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.
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several people ask me about my dev environment for working with Git on Windows so I decided to write it up here for me to point people to. Of course the first thing that you want is Visual Studio 2013 with the built in Git tooling.
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I’ve been running Eclipse Juno regularly since the M5 milestone. One of the things I’ve really noticed is that the default theme for Eclipse Juno on Mac OS X blends in better with other Cocoa applications than Juno looks on my Windows machines.
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I just got delivery of my shiny new Raspberry Pi. With-in a few minutes I had it all booted and running a stock Debian “squeeze” image, almost too easy and the performance of the diminutive Raspberry Pi was great.
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As you have probably heard by now, Eclipse 3.7 shipped today. Congratulations to everyone involved. From a personal point of view I’m secretly pleased to see that one of my own bug reports manage to sneak it’s way in to this release as well which I think means I have managed to do my bit and contribute a little...
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As you may have read over on Brian Harry’s blog, we recently made available a TFS SDK for Java. This is the same core code that we use in Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 to talk to TFS from Eclipse and from our Cross-platform command line client – just packaged up into a single jar file to make it easier to consume...
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[](http://cid-c7a08ae2600d197a.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/YearPlanner/CurrentYearPlanner.xlsx)A while ago I blogged about my surprising obsession for having a year planner by my desk.
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[](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.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/Windows-Live-Writer/f15622a5b7ac_8071/TEE_World_Tour_2.jpg)Ed Thomson from the Team Explorer Everywhere team is going to be doing a tour of the mid-west and central United States in early April.
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One of the key things about your CI build is to ensure that is runs fast so that you have a very quick feedback loop to see if you have a good build or not. Rob Maher has an interesting blog post up describing how he customized the build process to make use of the test impact analysis feature so that only the impacted...
Continue ReadingAs Brian Harry announced earlier today, it’s been a busy week already here. Not only was Visual Studio 2010 SP1 released but so was Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1 and also the topic of this post, the Project Server Feature Pack.
Continue ReadingIn my travels I often run into former Subversion users coming to Team Foundation Server and struggling to come to terms with the differences in the version control model employed by TFS.
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Hopefully you have heard the news by now that in February we shipped Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1. Brian Harry has a couple of great blog posts (here and here) talking about the headline features of what was added, but I wanted to follow up with some smaller features that I personally use every day that you...
Continue ReadingToday, we have two things to celebrate. First is the fact that we just released a beta version of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1. Brian Harry has an excellent write up over on his blog.
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[](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 ReadingTonight I’ll be giving a talk on Team Foundation Build for NW-MTUG at the University of Ulster’s Magee Campus. The event starts at 6.30pm – if you are around it would be great to see you there.
Continue ReadingIn Team Foundation Server 2010 web access is installed by default. Therefore you can now happily create links to web access resources and know that there is somewhere that you can point a web browser to to find more information.
Continue ReadingToday the team released a brand new version of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. You can download the latest versions from here: TFS Power Tools Team Foundation Build Extensions MSSCCI Provider (no updates this release) Brian Harry has a great post highlighting three of the new features in the TFS power Tools up...
Continue ReadingI had the pleasure of travelling to New Orleans for the first time to speak at TechEd 2010 North America. New Orleans is now my favourite city to go to for a big conference like this. While there were plenty of hotels that you could walk to (if you can stand the humidity), there was also plenty of things to see and do.
Continue ReadingOn Thursday 20th May, I have the privilege of speaking at the Test Manager Forum in Dublin. I’ll update this post after the event with links to the slides, other resources and any other links that might come up that I end up promising to share to the audience.
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[](http://www.codeplex.com/) People using CodePlex can download Visual Studio Team Explorer to access a CodePlex hosted TFS instance free of charge, but what if you want to be a project team member and access the code from Eclipse or a non-windows machine?
Continue ReadingIn case you missed it, as part of Bob Muglia’s keynote announcing the launch of Visual Studio 2010 last week he also announced the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team Explorer Everywhere 2010.
