Like many developers, I contribute to open source projects at home – usually to scratch an itch, learn something new or just to contribute to something I love using myself. However, I work for the open source .NET Foundation which means I have a dream job of getting paid to work on open source.
Continue ReadingI'm excited to say that today I started a new job as the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. The .NET Foundation is an independent non-profit organization set up to foster open development, innovation and collaboration around the Microsoft .NET development framework.
Continue 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 ReadingAs 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...
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://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.
Continue Reading[](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470943327/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=woodweb03-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470943327)I’ve always wanted to write a technical book and when I started getting involved in Team Foundation Server I thought that this technology area might be my chance.
Continue Reading[](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.
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 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.
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 Reading****A couple of weeks ago I was in Antwerp for a partner event and I also had the pleasure of meeting with a few customers from the Belgium and Luxembourg region.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=615)On Monday I was a little under the weather suffering from the winter tummy bug that is floating around at the moment, but my day was cheered up by a phone call from Carl and Richard over at .NET Rocks.
Continue ReadingOn November 3rd, I had the pleasure of announcing Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 Beta at my session during Eclipse Summit Europe. Thanks to everyone that came along to the session, and for all the follow-up discussions at the Microsoft area. As promised, the slides for my talk are accessible below:
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.
Continue Reading[](http://cid-c7a08ae2600d197a.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/YearPlanner)As I’ve mentioned in the past, I like to have a compact year planner on the wall next to my desk so that I can quickly reference stuff.
Continue 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 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...
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 ReadingI’m at TechEd EMEA again this year after missing last year’s EMEA event due to illness. I’m busy working the Visual Studio area in the Technical Learning Centre as usual, but for the first time as Microsoft staff rather than an MVP. The show so far has been great.
Continue ReadingFour 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 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 Reading[](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.
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 ReadingTonight 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.
Continue ReadingJust 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 Reading[](http://www.saasmadeeasy.com/Pages/default.aspx) Fellow MVP Paul Hacker just dropped me a line to share a great offer his company is making available for BizSpark companies.
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.flickr.com/photos/bgervin/3320077849/in/set-72157614557110879/) Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with my good friend and fellow MVP Ed Blankenship to learn about the Team Foundation Server deployment in Infragistics.
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 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...
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 ReadingLast week at TechEd 2009 North America, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Keller to discuss Teamprise past, present and future. If you have Silverlight installed you can watch the interview or you can download the video from the TechEd site. [](http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?
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 ReadingSadly, I couldn't go along to MIX this year. However luckily for me, Microsoft has followed a new trend with its conferences and made all the sessions available online for free for everyone to access.
Continue Reading[](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 Reading[](http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-Martin-Woodward-MVP-Summit-Web-Perf-Show-Off-and-a-VSTS-Pep-Talk/) This week I have been in Seattle for the MVP Summit 2009.
Continue ReadingNasty things start to happen on Windows systems when you start having paths that are longer than 254 characters. When NTFS is the underlying filesystem you can have up to 32767 unicode characters in the path, however in parts of Windows (and therefore .NET), a local file path (i.e. "C:\MyDir\MyFile.
Continue 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.
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://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 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 ReadingMy friend and fellow Team System MVP, Neno Loje, has been on a blogging frenzy this year. Recently he has published a handy Visual Studio template if you do a lot of playing with Team Foundation Server API calls (as I do), or if you are trying to play with an TFS API example that you have found on the net but are...
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 ReadingWe get so used to the words “Important Security Update” that it is easy to let messages like this one pass you by. However if you have Team System Web Access (TSWA) installed – particularly if you have it on a machine that can be accessed over the internet - then you really want to upgrade it to the latest version...
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://www.woodwardweb.com/talks/TFSWhatsNew2009Q1.pdf) Tonight at NIMTUG I'm going to be giving a talk to get everyone up to speed with the latest developments in the Team Foundation Server world.
Continue Reading[](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 Reading[](http://url.ie/11q9) Today is the first day of the new year in the office and so it is time for me to do the dance that I always do after Auld Lang Syne, and that is the Annual Year Planner Shuffle. This morning I threw away the 2008 year planner, moved the 2009 one up and printed out a new 2010 sheer.
Continue Reading[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) Over the holidays we sat down for the last time of 2008 and had a relaxed chat with Jeff Beehler, Team System Chief of Staff. We talked about the history of Team System, how the teams in Microsoft go about shipping the Team System product and Jeff throws in some teasers about what will be...
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 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.
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 Reading[](http://www.microsoftpdc.com) In case you hadn't heard, this week is Microsoft PDC 2008 in LA. Sadly I'm not able to make it over this time due to some health issues, however the Teamprise team will be out in full force.
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 ReadingWe just released a new Radio TFS episode on check-in policies. You can listen to the show here, but don't forget that you can subscribe to the show using the RSS Feed in iTunes or Zune (http://feeds.feedburner.com/radiotfs).
Continue ReadingIf you haven’t heard the news already, Microsoft have officially announced the name of the next version of Team System, previously known by the codename of “Rosario”. For Microsoft developers, this will be delivered on top of Visual Studio 2010.
