Like many developers, I contribute to open source projects at home – usually to scratch an itch, learn something new or just to contribute to something I love using myself. However, I work for the open source .NET Foundation which means I have a dream job of getting paid to work on open source.
Continue ReadingI'm excited to say that today I started a new job as the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. The .NET Foundation is an independent non-profit organization set up to foster open development, innovation and collaboration around the Microsoft .NET development framework.
Continue ReadingIf you want to work with your local Git repositories in some .NET code then LibGit2Sharp is your friend. It’s the open source library used by the Visual Studio Tools for Git and gives you a very idiomatic way to talk to Git from C# or VB.NET.
Continue ReadingThis weekend I thought I would get round to a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – a new website for the Radio TFS podcast that I do with Mickey and Paul. I haven’t had the chance to play with WebMatrix before so thought that I would give it a try when building the new Radio TFS site.
Continue Reading[](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470943327/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=woodweb03-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470943327)I’ve always wanted to write a technical book and when I started getting involved in Team Foundation Server I thought that this technology area might be my chance.
Continue Reading****A couple of weeks ago I was in Antwerp for a partner event and I also had the pleasure of meeting with a few customers from the Belgium and Luxembourg region.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=615)On Monday I was a little under the weather suffering from the winter tummy bug that is floating around at the moment, but my day was cheered up by a phone call from Carl and Richard over at .NET Rocks.
Continue Reading[](http://cid-c7a08ae2600d197a.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/YearPlanner)As I’ve mentioned in the past, I like to have a compact year planner on the wall next to my desk so that I can quickly reference stuff.
Continue ReadingWhen the Teamprise technology was acquired by Microsoft, one of the first non-TFS 2010 feature things that we knew we needed to do was change the name. You’d think re-branding would be simple, just do a global search and replace for “Teamprise” and replace with the official Microsoft name – and then reformat...
Continue ReadingThat is the question that I am frequently asked by folks looking at the impact of Team Foundation Build moving to Windows Workflow 4.0 from MSBuild as the master build orchestration language in the TFS 2010 release. In general I would always think carefully about re-writing everything in WF 4.
Continue ReadingI've been an avid Windows Live Writer user since the early days, and for many years I've used Moveable Type for my personal blog. The reason I went with Moveable Type was initially because that was what some of the other blogs that I read where using.
Continue Reading[](http://www.igate.com/) TFS has a many strengths. Two of them that I particularly like talking about are it's performance over a wide area network and the strong IDE integration available for both .NET and Java developers (the latter via Teamprise of course).
Continue ReadingI recently stumbled across a handy Team Foundation Build screensaver created by Jim Liddell and wanted to share it as it seems very good. For my team build talks I created a Team Build Wallboard as a code sample, however Jim has created his own as a WPF based screensaver and it looks very nice.
Continue ReadingIn the days before I worked for Teamprise, I had a 3 hour, 120 mile commute. Luckily, at that time a new thing called “podcasting” was starting to take off and so my travels were filled listening to the few podcasts that were available back then. We are talking pretty early in the history of podcasting.
Continue ReadingIf bunnies are just a little bit too cute and fluffy for you, then you might be interested in a little side project that reader Terry Humphries just got in touch with me about.
Continue ReadingFor a while now, we’ve been helping our Java customers by providing the Teamprise Build Extensions to allow people to easily build Ant based projects using Team Foundation Build and publish JUnit test results into TFS for inclusion in the reports etc. With the release of Teamprise 3.
Continue ReadingThis month I called Doug Seven and Daniel Norwood to talk about the work Quest are doing to provide Oracle support inside Visual Studio team System 2010. Doug Seven is a Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft focused on technical advocacy of Team System as an ALM solution and Daniel Norwood...
Continue ReadingThe Virtual Team System User Group is great for people like me that live somewhat removed from a major population centre. In fact, as I look out my window I can’t even see the sheep that usually live outside.
Continue Reading[](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-Martin-Woodward-MVP-Summit-Web-Perf-Show-Off-and-a-VSTS-Pep-Talk/) This week I have been in Seattle for the MVP Summit 2009.
Continue ReadingNasty things start to happen on Windows systems when you start having paths that are longer than 254 characters. When NTFS is the underlying filesystem you can have up to 32767 unicode characters in the path, however in parts of Windows (and therefore .NET), a local file path (i.e. "C:\MyDir\MyFile.
Continue Reading[](http://www.platinumbay.com/blogs/dotneticated/archive/2009/02/18/team-system-on-twitter.aspx) Twitter seems to be going mainstream here in the UK. I know this because my wife asked me about it, so it must be pretty mainstream as I consider her my bellwether on normality.
Continue ReadingWhen you create a new build definition in Team Foundation Server, you get to define how the workspace looks for the build. By default this includes the ENTIRE team project. While this usually always works, it is nearly always not what you want.
