Say Hello to VibeCodr, the ultimate vibe coding accessory designed to enhance your programming flow and productivity. This project combines hardware and vibe coded software to create a unique experience that brings joy with every press.
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Halloween is the perfect time to combine technology with spookiness, and this year I've created something rather special: a build status indicator that brings your CI/CD pipeline to life in the most festive way possible.
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 ReadingOver 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.
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 ReadingI’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.
Continue ReadingI 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.
Continue ReadingIf you are looking to extend Team Foundation Build using workflow activities, then the first thing you should do it take a look at the latest stable release of the Community TFS Build Extensions over on CodePlex.
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 ReadingWhen you create a new build definition with TFS 2010 by default it does a clean build for you every time. That is to say that between builds all the source from the previous build is deleted along with the compiled outputs and then the source is downloaded fresh, built and you are good to go.
Continue ReadingAs 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...
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 ReadingOne 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...
Continue ReadingHopefully 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 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 ReadingIn the latest episode of Radio TFS Mickey and I sat down for a chat with Jonathan Wanagel who is the Principal Development Manager over at CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting site.
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...
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.
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.
Continue Reading[](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.
Continue Reading[](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 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 ReadingThis morning I was creating a new build definition for the Beta branch of the initial Microsoft release of the Teamprise acquired bits. Creating a new build definition in Visual Studio 2010 is remarkably easy, but we have a fairly complex workspace template.
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 ReadingFellow Microsoft TFS Program Manager Jim Lamb has a good post detailing how to create a custom workflow activity in Team Foundation Build 2010 using the first of what I am sure will be many activities to stamp your assemblies with the build number.
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 ReadingIn my inbox this morning I got news of another new version of the Team Foundation Sidekicks from Attrice. I recommended these tools to several people during the recent TechEd EMEA event in Berlin and so it is great to new tools being added all the time.
Continue ReadingGrant Holliday has an excellent post up on the new public workspaces feature in TFS 2010, why it was created and how to use it. I’ve spoken with a number of Teamprise customers who will benefit from this feature when we add workspace permissions to the cross-platform client as it seems fairly common to share access...
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...
Continue ReadingToday, Microsoft made some important announcements regarding the future of Visual Studio 2010 along with the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2.
Continue ReadingA feature of changeset metadata in Team Foundation Server 2008 is that it is actually editable. If you look at the changeset details for a historical check-in in Visual Studio you will notice that the comment and check-in notes fields are enabled and there is a “Save” button.
Continue ReadingI’m playing with a lot of cool stuff at the moment as we get ready for Team Foundation Server 2010, but accessing TFS from the Mac or inside Eclipse doesn’t give me as many of those “it shouldn’t work that well” moments any more.
Continue ReadingAs I am exploring programming against TFS 2010, I usually build myself up a collection of code snippets that show me how to do various discrete operations. I thought it would be useful for me to post some of these to my blog so that others might benefit later.
Continue ReadingThe clever folks over at CodePlex have recently released the code to the sites excellent wiki. As you would expect from CodePlex team, the code is available as a project on CodePlex at http://wikiplex.codeplex.com. Even better news is that the code has been released under the permissive MS-PL open source license.
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 ReadingA 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.
Continue ReadingNow that TFS 2010 Beta 1 is publically available, I thought it would make sense to share our plans with everyone. Teamprise has been working closely with Microsoft on the TFS 2010 release. First of all, can I quickly thank all the people at Microsoft who have been helping us so far.
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 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 Reading[](http://galilee.microsoft.fr/TechDays2009/Default.aspx)On Tuesday February 10th I’ll be popping over to Paris where I have the privaledge of being invited to speak at TechDays 09 courtesy of Microsoft France.
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 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 ReadingOften when doing some build integration work with the TFS2008 Build API, you will want to get the latest build for a particular definition – for example to show the latest status of the build etc.
Continue ReadingWhen I saw the news about the upcoming Windows Vista SP2, there was a little note right down at the bottom that got me quite excited. "Windows Vista SP2 includes Hyper-V™ technology, enabling full virtualization of server workloads" I know a lot of people that run Windows Server 2008 on their laptops, specifically so...
Continue Reading[](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...
Continue ReadingDuring Brian Harry's "Team Foundation Server 2010 Cool New Features" presentation at PDC, he demonstrated Teamprise working with TFS 2010 (codenamed "Rosario"). Not often you get one of the most senior technical people in Microsoft using Eclipse on stage at the premiere Microsoft conference!
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.