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[](http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/) Tomorrow I will be making my making my maiden talk at EclipseCon in Santa Clara. I’ve been at the conference all week manning the Microsoft booth and sneaking along to sessions when possible. I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed my week here.
Continue ReadingThis morning I got an email from HR congratulating me on completing my three month probationary period at Microsoft. I hadn’t realised I had a probation period (in fact I’m pretty sure I don’t, but as I passed I’m not going to rock the boat).
Continue ReadingSince joining Microsoft it has been fantastic to see how committed everyone is to the technology that was acquired from Teamprise. When Microsoft purchased the Teamprise technology, they also hired all the developers (including me) and are investing heavily not just in the 2010 release but more importantly the...
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Four years ago this month, I joined a small start-up being created called Teamprise after reading about it on Eric Sink's blog. Our mission was to bring the benefits of application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Team Foundation Server to everyone.
Continue ReadingOne of the features in Teamprise 3.3 is the ability to connect to a Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 project collection. The support for TFS 2010 Beta 2 in Teamprise is very similar to the support you will find in a patched Visual Studio 2008 instance – you can connect and work correctly, however some of the new TFS...
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/VirtualizedAeroGoodness_C4A5/fusion3_2.png) On Tuesday, VMware announced the latest in their product lines, VMware Fusion 3 and Workstation 7. While I have been a fan of VMware Fusion on the Mac for a while – this latest version is fantastic.
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.
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Tonight I have the pleasure of speaking with the Team System Users Group Virtual Edition. We are going to be talking about Team Build 2010 based on the Beta 1 bits.
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Just released the latest Radio TFS episode. We got the whole gang together so decided to have a catch up and a chat about our first impression from using Beta 1 of Team System for a few weeks.
Continue ReadingIn TFS 2010 quite a few things have been fundamentally changed for the better, but from an end user point of view people hopefully won't notice. Things like hierarchical work items will very quickly because just how work items should work and people will scratch their heads when they go look at a TFS 2008 or TFS 2005...
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A guiding principle with Team Foundation Server is that all the flexibility of configuration and all the control should not get in the way of getting work done. For example, if you try to do a check-in that fails a defined check-in policy, you get the following warning.
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.
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The 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.
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/2009/03/25/AdoptingTeamSystemWithStevenBorg.aspx) Earlier this month I spent a very pleasant evening at the beautiful home of Steven Borg and recorded the chat we had about adopting Team System in the real world for this months episode of Radio TFS.
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 ReadingOver the weekend we published a new Radio TFS episode. This month we chatted with Tommy Norman about his real world experiences using using Team Foundation Server in agile software development projects.
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[](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 Reading[](http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/06/22/funny-pictures-minion-return-wif-cheezburger/)Anyone who works in an office with other programmers will know the joys of trying to get a group together to go to lunch. The phrase "like herding cats" is often used.
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.
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[](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.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/BacktotheFuturewithVMWare_1104/tfs2010_on_mac_2.jpg) One of the many pains of working with the October 2008 CTP of VS2010 (aka Rosario) is that on top of everything else, it actually timebombed on January 1st 2009.
Continue ReadingFrom time to time I hear from people who dislike the automatic check out behaviour common with TFS. One of the great things about TFS is the the pending changes list that shows you the files you have currently checked out and allows you to easily undo any un-intentional check outs.
Continue ReadingWhenever I talk about TFS, one of the things I always mention is the fact that because all the data about the software project is now being tracked in a SQL Server database, Microsoft were able to stick a Data Warehouse over the top of all that raw data to give you a really good view on reporting.
Continue ReadingI recently moved my domain email over to Google Apps for Domains. So far I have been very happy with it and all my family have been set up with accounts, and all is working well for them to.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/Windows7onMSIWind_9736/windwin7m3_2.jpg) For the record, I like Windows Vista. However, for those of us who remember the Vista beta program and even early days of running Windows Vista it wasn't always fun - largely due to the driver support but there were plenty of bugs...