Continue Reading[](http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/) After the highly successful Developer Developer Developer event in Galway last year, this time it is moving north to my neck of the woods – Belfast.
Continue Reading[](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/) Brian Keller (of This Week on Channel 9 fame) has just announced a new weekly show on Channel 9 called 10-4 where you can learn about what's coming in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. http://channel9.msdn.
Continue Reading[](http://www.teamprise.com/products/accelerator/) At PDC last night Ed Thomson announced our latest product, the Teamprise Remote Accelerator. This is a single user Team Foundation Server proxy designed for use by lone remote developers working off-site.
Continue ReadingIf you haven’t heard the news already, Microsoft have officially announced the name of the next version of Team System, previously known by the codename of “Rosario”. For Microsoft developers, this will be delivered on top of Visual Studio 2010.
Continue ReadingIn TFS 2008 SP1, a new feature was quietly introduced, WIT Client Metadata Filtering. This feature could boost the performance of your Team Foundation Server experience, reduce the amount of traffic flowing over your network and reduce the data porosity of your TFS instance. Yet it is not enabled by default.
Continue Reading[](http://www.codeplex.com/MigrationSyncToolkit) In a recent episode of .NET Rocks, we got talking about migrating to TFS and taking your SCM history with you. If you really wanted to go through the pain of doing this then the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit project on CodePlex is a good starting point to...
Continue Reading[](http://www.tsug-ve.com/) Chewing Glas (aka Paul Hacker) and Daven Finesmith (aka Dave McKinstry) are proud to announce a new users group, the Team System User Group - Virtual Edition.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=373) The other week Brian Randall and I sat down with Carl and Richard to record a .Net Rocks episode. Honestly, you wait years for a Brian Randall podcast and then three come along at once!
Continue ReadingNow that TFS 2008 SP1 is here, time to create a version of the TFS installer media that just contains the bits with SP1 applied. This is essential for installations targeting SQL Server 2008, but also makes the installation process onto Windows Server 2008 much easier and any installation faster (otherwise you have...
Continue Reading[](http://www.thomsonreuters.com/) I am proud to announce that Microsoft have just published a joint case study with us on the success Thomson Reuters have had using Team Foundation Server in a mixed development shop.
Continue Reading[](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/radiotfs/~5/296872926/radiotfs_005.mp3) I've just posted the latest installment of Radio TFS. I'm actually a show behind on editing so expect to see episode 6 up soon.
Continue ReadingAs a professional programmer, the languages I code in during the day are very much dependant on the particular project I am working on. Also as a programmer I have a very low threshold for repetitive or complex tasks - basically if I have to do something more than twice then I'll probably write a quick program to do...
Continue Reading[](http://www.infragistics.com/Default.aspx)Infragistics is the world's largest publisher of reusable presentation layer development tools for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, Tablet PC and Java (JSF) environments. I think they can count most of the Fortune 2000 as customers of theirs.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/TFSBuildAPIbyExample1Queueabuild_C1CE/BuildAPI_2.gif) As we all know by now - the build system in TFS2008 was substantially improved. Along with the many improvements came an official API for talking to the build system.
Continue ReadingJeffrey Fredrick just announced that CruiseControl 2.7.2 is now available for download: http://tinyurl.com/2zm9mz. There are lots of bug fixes, lots of changes to the Dashboard and some new plug-ins, but the bit that is of most interest to me was (from the release notes) TeamFoundationServer source control Fix...
Continue ReadingAt EclipseCon 2008 this morning, we just announced that Teamprise 3.0 has been released! If you've been wondering why I have been quiet on the blog lately - but also why anything I have been talking about is Team Foundation Build related, then you are about to find out why :-) First of all, I'd encourage you to go...
Continue ReadingThe fantastic team at CodePlex have just rolled out yet another great feature - this time it is statistics for your CodePlex project. I dropped by my TFS Plug-in for CruiseControl.NET to take a look... [](http://www.codeplex.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dddireland.com/) Developer Developer Developer is coming to the beautiful west of Ireland in May with GAMTUG hosting the event on Saturday May 3rd. If you are in or around Ireland at that time then I would encourage you sign up.
Continue ReadingI like my build numbers to be the same number that my assemblies are versioned with (and my end deliverables). It just makes things easier to track, that way if I get a bug report in from a customer I can look at the version and easily look at the label in source control to see what code that included.
Continue ReadingIn a previous post, I talked about how Windows file sharing sucks over the WAN. This is particularly annoying for me when trying to view the log of a TFS Build - especially if that build has failed and I want to know why in a hurry.