Continue ReadingIn TFS 2008 SP1, a new feature was quietly introduced, WIT Client Metadata Filtering. This feature could boost the performance of your Team Foundation Server experience, reduce the amount of traffic flowing over your network and reduce the data porosity of your TFS instance. Yet it is not enabled by default.
Continue Reading[](http://www.codeplex.com/MigrationSyncToolkit) In a recent episode of .NET Rocks, we got talking about migrating to TFS and taking your SCM history with you. If you really wanted to go through the pain of doing this then the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit project on CodePlex is a good starting point to...
Continue Reading[](http://www.tsug-ve.com/) Chewing Glas (aka Paul Hacker) and Daven Finesmith (aka Dave McKinstry) are proud to announce a new users group, the Team System User Group - Virtual Edition.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=373) The other week Brian Randall and I sat down with Carl and Richard to record a .Net Rocks episode. Honestly, you wait years for a Brian Randall podcast and then three come along at once!
Continue ReadingTeam Foundation Server uses Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) to provide the project portal infrastructure. If you installed TFS 2005 then you will probably have WSS 2.0 installed, even if you later upgraded to TFS 2008. WSS 3.0 gets installed by default with TFS 2008 installations and is much better than WSS 2.
Continue Reading[](http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/) Over on Radio TFS we've just published a special episode on the Database Edition of Team System with the man himself, Gert Drapers. In the show Gert brings us up to speed on how the product got started, where it is now and where it is going in the future.
Continue ReadingTo celebrate my 5 year anniversary of blogging, I gave this site a long overdue refresh over the weekend. While I've been publishing stuff on the Woodwardweb.com domain since 1999, that was initially just putting pages up with notepad and Dreamweaver.
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 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,...
Continue Reading[](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.
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 ReadingMany people know that Team System and Team Foundation Server are incredibly extensible platforms. Mike Azocar (a fellow Team System MVP) has come up with a great idea to see up can come up with the coolest Team System add-on.
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've been doing a lot of work with the Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Preview, and even recorded a podcast about it (also see Brian Harry's blog post for more details on TFS 2008 SP1 features). One out of the many new features introduced in TFS 2008 SP1 is the "Last Check-in" column in the source control explorer.
Continue Reading[](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://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/radiotfs/~5/296872926/radiotfs_005.mp3) I've just posted the latest installment of Radio TFS. I'm actually a show behind on editing so expect to see episode 6 up soon.
Continue ReadingAs a professional programmer, the languages I code in during the day are very much dependant on the particular project I am working on. Also as a programmer I have a very low threshold for repetitive or complex tasks - basically if I have to do something more than twice then I'll probably write a quick program to do...
Continue Reading[](http://www.infragistics.com/Default.aspx)Infragistics is the world's largest publisher of reusable presentation layer development tools for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, Tablet PC and Java (JSF) environments. I think they can count most of the Fortune 2000 as customers of theirs.
Continue ReadingI am currently playing with SP1 of VSTS 2008 and TFS 2008 in a Windows Server 2008 VMWare instance I have. Whenever I created this particular instance I kept the disk space at 16Gb which is normally plenty for these play instances but after installing the service pack of VSTS my disk space was getting low.
Continue ReadingSigh. Apple are really starting to get on my nerves. Not only is iTunes on Windows consistently very buggy, slow and foreign looking in the Windows OS - they are now trying to trick Windows users into installing Safari. On this particular machine I have never installed Safari, and I never want to.
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 ReadingI've just posted the fourth episode of Radio TFS. In this episode Paul and Mickey talk about Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition while I ask dumb questions and go off on tangents. Despite this, it is actually one of our better episodes to date.
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 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.
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 Reading[](http://www.radiotfs.com/) Paul Hacker, Mickey Gousset and I have recently started a Team System related podcast called Radio TFS. While it is not going to win any awards any time soon, we've been having a lot of fun so we are going to continue to try and get one or two episodes out a month.
Continue Reading[](http://www.dddireland.com/) Developer Developer Developer is coming to the beautiful west of Ireland in May with GAMTUG hosting the event on Saturday May 3rd. If you are in or around Ireland at that time then I would encourage you sign up.
Continue ReadingI like my build numbers to be the same number that my assemblies are versioned with (and my end deliverables). It just makes things easier to track, that way if I get a bug report in from a customer I can look at the version and easily look at the label in source control to see what code that included.
Continue ReadingOne 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 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 ReadingMicrosoft Team Foundation Server 2008 has a great new improved build system (often referred to as "Team Build"). An advantage of running your build from Team Build is that (by default) all changes between your current build and the last good one are reported in the build report and any work items that were associated...
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 ReadingIt's funny, in these days of digital distribution, but seeing some physical media for a software project you have been closely involved with still means a great deal.
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 ReadingJust a quick update on the TFS2008 with CruiseControl (java version) issue. I recently submitted the patch to the CruiseControl project and it has already kindly been commited into trunk by Dan Rollo. The patch should appear in the 2.7.2 release of CruiseControl.
Continue ReadingThis morning while I was preparing for a customer demo that I'll be doing over LiveMeeting later today, my DSL connection stopped working. I have a reasonably complicated home office network arrangement - but it is most often my VPN connection or my unmanaged gigabit switch that are the problem.