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 ReadingEarlier in the week I was on a support call with a customer who was seeing strange issues. It later transpired that they had a TFS workspace configuration issue that we were not able to solve quickly over email.
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In 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.
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[](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 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 to...
Continue ReadingThat's right folks, 2008 SP1 is now available for everyone to download. Get it while it's hot! Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (needed for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System client, including Team Explorer), (exe version) (iso image version) Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 (needed for the server, build...
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[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) In this first episode back from the summer break we talk about the features available in TFS Version Control and talk about some of the fundamental concepts that you should understand to make your life easier.
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At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston today, Corey Steffen (General Manager of Teamprise and the guy that pays my wages) announced the public availability of Teamprise 3.1. This is a maintenance release free to everyone with a valid Teamprise 3.
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.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/brian/wallpaper/) It turns out that the little video I posted yesterday has taken on a bit of a life of it's own. Last time I checked, it was in the top 10 Science and Technology posts for YouTube in Ireland.
Continue ReadingI'm always keen try new and novel ways to keep in touch with the status of my software projects. Fortunately, Team Foundation Server provides many ways to do this.
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 ReadingUPDATE: Just heard from Brian Randell that the VPC is now ready to download. Updated links are below. Anthony Borton just pointed out to me that the new version of the Team System evaluation VPC is available.
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At 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 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.
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One of the most frequent questions I get when talking to people about TFS if how to upgrade from the freely downloadable 90-day TFS 2008 trial to a full version of TFS. Our TFS 2008 license key arrived at the weekend, so I thought I would take the opportunity to record the process.
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 ReadingAs a follow up to my post back in August when we put TFS Beta 2 onto our production box, I just thought I'd mention that here at Teamprise we have now been running Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 for over 6 months now.
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 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 ReadingRecently I've been playing more and more with the Expression suite of tools. I especially enjoy playing with Blend 2 and pretending that I can draw. While the integration with Visual Studio 2008 is very good, a big thing that is missing for me is that there is no integration with TFS.
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So, 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.
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At this years TechEd EMEA, they were doing a pilot recording video of the speakers along-side the usual audio/visual recordings that you get on your conference DVD's a few months after the event.
Continue ReadingAs promised, here is the code we created during the TFS 2008 Build session at TechEd 2007 in Barcelona. The idea was that this is "Wallboard" that is designed to run on a machine in a public area of the office.
Continue ReadingYesterday, Version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux were released on the Microsoft Download Center. Officially, this provides addition support for Virtual Server 2005 SP1, however I have read reports from the beta program suggesting they may also work under Virtual PC (albeit unsupported).
Continue ReadingThe new "Gutsy Gibbon" version of Ubuntu was officially released this week. While some of the developers at Teamprise use Ubuntu as their primary OS, I personally prefer Windows Vista, however I keep an Ubuntu image around so that I can quickly test any new UI code I write in an alternate OS.
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[](http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=348628) Ron Jacobs has posted up an ARCast video from TechEd 2007 in Australia. About 3 minutes in he does a nice interview with an organization using Team Foundation Server in a cross-platform environment.
Continue ReadingOne of the great things about version control is that it covers a number of "Hit by a Bus" scenarios. I say this with an air of joviality, but each actual use case is never a nice one. I once worked with a guy, who supposedly once worked at a place where the "Hit By a Bus" scenario was a real one.
Continue ReadingAn odd smirk followed by "You come here a lot" is not what you want to hear when at the customs desk waiting to come into the US. Immediately I expected the worst - an armed SWAT team absailing from the ceiling to lead me off into a quiet room for interrogation while the snapping sounds of latex gloves ricochet out of...
Continue ReadingA neat (if not well known) feature of Windows Vista is the built in ability to do a "Command Prompt Here" by selecting a folder, keeping the shift key down and right clicking on the folder. While this is neat, I've sometimes found myself needing an Command Prompt with full administrative privileges.