Continue ReadingI just noticed that on Wednesday January 16th at 5pm, the Minnesota Visual Studio Team System User Group are having a talk by Mac Noland. Mac is a good guy with some very interesting real-life experience in the use of TFS, and I would expect this talk from Mac to give people a great understanding of TFS could fit in...
Continue ReadingUpdate: With Teamprise 3.0 we included this work into the freely downloadable Teamprise Extensions for Team Build. The source is also provided under the MS-PL if you are interested. You should definately look at the new version as it contains some fixes and additional features based on feedback during beta testing.
Continue ReadingJust a quick update on the TFS2008 with CruiseControl (java version) issue. I recently submitted the patch to the CruiseControl project and it has already kindly been commited into trunk by Dan Rollo. The patch should appear in the 2.7.2 release of CruiseControl.
Continue ReadingThis morning while I was preparing for a customer demo that I'll be doing over LiveMeeting later today, my DSL connection stopped working. I have a reasonably complicated home office network arrangement - but it is most often my VPN connection or my unmanaged gigabit switch that are the problem.
Continue ReadingRecently, I noticed a small change in the way TFS 2008 (RTM) handles history calls between date ranges that unfortunately breaks the existing CruiseControl.NET integration to TFS. Should you want to carry on using CC.NET using TFS2008 as your source control then the following 1.4.0 release may be of interest.
Continue ReadingI had the pleasure of meeting James Dawson at TechEd in Barcelona this year, and recently he dropped me a note to let me know about a Team Build plug-in for CruiseControl.NET that folks still on TFS 2005 might find interesting. It basically allows you to use CruiseControl.
Continue ReadingSo, at the risk of starting one of those annoying meme's, I've kinda had this conversation with a few folks before and people of my age always seem to enjoy it so here goes. My first computers. #### My First Computer The computer I first learnt to code on was a Commodore Vic-20.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/talks/TFS2008_Whats_New.pdf) Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to my local .NET User Group (NIMTUG) on what is new in Team Foundation Server 2008.
Continue ReadingSo, to stop my Beta 2 VPC image from expiring this week, I thought I'd try out an "upgrade" of one of the VSTS + TFS Beta 2 VPC images to a full copy of Windows Server Enterprise Edition with a retail key (as provided by my MSDN account, that Microsoft kindly supply me as a perk of being a Team System MVP).
Continue ReadingIf you are customizing a team build, then there are only two things you need to know to get you started. The rest you can (mostly) figure out from there. Your build is defined in a file called TFSBuild.proj for your particular Team Build Type. You probably figured that bit out already.
Continue ReadingSome interesting news seems to be coming out of the Alt.NET Conference in Austin. I'd got a few IM's from folks at the conference talking about Scott Guthrie's talk. According to Jeff Palermo's blog, Scott Guthrie showed off a new ASP.NET MVC Framework.
Continue ReadingSkype seems to have been having trouble this morning. At first I thought it was a set of Windows Vista Updates I'd applied - but when the problem started affecting my hardware based Skype phone as well my suspicions went to my ISP.
Continue ReadingPaul Julius just announced that RC3 of CruiseControl 2.7.1 has been released from the Agile 2007 conference. From my point of view this is fantastic news, because it includes a patch I submitted to the project to include integration between CruiseControl and Team Foundation Server.
Continue ReadingAs I've mentioned before, I love Resharper from those crazily clever folks at JetBrains. Today I installed an Early Access version of 3.0.2 into Visual Studio 2008 and all the goodness has returned.
Continue ReadingIf you are going to get into the Zen of TFS Team Build, then at some point you are going to have to read the TeamBuild .targets file (located in %ProgramFiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets).
Continue ReadingThe blogosphere today is buzzing with news of the other launch happening today, but there is one a bit closer to my own heart - Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) has been released. I'm downloading it right now. I've been running Eclipse 3.
Continue ReadingIf the recent announcements about Silverlight have your interest and you can get to Dublin on June 7th this year then I would urge you to take a look at this years Irish community conference IMTC.
Continue ReadingRecently I had the pleasure of chatting with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell about Source Control and Continuous Integration - this was recorded for DotNetRocks and the show is now available for you to enjoy. As Eric has mentioned, I've been a fan of DNR for a while.
Continue ReadingI wasn't at SD West this year, however I'd heard that Brian Harry was going to be doing an interesting keynote. Jack Vaughan has recently published some of his "take-aways" from Brian's presentation and it certainly looks like there was some good stuff in it. My favorite quote is:- “In version 1.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/YouarenotrunningVistaRemoteDesktopwarnin_9654/Remote%20Desktop%20Connection%5B5%5D.png) When running Remote Desktop from Windows Vista I've been getting the following error popping up everytime I connect.
Continue ReadingI'm safely back from a fantastic week at the MVP Summit in Seattle / Redmond. The week itself was very enjoyable and packed with tons of useful information - thanks to Noah and the VSTS team for being our hosts for the week.