Continue ReadingRecently, I noticed a small change in the way TFS 2008 (RTM) handles history calls between date ranges that unfortunately breaks the existing CruiseControl.NET integration to TFS. Should you want to carry on using CC.NET using TFS2008 as your source control then the following 1.4.0 release may be of interest.
Continue 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.
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 ReadingThe Team System group are holding a couple of their popular group chats again on Wednesday, December 5th. If you haven't been to one before it is a great opportunity to get to talk live with the very people that work on team system, give them your feedback and get your questions answered direct by the folks that made...
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 ReadingI got an IM message from fellow Team System MVP Grant Holliday this morning prompting me to log-in to MSDN Subscription Downloads and see what was new - lo and behold I'm downloading VSTS 2008 as we speak ;-) I am currently getting above 220 Kb/sec download which is close to the maximum I ever get on my DSL line so...
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 ReadingIf you are/were planning on using that Beta 2 VPC of Team System or TFS that you downloaded after November 1st, then think again. Jeff Beehler has posted to warn folks that the group have recently discovered that the VPC will expire early due to the timeout in the operating system. See Jeff's post for more details.
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.
Continue Reading[](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 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 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...
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 ReadingRC0 of Windows Server 2008 was made available earlier this week. I am currently installing it inside a Virtual PC and I have to say I'm impressed so far. The installation process is much faster and smoother.
Continue ReadingBrian Harry has posted some great news over on his blog - Microsoft have release a new tool to allow users to migrate from ClearCase to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
Continue ReadingSkype seems to have been having trouble this morning. At first I thought it was a set of Windows Vista Updates I'd applied - but when the problem started affecting my hardware based Skype phone as well my suspicions went to my ISP.
Continue ReadingPaul Julius just announced that RC3 of CruiseControl 2.7.1 has been released from the Agile 2007 conference. From my point of view this is fantastic news, because it includes a patch I submitted to the project to include integration between CruiseControl and Team Foundation Server.
Continue ReadingAs I've mentioned before, I love Resharper from those crazily clever folks at JetBrains. Today I installed an Early Access version of 3.0.2 into Visual Studio 2008 and all the goodness has returned.
Continue 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 ReadingWith Team Build in Team Foundation Server, you can have multiple build types for multiple projects. For example, we have a build that runs fast that we can have running Continuous Integration on, and a slower build (that does obfuscation, release packaging etc) that is run on demand when we want to perform a release...
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 ReadingAs I've mentioned before - keyword expansion is a feature that many SCM tools have, but TFS does not. Buck Hodges has just published an excellent post on why this is the case and talks about some of the approaches that people have tried to get around this. Definitely worth a read.
Continue ReadingThis took me a while to figure out, so I am writing down here to help me remember later. It may also be useful if you are playing with Gmail at all (BTW, the spam filtering on Gmail is very good).
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 ReadingBy the time I post this, you'll probably see it posted a hundred places, however on the rare chance that you only read my blog and not one of the many other great blogs about team system, can I point you to the upcoming Team System chat.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/AllYourDisksAreBelongToUs_9643/Win_vista_men%5B3%5D.gif) With the Trustworthy Computing initiative, we'd all thought the days of easter eggs) in Microsoft products had died, however three enterprising young men from the Anti-piracy Team at Microsoft managed to get...
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/STS117Launch_856A/shuttle_trail%5B10%5D.jpg) At 4pm the floor of TechEd 2007 closed and I headed straight off to Cocoa Beach to find a spot to watch the Shuttle launch. It was great driving along the roads, past all the people parked up on the side of the road.
Continue ReadingGrr, Ed has laid down the gauntlet and gone to rather extreme lengths to beat my claim to have the world's smallest TFS Proxy server up and running. I'm off to go talk to the embedded folks...
Continue ReadingLast night I had the privilege of being invited to a party hosted by the good folks running the Visual Studio Industry Partner program that Teamprise is a member of. The venue was the perfect place to host a party for nerds - they hired out the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center.
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.
Continue ReadingThis 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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/TheMoonmeetsVenusinRandalstown_E185/moon_venus%5B3%5D.jpg) On Saturday night I took a look out my kitchen window and was met with this view of the Moon and Venus.
Continue ReadingIf the recent announcements about Silverlight have your interest and you can get to Dublin on June 7th this year then I would urge you to take a look at this years Irish community conference IMTC.
Continue ReadingRecently I had the pleasure of chatting with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell about Source Control and Continuous Integration - this was recorded for DotNetRocks and the show is now available for you to enjoy. As Eric has mentioned, I've been a fan of DNR for a while.
Continue ReadingI'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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/admin_shell.ico) In Windows Vista, one of the first things I do on a new machine is create an "Admin Shell". The steps I do are as follows:- Copy the shortcut of your favorite command prompt (PowerShell or cmd.exe) Rename the shortcut "Admin Shell" or whatever you want.
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 ReadingAs you may have seen elsewhere, the VSTS team will be available for you to talk with on Friday. This is a great opportunity to talk directly with the team, get answers direct from from the folks that know as well as pass along any feedback you might have.
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 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 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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/YouarenotrunningVistaRemoteDesktopwarnin_9654/Remote%20Desktop%20Connection%5B5%5D.png) When running Remote Desktop from Windows Vista I've been getting the following error popping up everytime I connect.