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 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.youtube.com/watch?v=Is32fWJJA-I) Since posting about Brian the Build Bunny, I have been getting a steady stream of emails from people who would like to know more about how it works. Team Foundation Server provides a mechanism by which you can subscribe to events when certain things happen.
Continue ReadingAt 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 ReadingOver the years, I have tried many different approaches to software estimation. From the Ceiling and Weller method (look up to the ceiling, scratch your chin and say "Well-errr"), FITA analysis (Finger In The Air) through various variations (both formal and informal) of metric based estimation techniques to things...
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 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 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.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 ReadingThanks to everyone who attended my session this afternoon at IMTC 2008 in Dublin. As promised, here is a copy of the slide deck. Automating Builds with Team Foundation Server 2008 (pdf - 1.
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 ReadingThe Team System Chat's are a great way for you to talk direct to very influential members of the product group - the people that actually write the code behind team system.
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 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 ReadingBrian Keller has posted a great interview with Brian Harry about Visual Studio Team System 2008, and a lot of detail on the improvements in Team Foundation Server 2008.
Continue ReadingI swear, one day I'll learn. Despite having promised myself to steer clear of the initial release of any Windows version of iTunes because they are consistently broke in some pretty severe ways - I read this report on Engadget and decided to upgrade thinking that they may finally haved solved the issues I have been...
Continue ReadingNo - this is not a post about the big news in Northern Ireland this past week. On Friday night I was in the middle of a rather large change that I wasn't ready to check-in to the mainline of code. However, as I am now in the habit of doing, I shelved the changes to TFS before I stopped work for the evening.
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 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 ReadingAt 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 ReadingThanks to everyone who came along to the talk today in Barcelona. We had a big crowd who seemed to enjoy the session. I had a few people coming up afterwards asking for a copy of the Wallboard code that we built during the session - I'm currently in the process of adding some extra comments to the code to explain...
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 ReadingJeff Beehler has posted an update on the Beta 2 expiration issue. He currently see's three possible alternatives: Do nothing: if you don't need to use your VPC for more than an hour or so at at time (for instance for demos), then you can probably tolerate the behavior of the timed out OS.
Continue Reading[](http://www.microsoft.com/europe/teched-developers)I'm joining my good friend Brian Randell to do a session on Team Build 2008 at TechEd Developers in Barcelona on November 8th. If you are at TechEd then please do come along - it is shaping up to be a fun talk.
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 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.
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 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 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 ReadingNow that the V1 of the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit is up and running on CodePlex, Matt and the team are looking for feedback on what systems you would like migration options allowing you to abandon your old system and move to TFS.
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 ReadingA new project has been released over on CodePlex from the Patterns and Practices folks which attempts to improve the guidance generation process. "The interim solution makes it easier to customise the narrative guidance than the current mechanisms, but I should emphasize that it will be replaced by our longer term...
Continue ReadingPeople go on about iPod + iTunes + Store being this all time great combination. I'll admit that I love my iPod, and if/when one comes out with similar capabilities to the iPhone player I'll be buying it. However, I don't think I'm being controversial here when I say that iTunes on Windows really sucks.
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 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 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.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/HelpinOrcastf.exe_BB18/Visual%20Studio%20Codename%20Orcas%20Command%20Prompt%5B2%5D.png)Ahh, in Beta 1 of the Team Explorer client, if you type "tf" in a Visual Studio command prompt, you get back help in the console, rather than a window popping up taking you to the...
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 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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/VistaTopTipHowtogetTelnetBack_952B/vista%5B6%5D.png)When debugging network issues, I tend to fallback to good old telnet as a way of opening a port to a machine.
Continue ReadingThe Team Foundation Server Version Control Proxy is a wonderful thing - despite the not so catchy name. It sits between a remote office and your Team Foundation Server Application Tier and caches requests for file downloads from that remote office so that the second person to request that version of that file will...
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 just found out about the following project going on at CodePlex out of the patterns and practices project which find a very interesting idea that I am going to try and find out if I can contribute to:- VSTSGuidance: http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSGuidance
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 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 ReadingOne of the concepts that people need to understand when they begin to work with Team Foundation Server Version Control is that of the Team Foundation Server (TFS) Workspace. So I thought I would write a series of blog-posts covering the basics of TFS workspaces, with this post being the first.
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 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 having trouble getting Visual Studio Team Suite up and running on my new vista install. I was assuming it was something nasty in the long winded installs of Visual Studio Team Suite, Team Explorer, SP1 for both and the Beta of the Vista GDR for Team Suite.