Continue ReadingYesterday we made version 2.1 of Teamprise publicly available. If you've previously installed Teamprise, then I recommend that you upgrade to this version as it includes a number of bug-fixes that while not critical are definitely useful. People who purchased a Teamprise Client Suite for Version 1 or 2.
Continue ReadingHere at Teamprise we've recently changed our build numbering scheme. We use the traditional Major.Minor.Revision.Build approach with Major.Minor.Revision being the only thing an end user should care about and Major.Minor the only thing we would every do any marketing for.
Continue ReadingThe Vista Aero interface is awesome - but capturing that beauty has always been hard for me. All that changed this morning when Jeff Atwood put me on to an awesome tool by Kenny Kerr. Kenny Kerr's Windows Clippings 1.5 is simply the best capture tool for Windows Vista that I have used.
Continue ReadingI'm getting really excited about the next CTP for the next release of Visual Studio (Codenamed Orcas). Not only will previews of some great new features in Team Foundation Server be coming along, Scott Guthrie just announced a bunch of changes to the web designer editor in Visual Studio.
Continue ReadingI'd been seeing this for a while now, the game of Blogtag has been running riot over the internet. Blog memes are kinda like the blog equivalent of a chain letter or a pyramid marketing scheme but very slightly less dumb and hopefully have more positive consequences.
Continue ReadingJamie Cansdale (the brains behind the must-have Visual Studio Extension TestDriven.NET) has set up a charity auction in aid of the charity Wells for Zoë and its work in Malawi. What's better is that he's convinced many of the other must-have .Net development tools folks to donate some licenses into the pot as well.
Continue Readingvia [James and Roy] Leon Langleyben (MVP) has just posted a version of his TFS Permissions Manager. It looks pretty good, I am just downloading it right now. Leon is addressing a key need with TFS V1, that is to help around managing user permissions in the multiple places necessary and he has somehow managed to...
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/HomefromTechEd2006Developers_9F0A/booth%5B1%5D.jpg)I'm back home from sunny Barcelona, and just wanted to post a quick note to thank all the folks who stopped by. It was great to meet some old friends again, and also to make some new ones.
Continue ReadingIn case you missed the excellent news, Jamie Cansdale has announced that TestDriven.NET 2.0 is now shipping. The TestDriven plug-in is essential for anyone wanting to run unit tests from with Visual Studio (any edition).
Continue ReadingThanks to all the people who came along to the Developer Track of todays conference in Galway. It was great to see such a mix of people with different experience of .NET and Team System in General - but also nice to see some Java folks.
Continue ReadingTomorrow (October 12th), I'll be talking at the first annual ICT Conference in Galway, Ireland. While having me attend is probably reason for you to stay away, Eric Lee (PM on Visual Studio Team System) is flying in from Redmond especially to talk.
Continue ReadingI've used my old iPod Mini nearly every day for 2 years (since I discovered Podcasting for the first time). Tomorrow I have a rather long car journey ahead of me and I have been saving up a few episodes of .NET Rocks, Slacker Astronomy, In Business and a new episode of Today in Parliament for the trip.
Continue ReadingSo, the day after I get made a Microsoft MVP I do two posts about Java - go figure. Anyway, today I had one of those moments where you thought you understood something and then realize you didn't and probably a lot of your code that you've written over the past 10 years doesn't work as well as you thought...
Continue ReadingSo, this isn't exactly original material - but I was having a chat with somebody today who I consider very knowledgeable about Visual Studio Team System and they were not aware of these so hopefully re-posting some will help more people discover them.
Continue ReadingJust wanted to let folks know that Preview 2 is now available for download to our preview program customers. If you want to take a look at Preview 2, then you can sign up here.
Continue ReadingWe've just been having a discussion internally about ways of numbering our builds. It seems a sensible idea to qualify a build with the changeset number in our TFS repository, that way we are able to easily identify the exact status of all the files included in that build without the need to add a label into TFS.
Continue ReadingI just discovered Microsoft Max. While the application still seems to be in the early stages, it has to be the prettiest application I have ever used - just take a look at the semi-transparent splash screen with it's lovely wobbly progress bar.
Continue ReadingI've been involved with Indigo for exactly 2 years this week, through the various changes in product name. Anyway RC1 of .NET 3.0 was released yesterday (just under a year since .NET 2.0). I'm currently downloading it and will install over my beta version of WinFX. I'm quite interested to find out if the .
Continue ReadingJamie Cansdale has released RC1 of the new version of TestDriven.NET. For those of you that don't know it TestDriven.NET is an excellent unit test integration plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 and 2003. Scott Hanselman recently voted it number 11 in his Big Ten Life and Work-Changing Utilities.