Continue 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 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 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 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 Reading[](http://www.eclipsecon.org/2007/)Just wanted to mention that Corey (my boss) will be presenting at EclipseCon 2007 in Santa Clara on March 6th. Usually when I do my Teamprise demo's people there have seen the Team Explorer interface inside Visual Studio before and they are usually convinced of the benefits of TFS...
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 ReadingOne of the things I've always enjoyed about Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista is that no matter how much the UI changes, some shortcuts just seem to stay around allowing me to quickly navigate around the system.
Continue ReadingHere at Teamprise we've recently changed our build numbering scheme. We use the traditional Major.Minor.Revision.Build approach with Major.Minor.Revision being the only thing an end user should care about and Major.Minor the only thing we would every do any marketing for.
Continue ReadingThe Vista Aero interface is awesome - but capturing that beauty has always been hard for me. All that changed this morning when Jeff Atwood put me on to an awesome tool by Kenny Kerr. Kenny Kerr's Windows Clippings 1.5 is simply the best capture tool for Windows Vista that I have used.
Continue 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!
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 ReadingSo, next on my list was to get iTunes working so that I can easily feed my podcast addiction. I am very nearly at the point of purchasing a new MP3 player so I am ready for any excuse to tip me over the edge. Anyway, to get iTunes 7.0.
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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/WindowsVistaTipWindowsXforMobilityCenter_ED77/mobility_center4.png) I was having trouble getting my external monitor to work properly.
Continue Reading[](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 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 ReadingWell. I've had the pleasure of clashing with some great presenters in my time - but today I have the opportunity to clash with the great Zen master of presenters - Steve Jobs doing the keynote at MacWorld 2007.
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 ReadingOn Tuesday January 9th, I'll be doing a short MSDN webcast to demonstrate Teamprise 2.0 in action. If you haven't yet seen a demo of Teamprise or have some questions that you've been wanting answered then please sign up.
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 ReadingUpdate: 17.15 Fixed now, nothing to see here. Move along. As of the time of writing, all the BBC Podcasts have broke. Attempting to access the link gives a 404 error (reported as "The URL xxx could not be found on the server" in iTunes) This is a bit of a bummer for me as I am about to get in my car and drive...
Continue ReadingTuesday marked the beginning of my second year with Teamprise and today I'm very happy to report that we have just released Teamprise 2.0. To celebrate I thought I'd give you a quick run through of some of my favorite features.
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 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 ReadingOn the off chance that you read my blog and not Scott Hanselman's (shame on you) then I wanted to draw your attention to some invaluable registry tweaks he just posted - especially if you've been forced into installing Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to enable Outlook Instant Search - but also if you are a developer.
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 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 ReadingI logged into my MSDN subscription account this morning to find the following additions in my Operating Systems section! Obviously, the first thing I did was to start the download of the (single) DVD image for all 32-bit versions of Windows Vista.
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 ReadingThis morning I took the sort and pleasurable flight over from Belfast to Barcelona to join the Teamprise / SourceGear advance party ready to set up at the TechEd Developers conference in Barcelona.
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 ReadingA couple of weeks ago, Brian Harry posted about some Team System training content that is now available. If you missed the post and you have an interest in Team System then I highly recommend you take a read. The training content is being made available through the http://connect.Microsoft.com site.
Continue ReadingThanks to all the people who came along to the Developer Track of todays conference in Galway. It was great to see such a mix of people with different experience of .NET and Team System in General - but also nice to see some Java folks.
Continue ReadingTomorrow (October 12th), I'll be talking at the first annual ICT Conference in Galway, Ireland. While having me attend is probably reason for you to stay away, Eric Lee (PM on Visual Studio Team System) is flying in from Redmond especially to talk.
Continue ReadingI've used my old iPod Mini nearly every day for 2 years (since I discovered Podcasting for the first time). Tomorrow I have a rather long car journey ahead of me and I have been saving up a few episodes of .NET Rocks, Slacker Astronomy, In Business and a new episode of Today in Parliament for the trip.
Continue 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 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).
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 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 ReadingBrian Harry has been on a blogging spree this week!. Last night he announced some new Team Foundation Server Power Toys. This also shows a new and very welcome trend from Microsoft's DevDiv - the Power Toys are available as a separate download, but more interestingly many of them also integrate seamlessly into the...
Continue ReadingBrian Harry has recently posted an excellent word document talking about some guidelines to follow when developing custom TFS extensions. The document is definitely worth a read as it gives you a better understanding of the issues behind the guidance.
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 ReadingNext week you can have the opportunity to join the VSTS product group to discuss the features available in the different editions and Team Foundation Server. If you have some feedback that you have been dying to give about the product then this is a great opportunity to influence the team directly.
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.woodwardweb.com/WindowsLiveWriter/PintSizedTFSProxy_F31B/tfs_proxy%5B3%5D.jpg) I use Team Foundation Server over the end of a VPN connection to from my house in the UK over to Teamprise HQ back in Champaign, IL.
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 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.