Continue ReadingDave Glover has held onto the title of world's smallest Team Foundation Server instance since August 2006. However, I have a confession to make. On Tuesday I was doing an MSDN webcast demonstrating the Teamprise plug-in.
Continue ReadingIf (like me) you are using the tf.exe.aspx) command line to access your Team Foundation Server via a Version Control Proxy from a remote office, then the following tip is extremely useful - much more so than my previous registry hack.
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 ReadingEvery source control system I have worked with until recently supported keyword expansion. My code comment blocks have always tended to be something like (in Java):- /* Description.
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 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 ReadingOne of the questions that came up from one of our users was "how do I delete the files from my local file system - and tell Team Foundation Server that I have done this". The first thing you might try is to just delete them locally. However, Team Foundation Server (TFS) uses your workspace.
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.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/VistaRTMonIntelMacMini_B4B1/startupdisk6.png) Just as a follow up to my previous post, I was having trouble switching back into Mac OS X once booted into Vista.
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 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 ReadingTeam Foundation Server source control has a great feature called Shelving. Shelving lets you set store a batch of pending changes onto the server and optionally remove them from your local workspace.
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 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 ReadingOne of the things that Java IDE's have always had over Visual Studio is the ability to target older versions of the VM from the latest and greatest versions of the tools. For example, I develop in Eclipse 3.2 day to day, but I target Eclipse 3.0 on Java 1.4 for compilations and to debug against.
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 ReadingVisual Studio Team Foundation Server gives a fantastic ability to track and report on various facts about your software development process. It frees managers (and team members) from the chore of recording and collating data about the development process.
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 ReadingWe have some friends staying with us from out of town at the moment. They are actually friends of my parents - the type of people that were always around when I was growing up and I called my Aunt and Uncle even though they are not blood-relatives.
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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/TheMissingMergeContextMenu_13EDC/merge_options3.png) I'm currently busy with the merge functionality in Teamprise Version 2.
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 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.
Continue ReadingShowing branch history in a visual way is not something that the current version 1.0 of the Microsoft Team Foundation Server client is great at. In fairness to the team, showing the branch history of files in an graphical way is pretty complicated and would involve many lines of code – especially when you build a...
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 ReadingToday we released Teamprise V1.1 to the general public (available here). Version 1.1 is a maintenance release to address several issues that our customers have reported. Most notably, Version 1.1 now fully supports NTLM authentication (including NTLMv2).
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 ReadingBy default, the maximum attachment size for attachments to work items in Team Foundation Server is 4Mb. It is handy that this feature exists because people may accidentally attach massive files when they should really be attaching something a little smaller.
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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/teamprise2.png)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/teamprise2.png)In a few hours, I’ll be getting on a flight to TechEd 2006 in Boston. If you are coming along then make sure to stop by the Teamprise booth and get a preview of Teamprise 2.0.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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...
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 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 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 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 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 ReadingJeff Atwood has posted a sample to allow you to implement what has got to be the single most requested check-in policy for Team System, forcing a user to comment their change. Based on some earlier posts by James Manning, Jeff's download also contains some good example check-in policies.
Continue ReadingJust to let folks know I’ll be popping over to attend SD West. I’ll be doing a technical session on Thursday morning and I’ll be at the Teamprise booth in the Microsoft Pavilion the rest of the time.
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 Reading[](http://www.teamprise.com/)Preview 6 of Teamprise is now available for registered users to download (registration is free). This release is compatible with the RC version of Team Foundation Server only - Beta 3 and Beta 3 refresh users should stick with Preview 5 or upgrade TFS now to claim your free T-shirt.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/vsts_google_toolbar.jpg)Well, having tried new new beta of Google Toolbar I just had to try implementing my own toolbar button. Here is one that will give you the top previous posts from folks around the VSTS blogosphere.
Continue ReadingI’m currently writing a diagnostics tool to perform all the same connectivity diagnostic checks that I do manually when I am having trouble connecting to something. The following code snippet is how I am checking to see if a web or proxy server is listening on a particular port.
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 ReadingAnyone who watches the Simpsons or Ghostbusters (555 2368) is aware that numbers beginning with 555 in the states are usually fake. While looking for information about international dialing from the UK, I stumbled upon the official Ofcom list of fake numbers - UK number ranges reserved for drama purposes.
Continue ReadingJohn Lawrence has posted an interesting tip about the error "Server did not recognize the value of the HTTP Header SOAPAction: http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/Services/ServerStatus/02/CheckAuthentication".
Continue ReadingI am in the pre-workshop conference VSTS for Everyone: Best Practices for the Whole Team. It is really interesting watching other people learning VSTS and also what common questions that they ask.