Continue Reading[](http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=Highlight4Writer)Well, the benefits of the Live Writer SDK are already coming true for me. One of my bug-bears with BlogJet was to copy/paste in code samples was pretty tricky.
Continue ReadingI use VMWare a lot. As we work on a cross-platform client to Team Foundation Server, I not only need to test our client on many operating systems, I also run Team Foundation Server in VMWare to talk to test our client against. Teamprise Explorer and the Eclipse plug-in use SWT for the UI Layer.
Continue ReadingI know it only seems like a few moments have past since we released version 1.1 onto the unsuspecting public, but today we opened the doors a little on Version 2.0 as we start our 2.0 Preview Program.
Continue ReadingLately a shocking thing has happened. People have started reading my blog. While this probably isn’t surprising to you (the reader) it is highly surprising to me (the author). I started blogging as a way to make it easier for me to find stuff in Google.
Continue ReadingThanks to the folks that dropped by the webcast early today. Hopefully it was ok – I found it very weird talking to the sheep in the field outside my house while all you folks were “out there”. Anyway, here are some links that I promised to people during the Q&A Session.
Continue ReadingI’d planned on giving a blow by blow account of TechEd 2006, but it was so amazingly busy I just never got time. I sat down at my laptop on Wednesday night and then woke up an hour later at the keyboard – so I figured I needed to sleep. During the day, the Teamprise booth was unbelievably busy.
Continue ReadingIn a couple of weeks I’ll be presenting a MSDN webcast on Team Foundation Server Source Control For those of you that have attended one of the talks I did around Ireland it is probably nothing new, but if you missed the talk then now is your opportunity to join in the fun from the comfort of your own computer.
Continue ReadingApologies for being quiet on the blogging front lately, we’ve been busy getting ready for TechEd in Boston next week. I’ll soon be able to share some exciting news so stay tuned.
Continue ReadingRecently I was putting together some slides for a talk and I was trying to put together a short sentence regarding the definition of each. The one that gave me most problems was that of the Team Project. Clark Sell recently posted a link to the official guidance on MSDN.aspx). As you can see it is hard to sum up.
Continue ReadingThanks to Ben for passing this on. You can now do a straight forward “apt-get install sun-java5–jre” and have it install on Debian and Ubuntu. Due to the old licensing restrictions you used to have to package up the installation yourself and was a real pain.
Continue ReadingGreat news from Rob Caron. CodePlex has been launched into public beta. CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project life-cycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.
Continue Reading[](http://www.anrdoezrs.net/7n65tenkem139464931326463B8)I’ve been using the new 2.5 beta version of Skype for a week now and I am loving it. The main new feature is the support for SMS messaging.
Continue ReadingOK, so the odds that you read my blog and not Scott Guthrie’s are pretty low, especially if you have any interest in this topic. However, Scott just announced that the VS 2005 Web Application Project has gone V1.0.
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone that came along to my talk at the 2006 Irish National Developers Conference yesterday. As it was Jedi Day, the session was appropriately aimed at being a deep-dive into some tips and tricks when using Team Foundation Server in the real world. As promised, here is the here is the slide deck (1.
Continue ReadingTonight I had the pleasure of listening to Scott Guthrie talk about ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas and IIS 7.0 at the Keynote for the 1st Irish National Developers Conference.
Continue ReadingIf you are going to be doing more than the basic check-in / check-out options then it pays to get to know the command line client – tf. The command line client is actually the most flexible and powerful client to Team Foundation Version Control. For more information, consult the MSDN help documentation.
Continue ReadingFor those of you morning the loss of Monad as it henceforth becomes known as Windows PowerShell (it’s impossible to say that without putting some inflection into your voice to try and sound like a voice over for a cheesy advert) – we now have a new name to make fun of thanks to Nintendo renaming there next generation...
Continue ReadingTonight I spoke at the Cork INDA group. Despite the excellent weather outside loads of people turned up and sat in on a talk on Source Control, which shows true dedication (especially from the folks standing at the back).
Continue Reading[](http://indc.wordpress.com/)If you are in or around Dublin next week (May 3rd & 4th 2006), then I would strongly encourage you to come along to the 2006 Irish National Developers Conference. This conference is being organised by local .NET development community, and is aimed squarely at the development community.
Continue ReadingI thought I’d try and post some quick Top Tips for Team Foundation Server – in no particular order apart from as I think of them. Today, this came up in the forums so I thought I’d elaborate.
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone that came along to my talk in Belfast last night. It was great to catch up with some old friends and good fun to stand up in front of my home crowd. As promised, here is the copy of the slide deck as a zipped PowerPoint File (2.
Continue ReadingNow V1.0 of Teamprise is out the door, we have started on the next release and are looking at the features that people want. One of these is Check-in policy support. Due to the way check-in policies are implemented in Team Foundation Server it presents us with several architectural challenges.
