Victor Stodell

I finally took the time to go through with a certification that I have been wanting to do for a while, MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Application Development . During my years as a .NET developer I have been working a lot with Windows Forms, so this was not a painful experience. The next step will propably be to aim for MCPD in the same area before it is time to move on to the new Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 certifications.

I just got home from  BriForum 2010 in Chicago. It has been a really fun and exciting week and a very interesting conference. This years main focus was  desktop virtualization , or VDI. This is a truly interesting subject and instead of a practically oriented conference there were a lot of discussions about the role of the computers in the near future and how we as IT staff would keep up with the rapid development. IT organizations often tend to be very stiff and having a hard time adapting to the user requests. This is something that hopefully will change, but it will take time and there are a lot of obstacles on the way. Technically we got to see a preview of  Microsofts RemoteFX , which basically is GPU-support over remote desktop. The next BriForum  will take place in London 2011. Form more information about the conference and what was presented, visit  briforum.com  or  brianmadden.com .

Active Directory have always been a little tricky to troubleshoot and monitor. There is a wide variety of  Performance Counters and other parameters to investigate, but this is heavy work to do manually. There is also a bunch of third party tools to do this for us but usually the price tag is big  With Windows Server 2008 a new set of tools were delivered which could be very useful when troubleshooting performance in Active Directory amongst other services. And the best of all is that they are free! Data Collector Sets The role Active Directory Domain Services includes a Data Collector Set intendet for Active Directory diagnostics. This can be found in Server Manager/Diagnostics/Performance/Data Collector Sets. Run the Active Directory Diagnostics for a limited time, but do not forget to stop it. A large amount of data is collected and when the job is stopped a nice and thorough report is generated. Windows System Resource Manager The Resource Manager is installed as a f...

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...