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 ReadingPoster child of the Web 2.0 movement and all round general legends Meebo have just launched a new service called MeeboMe that allows you to host a flash based chat window on your website and allow people to send you IM messages. It is in Alpha stages at the moment so may well cause problems.
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 recently did an interview for Port 25 (the website for Microsoft’s Open Source Lab). If you would like to listen to the podcast then it is now available here. The interview was recorded in a week when NTLM authentication was high on my mind (as you can tell).
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 ReadingUPDATE: Brian Harry has posted a new utility to help you determine the trial expiration dates on your server. View Brian's post for more details. Like a lot of early adopters, we installed the Team Foundation Server 180–day trial edition so that we could use is right away while we were waiting for our TFS license...
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 ReadingTeamprise currently requires a Java JRE with DES encryption available in the JVM for the magic of NTLM authentication to work correctly. Unfortunately, the GCJ that ships by default with Ubuntu and other Debian based distributions does not have one.
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 ReadingLater today I’m presenting a webcast for Microsoft EMEA on Team Foundation Server Version Control. The registration process to sign up for it was a little complicated but apparently I’m allowed to give people the direct URL to log into the live meeting account as a participant.
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 ReadingI’d planned on giving a blow by blow account of TechEd 2006, but it was so amazingly busy I just never got time. I sat down at my laptop on Wednesday night and then woke up an hour later at the keyboard – so I figured I needed to sleep. During the day, the Teamprise booth was unbelievably busy.
Continue 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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/CIMG3334.JPG)Back in February Microsoft were asking for feedback on the installation for Team Foundation Server Release Candidate. During the early betas TFS got a lot of flack for being hard to install.
Continue ReadingThis tip is a follow up from my rather less helpful post “Don’t Do That” where I discussed the “Inherit security settings” option in the security settings tab for the Source Control Explorer when talking to Team Foundation Server.
Continue ReadingOk, I’ll admit it. My name is Martin Woodward and I am a gadgetaholic. I have a few USB memory keys and a couple of external USB hard-drives. However, I’ve been thinking about getting a new memory key for a while because my other ones are either too small or are a bit battered looking.
Continue ReadingThanks to Ben for passing this on. You can now do a straight forward “apt-get install sun-java5–jre” and have it install on Debian and Ubuntu. Due to the old licensing restrictions you used to have to package up the installation yourself and was a real pain.
Continue ReadingGreat news from Rob Caron. CodePlex has been launched into public beta. CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project life-cycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.
Continue Reading[](http://www.anrdoezrs.net/7n65tenkem139464931326463B8)I’ve been using the new 2.5 beta version of Skype for a week now and I am loving it. The main new feature is the support for SMS messaging.
Continue 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.
Continue ReadingJust noticed that Google Labs has launched Google Trends, a nice tool to graph the differences in search volumes over time. Good way of making comparisons in to what people are looking for information about.
Continue ReadingThe weather is fantastic over Teamprise Europe HQ at the moment. For the first time this year I’m sat wearing a short-sleeved shirt with my window open and I am not in the slightest bit cold.
Continue ReadingOK, so the odds that you read my blog and not Scott Guthrie’s are pretty low, especially if you have any interest in this topic. However, Scott just announced that the VS 2005 Web Application Project has gone V1.0.
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone that came along to my talk at the 2006 Irish National Developers Conference yesterday. As it was Jedi Day, the session was appropriately aimed at being a deep-dive into some tips and tricks when using Team Foundation Server in the real world. As promised, here is the here is the slide deck (1.
Continue ReadingTonight I had the pleasure of listening to Scott Guthrie talk about ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas and IIS 7.0 at the Keynote for the 1st Irish National Developers Conference.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/28dayslater.png)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/28dayslater.png)The time had to come. When I booted up VSTS after the May-Day holiday weekend I got a message warning me that I had 28 days left of my evaluation period.
Continue ReadingIf you are going to be doing more than the basic check-in / check-out options then it pays to get to know the command line client – tf. The command line client is actually the most flexible and powerful client to Team Foundation Version Control. For more information, consult the MSDN help documentation.
Continue ReadingFor those of you morning the loss of Monad as it henceforth becomes known as Windows PowerShell (it’s impossible to say that without putting some inflection into your voice to try and sound like a voice over for a cheesy advert) – we now have a new name to make fun of thanks to Nintendo renaming there next generation...
Continue ReadingTonight I spoke at the Cork INDA group. Despite the excellent weather outside loads of people turned up and sat in on a talk on Source Control, which shows true dedication (especially from the folks standing at the back).
Continue Reading[](http://indc.wordpress.com/)If you are in or around Dublin next week (May 3rd & 4th 2006), then I would strongly encourage you to come along to the 2006 Irish National Developers Conference. This conference is being organised by local .NET development community, and is aimed squarely at the development community.
Continue ReadingI don’t know about you, but I love associating my check-ins with work items using the Pending Changes view, it makes it so easy to maintain requirements traceability and helps me feel less guilty as I’m doing one more thing that I should have been doing for years.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/username_cache.gif)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/username_cache.gif)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/username_cache.gif)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/username_cache.gif)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/username_cache.
Continue ReadingI thought I’d try and post some quick Top Tips for Team Foundation Server – in no particular order apart from as I think of them. Today, this came up in the forums so I thought I’d elaborate.