Continue ReadingI’ve seen a few forum posts on this topic and talk about it a lot whenever meeting new users to Team Foundation Server so I thought it worthwhile posting on the subject.
Continue ReadingA lot of people were asking about this when I was in Dublin. Brian Harry has announced the version 1.0 of the TFS MSSCCI provider allowing you to access the power of Team Foundation Server from the following platforms (among others):- Visual Studio .
Continue ReadingIf you came along to my talk last night in Dublin, then thanks for your time. I really enjoyed the chat as folks got stuck in and asked questions rather than just listening to me drone on. It’s also the first time I’ve spoke at an event and then wandered through into the bar to have pints lined up in front of me.
Continue ReadingAfter a somewhat public call to action, Ian Olsen is now blogging. Ian works over on the SourceGear side of the company and will be a familiar name to those of you subscribed to the CruiseControl.NET mailing lists. If you have the time pop along and pay him a visit.
Continue ReadingQuick post to say that I got an RTM version of Team Foundation Server installed inside a VPC over the weekend and it worked seamlessly (as we've come to expect - kudos to those involved). Once little caveat: don't attempt to install from media over a network share.
Continue ReadingSo, I was manning the booth yesterday in a freakishly tired state that I was almost hallucinating (I swear I saw another high ranking Microsoft person using Linux in a keynote). I'd got to the point where I'd said the same things so many times I couldn't remember if I was repeating myself to the same person or not.
Continue ReadingI've been living in Northern Ireland for over a year now however I've only been to Ireland once - and that was to get some cheap petrol as I was near the border. Next month I'm going to have a celebratory tour of the INDA user groups to talk about Team System now that it has been officially launched.
Continue ReadingTonight, I finally sat down and recompiled the CruiseControl.NET plugin to work with the RC version of the Team Foundation Server API. Turns out there was only one change – the TeamFoundationServer object now has a public constructor to pass the credentials to rather than using the factory as I has previously been...
Continue Reading[](http://feeds.feedburner.com/VstsBloggers) I have just added Richard Hundhausen’s excellent blog into the list of blogs that I slurp for the VSTS Community Bloggers Google Toolbar button. While I was there I made the blog a bit more reader friendly.
Continue ReadingI’ve been coding for around 25 years, since my parents bought me a VIC-20. I think it was probably a similar advert to this one by William Shatner that convinced them to buy it after seeing how much time my borther and I spent playing with our Atari 2600.
Continue ReadingVia Rob, Microsoft have now released a MSSCCI Provider that works in Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 6. According to the overview on the download site, “The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider enables users of Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio .
Continue ReadingI was just trying to get some backups configured and I wanted a way of deleting files from a directory stucture that were older than a certain date. I couldn't figure out how to do it easier from a Windows 2003 command script, so I wrote a quick C# console app to do the job.
Continue ReadingScott Hanselman's Hanselminutes podcast continues with this weeks episode about Continuous Integration. Jamie Cansdale (the genius behind TestDriven.NET) has posted about the tool Scott was on the way to mentioning when Karl interrupted him.
Continue ReadingAt the keynote today at VSLive, Soma Somasegar publicly announced the availability of VSTS RC in the next week and the RTM in March 2006 - so basically the team are on track.
Continue Reading[](http://tools.netgear.com/skype/)Like buses, you wait for ages then two come along at once. Following a wave of Skype announcements at CES, Creative have announced a new Skype phone.
Continue ReadingBuck Hodges recently posted about a problem with locks based on files types and shelving in VSTS Source Control. In the post he mentions a system called Gauntlet that is used internally in some teams at Microsoft. The Gauntlet system is very interesting to me.
Continue ReadingScott Guthrie has posted about a new web project type that will be available for VS 2005. I know quite a few people have been running into difficulties with the shipped way that web projects work in VS 2005 (especially when it comes to automating the build process outside of Visual Studio) and this new model sounds...
Continue ReadingVia [Rob] Dave McKinstry has recently posted about his Approach to Process Customization with TFS. While I have been practising my work item definitions on a scratch project inside a team system VPC before applying them to the production box, he lays out a good process to help you avoid mistakes.
Continue ReadingProblem: Use ssh tunnelling to access a Subversion repository using SSH tunneling (i.e. with a subversion repository url of svn+ssh://myservername/myrepo) using the Subclipse subversion integration with Eclipse.
Continue Reading[](/images/blog/geomap.html)Well, despite the massive load that Google Analytics took, they have done me proud and are now happily tracking the data from 3 of the sites I look after that I'm most interested in. This blog, VSTSPlugins and VSTSEclipse.
