Latest Microsoft Blogs

You all might be amazed by the number of emails, messages, and calls I get asking for any of the following: Guidance on SharePoint Requests to add SharePoint Guidance to WCSF Requests to add "Office applications" support to SCSF Well, I can finally help out folks looking for guidance on how to build SharePoint applications by saying "go check out the CodePlex project for patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance ( http://www.codeplex.com/spg )." If you are hoping for SharePoint support in WCSF, you should probably check this out too. Blaine and Francis are leading the effort on this project. I understand that they are tackling a few big challenges that customers have ranked as the most important including (this list is...

Chris Tavares and I were chatting yesterday morning about an idea Chris had: building a simple, reusable Http Module that gives folks DI scoped to the Application, Session, and Request. Yesterday afternoon, during the p&p Dev team's weekly "Code Kata" we threw together a spike/proof of concept in a couple of hours. "Code Kata" is a three hour block of time that the p&p Dev team uses for a number of things: cross-project pollination of ideas, things that work, things that don't work across project teams investigating new and emerging technologies that p&p may work with in the future investigating new and emerging platforms to determine if p&p may want to provide guidance in the future play with new...

This is the sixth post in a series. The other post include: Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Ummmm...Oooops. Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Actually Adding Unity If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . For those who have been following along, you all know I am making this up as I go. So, I am asking that you be patient with me as we figure this out together. This...

This is the fifth post in a series. The other post include: Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Ummmm...Oooops. If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . First off, I have moved this little side project to source control, so I can avoid the re-work I had to do before I could write this part of the series. Note to self : NEVER work without a safety net. That means both unit tests and source control...

This is the third post in a series. The other post include Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . In the last installment I wanted to remove the following from the ICompositionContainer: static methods Builder Locator Containers Services We completed the first four. In this installment, we will remove the Services collection, replacing it with using RegisterInstance and Resolve. After that, we will compare our ICompositionContainer...

This is the third post in a series. The other post include Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Adding an ICompositionContainer If you want background, go read the earlier posts. Based upon feedback, I am making the source code available at CWAB and Unity . In the last post, we started getting closer to my eventual goal. However, we still need to get rid of the static methods, Builder, Locator, Containers, and Services. Why? Static methods will make the necessary refactorings a pain in the.... well, a pain. Builder and Locator are handled by Unity internally, and we no longer need to deal with them directly. Containers will just be registered in the root container...

Some of you may remember that waaaay back in October (and earlier) the Web Client Software Factory team was shipping these things called "bundles". A bundle was all a developer needed to get started and learn about a single concept, like the Model View Presenter pattern in a web application, or contextual auto-complete. These bundles were released for VS2005 and .NET 2.0 on the WCSF community CodePlex site. Now, the same bundles for VS2005 with .NET2.0 and new bundles for VS2008 with .NET 3.5 are available on MSDN's Web Client Software Factory page . However, due to factors I do not understand and that are beyond my control, we are now calling these " Guidance Assets ". The first question everyone is going to ask is Read...

This is the second post in a series. The initial post is Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Intro . If you want background, go read the first post. Let's get started with some coding. First, I backed up my WCSF and WCSF-AppBlock code. Then, I opened up Visual Studio 2008, opened the Composite Web Application Block solution (with VSTS Tests), compiled, and ran all the tests. All Green. Now for the tough part, thinking about what we want to do. Basically, we need to be able to replace the CompositionContainer with an IUnityContainer, and remove a lot of dead code. How can we do this? We need to have a simple interface that would work as a facade on both containers (and any others). So, let's create an interface for...

A few weeks ago, I decided I needed to play with the Unity Dependency Injection container . I wanted to see how Chris and the rest of the team had designed it and see how usable the container was. I had seen requests on the Web Client Software Factory project's CodePlex site asking for a Unity version of WCSF. Put the two together, and I have a side project, a proof of concept I can legitimately do at work. My eventual end goal is to have the Order Management RI working with a new, Unity-based version of CWAB. So, I sat down a few Saturdays ago, with CWAB, an early drop of Unity, and started working. After about eight hours I had the basics of CWAB working: there was a container, and a module loader, global services, and module level services...

I spent two weeks between full time projects (still working on the 2 part time projects I am on) looking back at the build logs from the past 6 months (or so) trying to figure out what metrics we have, what we should track going forward, and what goals we should have for these metrics. I came up with some interesting findings. First, overall unit test code coverage was OK, but not as high as I would like on my projects. Of course, these numbers included generated code, view code, and other things that I usually filter out. Also coverage was fairly flat. For the most part, as we added code, we added tests. This, I think is much better than one of the alternatives, having coverage drop over the course of the project. Here is coverage for the Application...