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone that came along to my talk in Belfast last night. It was great to catch up with some old friends and good fun to stand up in front of my home crowd. As promised, here is the copy of the slide deck as a zipped PowerPoint File (2.
Continue ReadingNow V1.0 of Teamprise is out the door, we have started on the next release and are looking at the features that people want. One of these is Check-in policy support. Due to the way check-in policies are implemented in Team Foundation Server it presents us with several architectural challenges.
Continue ReadingA few minutes ago we flicked on the switch to release Teamprise v1.0 to public release. If you have tried out any of the preview versions then I urge you to upgrade as this one has a some new features along with many bug fixes. Now the excitement really begins :-)
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 ReadingIf (like me) you are slowly getting hooked on MSH (or Monad), the James Manning’s latest post will interest you – an early implementation of a MSH Provider for Team Foundation Server Version Control allowing you to access the repository as if it were any other mapped drive. Sweet!
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 want to know more about what I’ve been up to lately, then take a look at Ben’s latest post.
Continue ReadingFellow Teamprise developer Ed Thomson has started blogging. As you can tell from the header image in his blog, Ed is our resident Mac lover and his office is festooned with shiney Apple goodies (including one of those fancy new MacIntel machines).
Continue ReadingMy company (Teamprise) develop a plugin for Eclipse to talk to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). We also have a stand-alone client and a command line client – all of which run on Windows, Mac and Unix.
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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/tfs_deployment.png)[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/blog/tfs_deployment.png)In some recent forums posts, it has struck me that it is sometimes not clear to people what an install of Microsoft Team Foundation Server looks like.
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 ReadingAfter a somewhat public call to action, Ian Olsen is now blogging. Ian works over on the SourceGear side of the company and will be a familiar name to those of you subscribed to the CruiseControl.NET mailing lists. If you have the time pop along and pay him a visit.
Continue 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.
Continue ReadingI 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 ReadingAs I have mentioned before, when you check out a file for edit in Team Foundation Source Control, you are actually telling the server that you are going to edit a particular version of a particular file that you have in your local workspace.
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.
Continue ReadingJust noticed there is now an official Team Foundaion Server FAQ page. Nice to see four of my projects have made it on to the interoperability list :-)
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 ReadingQuick post to say that I got an RTM version of Team Foundation Server installed inside a VPC over the weekend and it worked seamlessly (as we've come to expect - kudos to those involved). Once little caveat: don't attempt to install from media over a network share.
Continue ReadingSo, I was manning the booth yesterday in a freakishly tired state that I was almost hallucinating (I swear I saw another high ranking Microsoft person using Linux in a keynote). I'd got to the point where I'd said the same things so many times I couldn't remember if I was repeating myself to the same person or not.
Continue 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 ReadingWell, the impending release of Team Foundation Server looks to be days away. The User Education team have posted the upgrade instructions. I'll post back to let folks know how we get on when we do the upgrade.
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).
Continue Reading[]()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 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 Reading[](http://feeds.feedburner.com/VstsBloggers) I have just added Richard Hundhausen’s excellent blog into the list of blogs that I slurp for the VSTS Community Bloggers Google Toolbar button. While I was there I made the blog a bit more reader friendly.
Continue ReadingI’ve been coding for around 25 years, since my parents bought me a VIC-20. I think it was probably a similar advert to this one by William Shatner that convinced them to buy it after seeing how much time my borther and I spent playing with our Atari 2600.
Continue ReadingVia Rob, Microsoft have now released a MSSCCI Provider that works in Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 6. According to the overview on the download site, “The Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider enables users of Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio .
Continue 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 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 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 ReadingYou'll probably be seeing a lot of these type of posts around the net, but I just wanted to say that I've got the RC version of Team Foundation Server up and running in a VPC. Apart from my only allocating the virtual server 384 Mb of memory for the first part - the installation went very smoothly.
Continue ReadingI woke up this morning to find the Release Candidate version of Team Foundation Server in my MSDN Subscriber downloads site. Who-hoo! I am currently downloading it while reading the Beta 3 (refresh) to RC upgrade procedures.
Continue ReadingScott Hanselman's Hanselminutes podcast continues with this weeks episode about Continuous Integration. Jamie Cansdale (the genius behind TestDriven.NET) has posted about the tool Scott was on the way to mentioning when Karl interrupted him.
Continue ReadingInternally in Teamprise, we have been having a lot of discussions about check-in and check-out in Team System and how to explain this concept to our end users. The problem is that the terms are overloaded depending on the source control system that you come from.
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 ReadingAt the keynote today at VSLive, Soma Somasegar publicly announced the availability of VSTS RC in the next week and the RTM in March 2006 - so basically the team are on track.
Continue ReadingI am in a presentation at the moment and realised that the speakers don't know about this excellent tip that I learnt from Rob Burke but never seen it written down anywhere.
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 Reading[](http://www.teamprise.com)Preview 5 of Teamprise is now available for registered users to download (registration is free). This release is compatible with Beta 3 and Beta 3 refresh of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.
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 ReadingIf you've been wondering what I have been up to lately, then make sure you sign up for the following MSDN Webcast:- MSDN Webcast: Accessing Visual Studio 2005 Team System Using the Teamprise Plug-In for Eclipse (Level 200).
