Victor Stodell

I spent this tuesday at  Microsoft in Kista  for an event with the name  Cloud Day . The main topic was of course  Windows Azure . It is really not a question if the cloud should be used, but more what the cloud could be used for, and how ? When it comes to  PaaS (Platform as a Service)  Windows Azure offers a great advantage compared to traditional hosting. You only pay for the bandwidth and server needs you have at the moment. There are great savings to be made. But at the same time this presents a new challenge for system architechts, who have to think of for instance each database call as a potential cost. In the future Microsoft will publish an online version of all their software as  SaaS (Software as a Service) . Today there is already the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) , which contains Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communicator and Office Live Meeting. Apart from these topics we also got a preview of what is coming u...

I have a relatively new found love for Silverlight, and when I got the chance to create a demo with Silverlight and Bing Maps I got very excited. The application gets objects from an existing Web Service. The objects contains meta data and coordinates in the format SWEREF 99. On silverlight.net there are information on how to get started with Silverlight. In addition, this is what you need to do to get started with Silverlight and Bing Maps: Download and install Bing Maps Silverlight Control SDK . Create an account at Bing Maps Account Center to be able to create Bing Maps Keys. In the Silverlight applicationen you only need to add a reference to Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.dll, and after that you are ready to use Bing Maps in Silverlight. <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication1.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://...

The default settings in  TFSBuild.proj  includes among other things that a Work Item (bug) is created whenever a build failes. This is a very useful feature, but if you do not want it this way it is possible to turn this feature off. The definition of the  CoreCreateWorkItem target in  Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets looks like this: <Target Name="CoreCreateWorkItem" Condition=" '$(SkipWorkItemCreation)'!='true' and '$(IsDesktopBuild)'!='true'" DependsOnTargets="$(CoreCreateWorkItemDependsOn)"> <PropertyGroup> <WorkItemTitle>$(WorkItemTitle) $(BuildNumber)</WorkItemTitle> ... </PropertyGroup> <CreateNewWorkItem TeamFoundationServerUrl="$(TeamFoundationServerUrl)" BuildUri="$(BuildUri)" BuildNumber="$(BuildNumber)" Description="$(WorkItemDescription)" TeamProject="$(Te...

Not everyone have embraced Microsofts testing platform, but prefer to use other tools for unit testing, for instance  NUnit . Because this is such a common scenario there is lots of information and components to help with integrating NUnit in Team Foundation Build. The easiest solution is to use two add-on components.  MSBuild Community Tasks  to make configuration easier and  NUnit for Team Build  to integrate the testresults in the build log and get the results in reports. Both of these components are open source and free to download. Begin with installing  NUnit , MSBuild Community Tasks  and  NUnit for Team Build . After that only some changes in TFSBuild.proj  are needet to get a really nice integration of NUnit in Team Foundation Server. Import MSBuild Community Tasks by adding the following row: <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSBuildCommunityTasks\MSBuild.Community.Tasks.targets" /> Now we have the possibilit...

Since we want to simplify administration by minimizing our server farm the subdomain that currently hosts our Team Foundation Server is going to be removed. This means that we will have to move the entire installation to the parent domain. Luckily we only have one server as application-tier and data-tier, and we are very few users, which makes the process a whole lot less dramatic. First of all we have to make sure that the new domain is ready to incorporate the server. It is not possible to perform any kind of user mapping, so all user accounts must have the same login name on the new domain as on the current domain. This also applies to the service accounts used by Team Foundation Server. The documentation around this procedure is well documented on  MSDN . The article describes the scenario to move from a workgroup to a domain, but the scenario from one domain to another works exactly the same. The entire process can be summarized in 5 steps: Ensure that all users hav...

The first time you open Team Explorer to connect to Team Foundation Server there are three things that needs to be done before you can start working against the server. Register server in Visual Studio Select active projects in Team Explorer Create workspace in Source Control I got a request if there was a way to automate these steps. Of course it can be done, but there are some light hacking involved. Here is what I cam up with: Register server Registered servers are easy to manage since they are saved in the registry. Given that the user has write access to the registry this step is easy to automate. The structure is as shown below, where my server is called ServerName . The key names explain themselves and this is all that is needed for Visual Studio to find the server as a registered Team Foundation Server. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers] "ServerName"="http://servername:8080/" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Softwa...

In my work with the Cornball as my first Silverlight project I have had to solve a huge amount of problems which turned out to be quite a high threshold before I could get started with the development for real. Not the least in the difference between a WinForms application and a Silverlight application. In this post I will mention a couple of the things i encountered. Splash Screen/Preloader The builtin preloader in Silverlight does not look too bad, but it is definately more fun to create a custom preloader to fit with the rest of the application. I choose to create a very simple but functional preloader. First I had to include all the images as resources in the application for the preloader to actually have a purpose. By adding the images to the project and select Resource as Build Action the images will be included in the XAP-file. To show the images in the application, something of the following will do. XAML <Image Name="Card" Source="/SilverlightApplicatio...