Continue ReadingIf you had the mis-fortune of hearing me speak at the Belfast launch event for SQL 2005 / Visual Studio 2005 / Biztalk 2006 this morning then the following links may be of interest:-Rob Caron's Blog - Best place for VSTS related information Visual Studio Team System - Official Microsoft pages VSTSPlugins - Open...
Continue ReadingGoogle has recently announced it's new Analytics service. I've just added the tracker to this site so we'll see what the data looks like in a few hours. From all the screen shots it looks pretty nice, will post an update when I see what it thinks to my small site traffic...
Continue ReadingTaking me a little by suprise, the official RTM version of the .NET Framework 2.0 is now available. The really good news is that the official version is v2.0.50727 which is exactly the same version of the framework that shipped with Beta 3 of Visual Studio Team System.
Continue ReadingFinally got round to packaging up and releasing a CC.NET plugin for VSTS compiled against VSTS Beta 3. Great thanks to Troy Gould who did all the changes to the source files from the Beta 2 version. Now all I need to post some instuctions to give people a clue as to how to install it...
Continue ReadingA new version of Snippy is out. For those of you not familiar - you'll be sorry to hear that Snippy is not a replacement to Clippy in Office 12, nor is it a helpful marsupial that will rescue Timmy from down the well. Snippy is a handy little tool to help you edit code snippets in VS 2005.
Continue ReadingOver the weekend, I put up a website for my VSTSPlugins project - a home for open source VSTS Plugins. So far I've put up a CruiseControl.NET source control plugin.
Continue ReadingSkypehave done it again. Using the latest windows beta version (1.4.0.47) you now have access to Call Forwarding features. If you are offline or do not answer a skype call then you can configure Skype to automatically forward the call to your landline or cell phone (using your Skypeout credit to pay the the...
Continue ReadingI've been struggling with a known issue with nDoc where it tries to generate filenames that are bigger than 256 characters. So instead of generating my documentation within the build folder, which is under the project folder - I'm going to have to create a temp directory at the root of my current drive with a really...
Continue ReadingThis site may dissappear for some spells over the next few days. I'm currently in the process of moving house so it may take a while to get the old server located in my new garage. The good news is that I have some Cat5 cabling in the new house and a fancy 3Com router courtesy of Clark Sell.
Continue ReadingI sometimes come across code that I consider posting to The Daily WTF, but I find the old career preservation instincts usually kick in. One of the most common problems occur when code is copy/pasted into lots of places. Tonight I accidentally stumbled upon this little tool for java - the copy/paste detector.
Continue ReadingI'm loving the new Generics support in C# 2.0 - may I never use the vanilla System.Collections namespace again. Syntactically, generics in C# and Java are quite smiliar, but there are some important differences under the hood of the VM (or CLR).
Continue ReadingFantastic, the EAP for Resharper 2.0 is open for public download. Cannot wait to install this as I've really been missing Resharper in Visual Studio 2005 (writing Using statements is soo 2003). I just hope ctrl-shift-n is in there already (remember, ctrl-shift-n is the new ctrl-n).
Continue ReadingBill Caputo has posted an interesting article discussing inheritance in C#, especially when using interfaces. I learned about OO while learning how to write Java, so I still struggle with the fact that methods in C# are not virtual by default.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/itunes_podcasts.html)I downloaded version 4.9 of iTunes today that contains support for Podcasts. Overall it seems ok, very easy to use but no support for Bittorrent which means I'll be sticking with nimiq for a while yet to keep up to date with DotNetRocks.
Continue ReadingThanks to a load of great work from Alexis Kartmann, the nDumbster project is now in a state that I would recommend it's use for real world projects. nDumbster is a .Net port of the Dumbster project which is maintained by Jason Kitchen.
Continue ReadingIf you have ever tried interoperability between an MS environment and any of the others you are likely to have tripped over NTLM authentication before now. Obviously there is no RFC for this one, but Eric Glass has an excellent explanation of NTLM that was gathered by reading public available information and a bit of...
Continue ReadingI'm currently thinking a lot about different testing strategies. Martin Fowler has an intesting post entitled Mock Aren't Stubs in which he also discusses the differences between State testing and Interaction testing.
Continue ReadingYou know, this internet thing might just take off one day. One of my good buddies, Clark Sell, has just fired up Wordpress and started blogging. His first post is a good story that Kevin Rice sent him about how a company policy begins. This piece is very true, sadly the original source of this gem is unknown.
Continue ReadingSkypehave just gone public with their affiliate programme. Feel free to click on one of the links to Skype from the times I have recommended it in my blog and if you purchase Skype-Out credits, I'll get some money to waste on my own Skype spend...
Continue ReadingA few people have asked me this recently, so this is the current list of podcasts that I subscribe to and enjoy on my daily commute. .NET Rocks! - The internet audio talkshow for dotnet developers. Slashdot Review - A daily review of items of interest on Slashdot read by a southern guy.