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 ReadingYesterday I sat down with my freshly downloaded Orcas Beta 2 media (thanks to the Secure Content Downloader from the good folks at Microsoft Research in Cambridge) and upgraded our production TFS instance.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/TechEd2007Day0_104B5/CIMG0472%5B9%5D.jpg) It's been a busy day today getting setup. Started over at the Teamprise Booth getting the stand backdrop and the various machines set up (without any exploding this time which is a bonus).
Continue ReadingI don't travel as much as I used to, but there are some things about a hotel that caters to business travelers that they should get right. Forget about your fancy shmancy decor and strange taps that take you 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on, I'm talking basics here.
Continue ReadingI am currently sat in sunny Newark having sped through immigration in record time (there wasn't a single person in front of me in the queue - the first time that has ever happened. For anyone that it interested, I've fallen back into my Chicken rut. Anyway, I'm on my way to TechEd in Orlando.
Continue ReadingGood news World's Smallest TFS Proxy fans. At 11:10 this morning, the friendly man from Dell appeared at my door with a new motherboard flown in from Holland this morning.
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This morning we had a power cut which killed a particular tricky upgrade mid-way through trashing the machine I was attempting it on. Luckily the machine in question was a VM Ware image and I had recent taken a backup snap-shot so I only lost a few hours work.
Continue ReadingAnyone who has spent time on the inside of the Microsoft LAN knows that they have a ton of great internal tools and utilities that never make it into the outside world. One of those ones that did is Microsoft LogParser.
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 ReadingI've just got back into the office after a week and a bit on vacation and was pleased to see a few announcements have been made while I was off sunning myself. We will be making our Java API for TFS available for license later in the year We released 2.1.2 of Teamprise Client Suite The Java API thing just makes sense.
Continue ReadingMickey Gousset has posted details of the new Team System training courses from Notion Solutions. What I think is very excited about this offering is that it is a proper "remote learning" initiative.
Continue ReadingSigh. Why do I only experience travel delays when I am coming home and never on the outbound journey? Last night, my first plane from New York to Belfast suffered a hydraulics failure. Luckily they had a spare airplane lying around that they then got cleaned up, filled up with gas etc and let us on.
Continue ReadingThis is a follow-up to a post I made over a year ago. I'm popping over to the US for a couple of days this week and I am currently sat in Newark airport with the New York skyline out one window, and Ikea out the other.
Continue ReadingThose of you lucky enough to have an MSDN subscription can go download Beta 1 very shortly, according to the announcement it is available now (but it isn't showing up in my MSDN subscription yet) - I suspect that the lovely bits on on the way through the MSDN distribution pipe as we speak.
Continue ReadingAt the recent MVP summit, I attended a Mash-up lounge event. It was a bit Web 2.0-ey, but basically they had a bunch of bean bags, fake palm trees, and members of the Windows Live team and some Virtual Earth MVP's around to help folks get up to speed with the Windows Live API's.
Continue ReadingToday, I am pleased to announce that Teamprise are offering complimentary licenses of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to use Teamprise to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. If you want to take advantage of this offer, see the sign up page.
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 ReadingThis afternoon at EclipseCon, Corey (my boss) announced that Teamprise has joined the Eclipse Foundation. This is exciting news for us and goes well with our status as a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner - demonstrating our commitment to both platforms.
Continue ReadingSo in my previous post, I introduced the concept of a TFS workspace. If you only have one TFS workspace then you might have so far been blissfully unaware that you had one.
Continue ReadingToday, I received a fancy new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter 8000 mouse courtesy of Microsoft. This is a Bluetooth enabled mouse with some useful extra buttons for slide advance and a built in laser pointer when presenting. It is a nice mobile mouse that, while not without flaws, I would still recommend.
Continue ReadingOver the next few months I'm going to be doing a bit of traveling to the US again, and this offer could not have come at a better time - free TMobile access from my Windows Vista Laptop - sweet!
