007 will suffice.

For those with more time, here's the link to Yahoo Go for TV.

Visual Studio 2005 Shortcut

Every once in a while, I run across a feature that I love. Here is one of the more recent ones:

If you are writing a private variable with property access in a class, just type prop and hit tab in C# and it creates the guts for you. Even better, you tab between fields that need to be updated and it remains consistent in the properties.

I'm not sure this really is better than using the class modeling tool, but it is an option for those of us that like to hand type everything. I do have to admit though, the class modeling tool in vs 2005 is pretty nice too. ;)

This tip is from an email list I subscribe to from sqlmag.com. The list is the Developer / .Net Update.

Not Much Happening?

I know it has been a while since my last post. Things have been going faster than I could have hoped for. Oh wait, did I really just say that and mean it? In a sick and twisted sort of way, yes.

In the last six months, things at work have progressed to an outright runaway train. Projects are due more quickly than we have time to think about and the pace is insane. So why do I like it? I can't say for sure, but it seems like the more "progress" we make in the department, the better I feel about work overall. The downside is that my home/family life suffers greatly so this can't be something that lasts for too long.

In a way, I think developers thrive on the deadline and delay what can be delayed even to the detriment of a project. The delays are the days that a person just can't get into the groove. I read a recent article passed along to me by another developer. This article drives the point home to an extreme I don't quite agree with, but the overall point is very visible. Take a read of Joel Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" if you have a few more minutes.

Cheers!

Just Click Help

Sometimes I love it when products tell you to do something that you can't. My most recent was this message from Visual Studio 2005 (the real deal, no beta here).

Unable to start debugging on the web server. Unable to connect to the web server. Verify that the web server is running and that incoming HTTP requests are not blocked by a firewall.

Click Help for more information.

<ok button>

The part you can't do? Click Help. There is no Help to click.

If you happen to run into this gem, the problem was security based (turned anonymous authentication off and the worker process for asp.net didn't have access rights).