Continue ReadingI've been playing with GIMP lately. Coming from Photoshop, I find the interface really hard to use. Also, the number of windows that GIMP generates it just plain annoying.
Continue ReadingIn an effort to keep my Java skills up to date while also using some of my new-found dotnet knowledge I've joined the team trying to put together a VSTS SCC plugin for Eclipse that talks to the source control functionality in Visual Studio Team System.
Continue ReadingJetbrains have announced the plan for Resharper 2.0, including the much awaited support for Visual Studio 2005!. Fantastic news as VS 2005 without resharper is worse than VS 2003 in my humble opinion. (I'd forgotton just how much Resharper does for you!) The full plan is posted here.
Continue ReadingFound my second thing in .Net that really sucks. In .Net DateTime is a reference type and is therefore not nullable (Unlike the Java.Sql.Date class in java). I am talking to a SQL Server database with a nullable DateTime field and I want to accurately pass this around my application then out of a web service (that is...
Continue Reading[](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321245660/woodwardwebcom)One of my friends recently gave me "Effective C#" by Bill Wagner. I just wanted to do a quick post to say what an excellent book this is.
Continue ReadingToday I had the pleasure of visiting London for the day. It's always a pleasure to visit London because I am so very grateful that I don't live there. (If you haven't heard the London Underground song then take a listen - NOT work safe!!
Continue ReadingHeard about WebWork from a few different sources lately. I hate Struts with a passion (especially in large teams) and find the aspx framework in .NET gets in the way between what I know I want to do and the implementation.
Continue ReadingMy wife was treated to the "Martin Woodward Excited Dance" this evening after I watched the trailer for the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy film. Superb. Looks like they have managed to update the story line while sticking to the Douglas Adams humour.
Continue ReadingSorry about the lack of posts lately. Had lots on at work and then lots on at home when I eventually get there so been too busy to play and find things of interest. Just for interest these are the podcasts that I listen to on my long commute. If anyone has any recomendations for me then let me know.
Continue Reading[](http://www.nimiq.nl/)I have been driven to desperation with iPodder, so thought I would go looking for another podcast client before I wrote my own. Looks like the guys at nimiq have beat me to it and done a great job!
Continue ReadingJet Brains have just announced the opening of the EAP for their new .NET Profiler, available for download. Resharper by Jet Brains and of course IntelliJ are excellent tools, however the future of Resharper and now the .
Continue ReadingJust wanted to take the time to plug the JavaCoder.Net web site - a handy site put together by one of my pals that is helping me stay in touch with the world of Java. If you get the time, please take a look. It's very fast and completely free of adverts.
Continue ReadingGood post on Paul Vick's blog about the characteristics of Black Hole projects at M$. This got me thinking about some traits I recognise:-The goal of the system cannot be summed up in a sentanceThey involve more people than you can fit on a busThey must have completely unrealistic deadlines.
Continue ReadingI have been investigating several ways of generating files suitable for use in Excel from a C# application. As with most problems, there is more than one way to crack a nut.
Continue ReadingI've recently come across Podcasting (or blogcasting as it is sometimes called). Basically it makes use of a feature in the RSS spec called enclosure that allows links to downloadable content - in this case audio content.
Continue ReadingBeen using Visual Studio 2003 lately, not a bad editor (no where near as good as intellij for Java for pretty good). Today, all of a sudden the autocomplete feature - called Intellisense (TM - M$) stopped working. Now normally, this is because of an error earlier in the code, not yet displayed to you (dumb).
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/moblog/world_wind.html)So, how about a desktop application that allows you to zoom in to any part of the world, move around and view in 3D? How about the appliation coming from NASA, which means you have a NASA directory in your Program Files, and a cool NASA icon on your desktop?
Continue ReadingBeen wondering what to do with all those GMail invites? Well thanks to a couple of new developments you can now mount a gmail account as an external file system. First up, for lovers of penguins we have GmailFS a mountable filesystem for linux.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/ballycastle_big.html)After a sad delay, I'm now back online! We have moved to Ballycastle in Northern Ireland. Lot's of things going on, including starting a new job. Expect to see lots of posting about dotnet and c# soon!!!
Continue ReadingI'll be working in America for a few weeks soon and I wanted to try out ways of calling home cheaply. BT have recently announced Yahoo! Messenger with BT Communicator. I will install this and give it a go - particularly as the calls get billed to my home phone line. However, been playing with www.skype.
Continue ReadingTim Robertson has now upped and gone to Australia to be an excellent surf dude. We miss him, however the regular updates on his blog keep us up to date with all the things that can kill you down under.
Continue ReadingJust discovered SharpReader a pretty decent free RSS reader. My lunchtime trawl of the net may have just got a lot faster. The interface is functional, and the pop-ups notifications are very well done.
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