Loren Halvorson's Blog

At PDC05 I attended a very good presentation on Visual Studio Team System testing. The presenter walked through a scenerio where a developer was beginning to work on an ASP.NET web application and after getting the code from source control, needed to run a set of build verification tests (BVTs) to make sure everything was set up properly. He used VSTS's awesome new webtests (think...vastly improved Application Center Test a.k.a. ACT) to do this. What he failed to mention is that for most developers this scenario won't be possible because if I understood correctly, the webtest feature isn't included in the Developer edition. It is only in the Tester edition and the full suite.

When I saw the demo of the newly announced Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) in Wednesday's PDC05 keynote, I quickly replaced the sessions I had originally planned to attend that afternoon with three straight sessions on WWF to get a better handle on what MS has done, and I must say that I am quite impressed and excited by what I saw.

Did anyone else here at PDC05 catch that slide in Wednesday morning's keynote that mentioned that SharePoint was going to support Blogs and Wikis? I sure would be interested in hearing more about their plans in that area.

Well it's off to the PDC05 in Los Angeles. I'm looking forward to it a great deal...four straight days of Powerpoints! Can you get any geekier than that? I usually come away from PDC's all excited about technologies that we can't have yet because they're a l-o-ong way out, and I'm sure this will be no different. But it's good to know the technology vector that Microsoft is on so you can plan accordingly in your technology direction. The good news is that soon I'm actually getting a laptop that's capable of running virtual PC's so I may even get a chance to play with the bits they give us for real this time. See some of you in sunny CA. I'll be the guy in glasses, shorts, a polo shirt and sandals...wait that may not be specific enough...carrying a PDA.

CruiseControl.NET 1.0 RC1 just released. It's exciting to see them working toward a 1.0 release which they hope will be in the next few weeks.

Scott Colestock has put up a nice post talking about using the XmlPreprocess tool I wrote. He includes some screen shots of the Excel spreadsheet you can use to drive the tool.

Just wanted to follow up my previous post on the value of a wiki for technical documentation. I just read this interesting post from Korby Parnell entitled "Wikis Increasingly Trusted as a Source of Technical Documentation". In it, Korby points to an instance where a gotdotnet whitepaper links to documentation on a Microsoft technology that is stored on the Channel 9 wiki. This demonstrates how wikis are great for technical documentation because they are 1) more likely to be kept current, and 2) collaborative. Here's a quote from Korby's post:

We've been using an internal wiki for about a year now for all sorts of collaboration with great success. I bet many teams could benefit from a wiki, but either haven't ever heard of them, or think they are hard to set up. I thought I'd write a post on this to encourage you to give it a try.