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/IvemovedtoWindowsVista_E50A/m70_experience%5B7%5D.png)Well, the time came. I got too jealous of everyone with Windows Vista and decided to upgrade myself. Before I start complaining, the reason I installed Vista on my main dev box is because I like it.
Continue ReadingThis morning I have been installing Team Foundation Server SP1 onto some test TFS instances. A handy hint for you is that you need to apply KB919156 before installing SP1.
Continue ReadingI'm loving Windows Vista RTM. I'm actually considering moving my main development PC over - just need to be certain that everything I use will work just fine - in the meantime, I'll stick with it running from my Core Duo based Mac Mini. Today, I stumbled over a great blog from Tim Sneath, a Windows Vista Evangelist.
Continue Reading[](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0471919306?ie=UTF8&tag=woodwardwebcom&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0471919306)I was very excited to read that "Professional Team Foundation Server" is available in the shops just in time for Christmas.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/MacVistawithFries_9450/TeampriseOnVistaOnMac2%5B12%5D.png) At the moment, we are going through a heavy testing phase on Version 2.0 of the Teamprise Client Suite.
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 ReadingI've been having one of those days today. It's setup day at TechEd Developers and I'm down at the Teamprise Booth. Still not really ready as the pedestal that we've got turned out to be far too big and we're swapping it for a couple of smaller ones. Hopefully everything will be ok for 10.
Continue ReadingI use VMWare a lot. Not only do I use it for demonstrations of Teamprise, I also use it for day-to-day development and testing (one of the joys of developing a cross platform product that talks to a Microsoft server product). I work on a laptop most of the time.
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.
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Tomorrow (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 ReadingJust a reminder that the next Team System chat is this afternoon. Not only is this a great opportunity to talk about the Orcas CTP and the "Data Dude" edition of Team System, but any other questions you have.
Continue ReadingApologies for being quiet the past couple of weeks. I've been on vacation with my family and it was great. This morning has been spent going though the emails I've missed and catching up on what's been happening while I was away (mainly all the TFS SP1 goodies - more on that later as I experiment with it).
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Just 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 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 ReadingRecently, I've had a surge of emails asking various questions about Team Foundation Server and how to do certain things. While I always (eventually) respond, it can sometimes take me a while. If you have questions about Team Foundation Server then the best place to go is the MSDN forums.
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 ReadingSoon, we'll be going on holiday for the first time since my son was born. This means that we had to apply for a passport for my 2 year-old, which was a fun process.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsLiveWriter_A58B/live_writer.png) On Rob's recommendation, I've installed Windows Live Writer today. Up until now I've written most of my blog posts in BlogJet - however so far I'm liking Windows Live Writer and may well stick to it.
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I 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 ReadingI’ve just learnt something today from our resident tech-writer that I feel needs sharing. Apparently it is “old” to put two spaces after a full-stop (or “period” for you American’s out there). See the following articles for evidence:- http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html http://www.press.uchicago.
Continue ReadingAs announced yesterday by Brian Harry and also by Michal Malecki in the TFS Version Control Forum, version 1.1 of Team Foundation Msscci Provider is now available for download here.
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.
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Thanks 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 ReadingJust wanted to thank the good folks who attended my recent talks on source control with Team Foundation Server in Limerick and Galway. I had a fantastic welcome and enjoyed myself hugely. I revised the format slightly from earlier talks and so the slide deck (2.
Continue ReadingThis month is my 6th working on Teamprise. I have to say that this has been the best half year of my professional life so far. Teamprise is a very humbling place to work as a developer.
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Thanks 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 (1.9 MB).
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 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 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 ReadingThe day that Intel Macs first started shipping I walked into an Apple store, downloaded Teamprise and tried to run it to see if it would work. It didn’t. I wasn’t that surprised, but I had kinda been hoping that the magic of Rosetta would just take over and automagically make it work.
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 ReadingI am giving a talk tonight. As usual, I'm busy avoiding preparing for it. It is a rare day now-a-days that I put on a shirt and smart trousers but as I'm meeting folks I've never met before in a city I've never been to, I thought I'd better make an effort.