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 Reading[](http://tools.netgear.com/skype/)Like buses, you wait for ages then two come along at once. Following a wave of Skype announcements at CES, Creative have announced a new Skype phone.
Continue ReadingA nice post to start the day from Bill Caputo. I know he doesn't think of himself as an XP evangelist anymore, but I like to think of him as the Pragmatic Evangelist.
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 ReadingScott Guthrie has posted about a new web project type that will be available for VS 2005. I know quite a few people have been running into difficulties with the shipped way that web projects work in VS 2005 (especially when it comes to automating the build process outside of Visual Studio) and this new model sounds...
Continue ReadingVia [Rob] 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 ReadingVia [Rob] Dave McKinstry has recently posted about his Approach to Process Customization with TFS. While I have been practising my work item definitions on a scratch project inside a team system VPC before applying them to the production box, he lays out a good process to help you avoid mistakes.
Continue ReadingBuck Hodges has done an excellent post on improving performance of the team foundation source control command line (tf.exe). More details here.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/tfs_properties_full.png)The source control system within Visual Studio Team System has a very powerful security model. One of the nice things is that if a user does not have read permissions on one of the objects in a tree, then that object is totally hidden from view - the...
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 ReadingRecently, a colleague and I were struggling to get a Windows 2003 domain controller configured to use an external NTP time source. We were doing all the old registry hacks that you used to have to do to no affect.
Continue ReadingProblem: Use ssh tunnelling to access a Subversion repository using SSH tunneling (i.e. with a subversion repository url of svn+ssh://myservername/myrepo) using the Subclipse subversion integration with Eclipse.
Continue Reading[](/images/blog/geomap.html)Well, despite the massive load that Google Analytics took, they have done me proud and are now happily tracking the data from 3 of the sites I look after that I'm most interested in. This blog, VSTSPlugins and VSTSEclipse.
Continue ReadingIf you had the mis-fortune of hearing me speak at the Belfast launch event for SQL 2005 / Visual Studio 2005 / Biztalk 2006 this morning then the following links may be of interest:-Rob Caron's Blog - Best place for VSTS related information Visual Studio Team System - Official Microsoft pages VSTSPlugins - Open...
Continue 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 ReadingVia Joe, the new Team System VPC is now available for download at the MSDN Download Center. Installing Team System is an education in itself and one of the best ways to learn how all the moving parts hang together. However it does take a while to install (especially into a VPC).
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 ReadingI've been a keen user of Konfabulator for a while now. I even paid for a couple of licenses in the pre-Yahoo days. It's really easy to hack up your own widgets, and I have a strange self-distructive streak that means I enjoy writing in javascript every now and then.
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 ReadingThis week Siemens have demonstrated a cheap paper thin display using OLED technology. Sounds very promising, they are talking about displays being manufactured using print style processes making displays cheap enough to appear in magazines. See The Guardian or Physorg for more information.
Continue ReadingWell, looks like I made a good prediction. According to the New Scientist, MSN and Yahoo are linking their IM products together and opening up their VOIP solutions to SIP. What's that saying about thy enemy's ememy?
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 ReadingThis years DARPA Grand Challenge has seen a winner. Stanley, the modified VW Toureg from Stanford University, completed the 131 mile off-road course with a 19 mph average speed. Stanford University News has an excellent article, I'm sure there are more articles to follow.
Continue ReadingAs you've probably discovered by now, Google has launched Google Reader - a web based RSS reader with all the fancy AJAX lovliness you'd expect. So far, I'm a little dissapointed.
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 know I probably shouldn't be this excited, but I've just installed VSTS B3 into a single VPC image, and it worked first time!! Still a couple of funnies, reports don't seem to be working doesn't look fatal, probably a configuration setting missing somewhere but apart from that everything is good.
Continue ReadingAlan Irwin has started blogging. The only person I know with valid passports from 3 countries.
Continue ReadingOccassionally, I come across something that is soo good I think twice about recommending it to people because I don't want the site to get so busy that it becomes un-useable. But this thing is just too good to be quiet about. Go check out meebo. Check it out right now, and I mean right now - you won't regret it.
Continue ReadingSkypehave done it again. Using the latest windows beta version (1.4.0.47) you now have access to Call Forwarding features. If you are offline or do not answer a skype call then you can configure Skype to automatically forward the call to your landline or cell phone (using your Skypeout credit to pay the the...
Continue ReadingSome days I forget how much I hate SourceSafe. If for some reason you start being unable to log into your SourceSafe database and get the error "ss.ini" not found this is because the SourceSafe client has renamed the file to a .tmp file while it was doing something to it and for some reason not finished.
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 ReadingProbably going to be a lot of talk about this over the next few days. Google has just released a first beta of Google Talk - ther own IM / VoIP client. Just giving it a try now, but it will be interesting to see how this competes with Skype, AIM et al.
Continue ReadingWell, I'm back online in the new house - with a lovely new 2Mbps ADSL connection. Upstream is still 256Kbps but that is as good as I can get for now (unless I want to pay for extra lines and start bonding ADSL connections).
