May 2005 - Posts

• Connected Systems Developer Competition

  Microsoft is sponsoring a developer competition with prizes up to $50K - not too shabby.  Check out the details at the following link:   http://msdn.microsoft.com/devcompetition       Posted May 29 2005, 11:45 AM by cmenegay with no comments

• Dallas DevCon

  It's official! I'll be speaking @ the Dallas DevCon in June, in the VSTS track. Come check it out if you're in the Dallas area!   If your in the following areas (or can be in those areas), be sure to try to attend the Visual Studio 2005 Dev Con event... St. Louis, MO (5/26), Chicago, IL (6/1), Minneapolis, MN (6/1), Kansas City, KS (6/2), Omaha, NE (6/14), Detroit, MI (6/14) and Dallas, TX (6/16) The event costs $99 to attend and you'll receive three books for attending ($90 value).  For more information, visit the official announcement.   Posted May 13 2005, 11:48 AM by cmenegay with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Team System

• Geek gathering in Dallas

  Cory Smith is arranging another Dallas .NET geek gathering.  Make it if you can!.   Posted May 12 2005, 09:59 PM by cmenegay with no comments

• Team System Pricing

  I haven't been watching the latest buzz on VSTS pricing, but I just saw the new info on the MS website (I have no idea how long it's been there), and it seems much more helpful.       Posted May 11 2005, 09:03 PM by cmenegay with no comments Filed under: Team System

• Team System Q&A

  These questions are from my Team System training class in Dallas the last week of April. Q: How do I extend Alerts? A: Yes, the Team Foundation SDK that we recently posted contains information on how to hook in to the eventing system. This information is available at http://www.vsipdev.com/signin.aspx?ReturnUrl=/downloads/vs2005tsekBeta2.aspx   Q: On Load testing, what is "IP Switching"? A: IP switching allows a single machine to adopt multiple IP addresses so that it appears to your web infrastructure that requests are coming from different client boxes. This is frequently necessary to appropriately deal with load balancers that would direct traffic from a single client to the same back-end web server.   Q: How are testers (real QA people, not technical at all) supposed to work? Would they have test projects (for manual tets) in the main solution? Would you create a separate solution with just test projects for them? A: It is completely reasonable to have separate "test only" solutions for use by non-developers.   Q: What are the MS-Build deployment options - can my "drop" be to an FTP site? etc.? A: The drop path must be a UNC path.   Q: Can you prevent developers from suppressing FXcop errors messages? A: There is no support for preventing developers from suppressing a message in VS. The FxCop team works very hard on limiting the amount of false positives that occur but any static analysis tool will have false positives, making developers fix these false positives will lead to poorer code quality rather than highercode quality. A better aproach might be to review suppress messages every mayor milestone, as it is just an attribute it should be pretty easy to retrieve. A side note here is that in newer builds of whidbey, this attribute has a justification field, which you can make developers fill in with a description on why they suppressed a specific message   Q: Is there support for assigning a work item to a group? that was there in Dec. CTP, but seems gone now. A: Yes, you need to customize the work item type. See "Authoring Work Item Types" and "Authoring Work Item Types Lab" in the VSTS Beta 2 Extensibility Kit: http://www.vsipdev.com/signin.aspx?ReturnUrl=/downloads/vs2005tsekBeta2.aspx   Q: I've been trying to get code coverage working with Manual tests - what test types support code coverage? Manual, Web, etc? any pointers? A: For first part of the question, manual test code coverage will be available in RTM time. As a workaround you can try to create a test run with code coverage with unit test (or any other automated test) that takes long enough time for you to complete your manual tests. Most of the automated tests you should be able to collect code coverage if code under test is on the local machine.   Q: What is the best way to Report bugs against a specific build? A: There is a field in the MSF Agile "bug" work item that allows you to select a build from the list of recent builds that the bug can be filed against.                   Posted May 09 2005, 12:57 AM by cmenegay with no comments Filed under: Team System