Continue ReadingWith Apple about to celebrate it's 30th Anniversary, Wired is running a piece on the best Steve Jobs' comments ever. While I don't particularly like the proprietary way in which Apple goes about things - you have to admire the man's presentation skills, charisma, vision and the ability to go from a two man in a garage...
Continue ReadingI'm confused. Sometime this year, we want to buy a second TV for our house. As this TV will be around for a while in our "posh" room it makes sense (to me - not my wife) to get a HD TV. However, every TV I'm seen marketed has 768 lines, with various widths (1366 or 1280 pixels seem the most common).
Continue ReadingWhile even it's own mother would admit that VSS has some issues, the one thing in it's favour is it's simplicity. You only need a file server to keep a VSS repository available and organisations have a lot of experience keeping file systems up and running.
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I have a lovely Dell Precision M70 as my main development machine. It's a notebook so is great for when I am travelling around and has more than enough grunt to handle a few VMWare images running at once for cross-platform demos etc.
Continue ReadingJust been listening to an excellent programme from BBC Radio 4 - The X Factor. Not a story of wanabe pop stars, but a tale of what it is like to go into space and how the experience is about to open up to more normal people. It is presented by veteran astronaut Jeff Hoffman, who is now professor of astronautics at MIT.
Continue ReadingWell. That was rather painless. We've just completed the upgrade of our internal dogfooding instance of Team Foundation Server to the 180-day trial edition from the MSDN download site.
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 ReadingUsually, I am very good at the 24 hour clock. It comes from a childhood of setting the VCR because my parents just could never figure it out. However I turned up for my 9.30 flight this evening, only to find I had read my tickets wrong and it was actually 19.30.
Continue ReadingIf you were at my talk at SD West today, then this is the slide deck. However, if 8.30 am was a little early for you then don't worry - you didn't miss much and at least you have the slides now so you can still pretend you were there.
Continue ReadingAccording to the in flight map, I am currently 36000 feet above Baffin Bay, traveling at 550 Mph with mild amusement towards Foxe Bain. The temperature outside is a balmy -53 degrees Celsius.
Continue ReadingJames Manning has posted a suggestion for a powertoy to enable you to paste the contents on your clipboard into a work item as an attachment. Personally, I think this would be awesome, in conjunction with the standard windows Print Screen, or something more powerful like OneNote or WinSnap – it would make adding...
Continue ReadingBen Pryor has recently started blogging, I encourage you to add him to your aggregator. His first couple of posts are all ready pretty interesting (better than my first blog posts).
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[]()Recently I was looking at some screenshots from my good friend Clark Sell and I spent more time admiring the theme on his copy of Windows than looking at the error he was trying to show me.
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 ReadingSky+ has been the saviour of our television viewing since it arrived shortly after my son did (not a coincidence). For those non-UK citizens reading this blog Sky+ similar to the Tivo but more locked down as it comes from the main satellite TV company here.
Continue ReadingIf I were clever like Eric Sink or Bill Caputo, I'd be able to turn that catchy title in to a witty and insightful post about the software industry. But sadly for you, I'm not and (as witnessed in this blog) my writing skills are pretty awful.
Continue ReadingIn my talk at the Belfast Launch Event, I gave some numbers of the differences that we had found when migrating our source from Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server Source Control. Since then I've had a couple of emails asking for them again, so I'm including them in this blog post for posterity.
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 ReadingVia [Rob] Some smart folks over at Avanade have started blogging about the Software Lifecycle (being Avanade, you'd expect this to be heavily focused on VSTS and it is). If anyone is going to be getting serious about using VSTS "out there" then you'd expect these guys to be bleeding edge.
Continue ReadingI colleague of mine, Mike Cooper, just pointed me towards the "Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming". Hopefully not because he thinks I need to heed the advice - but it is always good to think about your own behaviour when revewing and pairing.