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 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 ReadingIt's probably obvious this one, but it took me a minute to figure it out. In VSTS source control, file version numbers do not go 1,2,3,4.. but they are versioned by the changeset number that the change was in.
Continue ReadingJust discovered the website - Pandora. Basically, it allows you to create a streaming music station by typing in the names of some songs or bands that you like. It will then play you music by those artists and similar ones.
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 ReadingOk, so I'm probably not the first or the last person to use that sentance. Anyway, Google Base is responding to requests. See the Google Blog post for more details. This could develop into a massive tagged, searchable repository or it could just be another Web 2.
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 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 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 ReadingJust posted a reply to the VSTS Forums, but this is such a common question that I thought I'd post the response here in a place that Google is more likely to stumble across it. The problem is when somebody leaves a file checked out from Team Foundation Source Control (formally known as Hatterras).
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 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 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 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 ReadingJust a quick sample to see if I can put stuff into IE's clipboard. Click here;) to copy "Hello World!" into the clipboard. Obviously, if I can put stuff in the clipboard, I can see what you happend to leave in it as well... Uses the window.clipboardData method.
Continue ReadingI couldn't find this with a quick google, so guessed the answer. If you want to pass login credentials to the Hatteras command line client (h.exe or soon to be renamed tf.exe) then you can use the /login command line parameter. The bit I couldn't find in the helpfile is that the format is /login:username,password.
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 ReadingAt the risk of prompting someone to ask for them, Dan Fernandez has posted a neat stored procedure utility that inspects your sprocs and can give you come basic code metrics on them as well. If any managers are reading, just remember that code metrics are not a direct measure of productivity.
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 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 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 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 ReadingJust reading Ben's blog. He has been playing with 2D Fractal Terrains (as you do). Seeing the landscape Ben generated instantly brought back so many memories. A school friend of mine, called Robert Parsons, used a similar algorithm to generate 2D landscapes that look just like Ben's.
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 ReadingI just used some spare PayPal money to get myself a 3 month subscription to the SkypeIn Beta. Had trouble finding a free number in the area code of my choice (was going to go for a US number in Silicon Valley, but ended up going for a Chicago one because there were plenty left) Anyway, feel free to spam my new...
Continue ReadingFrom Martin Fowler's site: Detestable (adjective): software that isn't testable.
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 ReadingInteresting news from Javaworld. BEA are to announce that they are to join the Eclipse foundation. Hopefully this signals that Weblogic Workshop will be integrated with Eclipse (just as IBM integrate at the moment for WSAD). This only leave Sun and Microsoft as the major vendors staying out of Eclipse.
Continue ReadingRecently, I've been trying to access some Microsoft webcasts but they just have not been working on my work PC. I got an error when media player tried to download the codec. Eventually tracked this down to needing the VoiceAge codec and not being able to find it.
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 ReadingI am now back on the first page of Google when you search for Martin Woodward. Not sure what's changed as I still have the same number of links to my site. I think perhaps it is because the discussion of the Wikipedia definition for "Podcasting" very kindly links to me, and this definition is now linked to in many...
Continue ReadingIn case you haven't seen this yet, take a look at Google Suggest. I hadn't seen it until one of my colleagues pointed me to it this morning - very cool autocomplete feature. One of the things I love about Google is taking a look at the source of their web pages.
Continue ReadingRecently discovered these excellent UML 2.0 Stencils and Templates for Visio by Pavel Hruby. While I am still waiting for my ideal UML drawing tool, I keep coming back to Visio.
Continue Reading[](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.
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 ReadingThe Register have published the results of an important benchmark test - what is the best free rucksack. No matter how boring the presentation, everyones eyes always light up when the contents of the marketing cupboard are raided.
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 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.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000139HAA/woodwardwebcom)I've just treated myself to a new toy. A brand new HP4150 PDA. After much looking, the cheapest place seemed to be Amazon. Been very happy with it so far. Has both Bluetooth and WiFi.
Continue Reading[](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 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.
Continue ReadingI'm trying Blogger for the first time to publish to my site. I design and build around content management systems all the time at work - about time I try some of my own medicene. I have to say, the functionality on Blogger is pretty good, considering the price (i.e. nowt).
Continue ReadingThe site was a full J2EE based eBusiness platform for BA World Cargo. It introduced track and trace functionality, which involves communicating with a legacy mainframe system. I am particulary proud of the barcode generation jsp pages which I wrote in the back of a car while on my way across Scotland to catch a ferry.
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