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 ReadingJust a quick post from inside the MS Vistor Centre in Redmond. Just seen a Compaq Luggable I still have in my Dad's loft inside a museum exibit - that's bad. Anyway, I'm now heading back to the office, then back to Chicago at the weekend.
Continue ReadingI'm about to go traveling, so I'm figuring out how to geocode my blog so that I can use the data to display where I happen to be when I post the blog entry. Mostly for my reference while I figure it out, here are the references I am using:-Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds article by Andrew TurnerWordKit Users...
Continue ReadingI always end up getting a KVM switch at work. It doesn't matter which company I work for - I'm never satisfied with just one machine under my desk. I used to just have multiple monitors on my desk but I need room for all that crap that I don't throw in the bin.
Continue ReadingApologies for the lack of posts recently. We are due a new release of my latest project at work in a couple of weeks and in my spare moments I have been investigating my new play project, a VSTS plugin for Eclipse. Anyway, I have just uploaded the website for the VSTSEclipse project to sourceforge.
Continue ReadingNot that I'm obsessed or anything, but in the latest Google index (Mar 31, 2005 03:19:55 GMT) I am now the Number 1 Martin Woodward on the internet! Now you can go to Google's homepage, type Martin Woodward and press the "I'm feeling lucky" button to go straight to my homepage.
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 ReadingWell, for some reason I seem to be back at my No. 2 spot in Google when you search for "Martin Woodward". I changes my blog templates a little bit. The Martin Woodward header at the top of every page is a bit of text that has a screen stylesheet applied that hides the text and displays the ": Martin Woodward" graphic...
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 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 ReadingI was have a quick trawl through some of my logs, and found this funny set of search queries... 2004.12.17 11:08:42 167.127.107.11 Search: query for 'noisy and annoying' 2004.12.17 11:08:51 167.127.107.11 Search: query for 'noisy annoying' 2004.12.17 11:08:56 167.127.107.
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 ReadingI'm currently doing a budget (January is always a long month, but this one will be particularly hard as my personal circumstances have changed rather a lot in the past year). I released that I had a new category to add to my usual food & drink, utilities, mortgage etc.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/1954Popularmechanics.html)Got forwarded this today, apparently from a 1954 Popular Mechanics magazine. "...how a 'home computer' could look like in the year 2004. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.
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Took this picture from my phone (Sony Erricson T610). The camera is pretty poor, however nice picture of the base of a lampost on the Queen's Bridge in Belfast. In the background is the Waterfront concert hall and you might just be able to make out my office.
Continue ReadingThe BBC have rather quietly released a new version of their website, with related links powered by their Newstraker system. This appears to automate the production of links to external news sites.
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 ReadingNightmare. Just done a search on Google for Martin Woodward and I no longer appear! My pagerank has just totally dissapeared! I still have a 5/10 ranking in the google toolbar but Martin Woodward no longer works - try for yourself. Could this be a result of my latest re-design? I'm absolutely gutted.
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[](http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/products/mobile/tablet_pcs/stylistic_st5010.html)Just got my hands on a new Fujitsu ST5010 Tablet PC for a demo and I really enjoyed working with it. I have been wanting to use a tablet PC in anger for a while now as the idea of the form-factor is one that I liked.
Continue ReadingDoing a big peice of UI design again at the moment. While avoiding writing documentation, found a couple of books that are pretty good, however the titles will certainly not help improve my wife's opinion of my job. First up with have Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.
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[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blogimages/btcom.html)Worked in the Central Architecture Team for the BT.com project, looking after the re-design of the Faut, Orders, Inventory, Tracking (FOIT) module. This was a BEA Weblogic Portal 7 project.
Continue ReadingJust seen this mouse - the Labtec Mini Optical Mouse - in action and it really looks like a fantastic mouse for the road warrior. It's optical (i.e. no mouse mat or de-fluffing required) and cordless with a unique design with its USB stored inside the mouse when not in use.
Continue ReadingManaged to get my Palm to connect to Blogger via wapblogger. My graffitti needs to get a lot faster.
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