Continue ReadingThis site may dissappear for some spells over the next few days. I'm currently in the process of moving house so it may take a while to get the old server located in my new garage. The good news is that I have some Cat5 cabling in the new house and a fancy 3Com router courtesy of Clark Sell.
Continue ReadingI sometimes come across code that I consider posting to The Daily WTF, but I find the old career preservation instincts usually kick in. One of the most common problems occur when code is copy/pasted into lots of places. Tonight I accidentally stumbled upon this little tool for java - the copy/paste detector.
Continue ReadingExcellent Google Hack via Scott Hanselman. Take a look at my guestmap Let me know where you live! It's a bit buggy and performance isn't great - but still pretty good.
Continue ReadingA friend of mine called Mike Becker just passed on a tip that I am now committed to passing on to as many people as I know. You ever needed access to the information in one of those annoying modal dialog boxes? Well now you can.
Continue ReadingI'm loving the new Generics support in C# 2.0 - may I never use the vanilla System.Collections namespace again. Syntactically, generics in C# and Java are quite smiliar, but there are some important differences under the hood of the VM (or CLR).
Continue ReadingI always have trouble finding this, so I'm adding a link to the VSTS Extensibility toolkit to my blog and my del.icio.us links...
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 ReadingFantastic, the EAP for Resharper 2.0 is open for public download. Cannot wait to install this as I've really been missing Resharper in Visual Studio 2005 (writing Using statements is soo 2003). I just hope ctrl-shift-n is in there already (remember, ctrl-shift-n is the new ctrl-n).
Continue 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'm probably late to the party, but I very rarely bother to update the firmware on my iPod. I'd heard the new iPod Updater (2005-06-26) contains support for podcasts but had not seen any details anywhere. I can confirm it is worth the effort if you listen to podcasts on your iPod.
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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/itunes_podcasts.html)I downloaded version 4.9 of iTunes today that contains support for Podcasts. Overall it seems ok, very easy to use but no support for Bittorrent which means I'll be sticking with nimiq for a while yet to keep up to date with DotNetRocks.
Continue ReadingThanks to a load of great work from Alexis Kartmann, the nDumbster project is now in a state that I would recommend it's use for real world projects. nDumbster is a .Net port of the Dumbster project which is maintained by Jason Kitchen.
Continue ReadingUpdate (Jan 2006): If you would like to use some of the features of VSTS from Eclipse then you might want to take a look at my new employer, Teamprise. They provide an eclipse plugin to access Team Foundation Source Control from Eclipse running on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Continue ReadingJoe has managed to get an article into the August edition Dr Dobbs Journal about our VSTSEclipse project. Good work fella! Now all we need to do is get it written...
Continue ReadingIf you have ever tried interoperability between an MS environment and any of the others you are likely to have tripped over NTLM authentication before now. Obviously there is no RFC for this one, but Eric Glass has an excellent explanation of NTLM that was gathered by reading public available information and a bit of...
Continue ReadingJust found this interesting article on documentation in Agile projects by Scott Ambler. As with everything in the Agile world, we must strive to do just enough to meet the business objectives - this includes documentation.
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 ReadingProof, if it was ever needed, of the power of modern browsers. Nuts to Google Maps, DHTML Lemmings is the perfect use of your browsers power. This works for me in Firefox 1.0 and IE 5.5. Oh No!
Continue ReadingYou know, this internet thing might just take off one day. One of my good buddies, Clark Sell, has just fired up Wordpress and started blogging. His first post is a good story that Kevin Rice sent him about how a company policy begins. This piece is very true, sadly the original source of this gem is unknown.
Continue ReadingSkypehave just gone public with their affiliate programme. Feel free to click on one of the links to Skype from the times I have recommended it in my blog and if you purchase Skype-Out credits, I'll get some money to waste on my own Skype spend...
Continue 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 ReadingVia Wired, there is now a WinAmp plugin that allows you to sync your iPod from WinAmp. Called mlipod, it also allows you to copy songs from your iPod back onto your computer - fantastic. Anyone know a plugin for WinAmp that downloads Podcasts?
Continue ReadingAccording to Steve Gilmor, Apple's iTunes is to support enclosures in RSS feeds (podcasting). I have been looking for more details on this and have not found any yet so I could have mis-read the article but it would be a sensible move for Apple.
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 ReadingJust a quick post to say that my old buddy Jez Stephenson has started blogging. Why don't you pop by and leave him some abuse? He is also setting up a new affilliate site "Quick Sound" selling guitars and music equipment. Rumour has it that he is thinking of getting into podcasting...
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 ReadingWow, Adobe have announced plans to buy Macromedia. Guess I'll only be buying from one company in the future when I need to do creative stuff for the web. Not sure what I think about this move, hope the price tag for Dreamweaver doesn't go up too much - what about the future of flash? We live in interesting times...
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 ReadingI've been playing with GIMP lately. Coming from Photoshop, I find the interface really hard to use. Also, the number of windows that GIMP generates it just plain annoying.
Continue ReadingIn an effort to keep my Java skills up to date while also using some of my new-found dotnet knowledge I've joined the team trying to put together a VSTS SCC plugin for Eclipse that talks to the source control functionality in Visual Studio Team System.
Continue 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 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 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"...
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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/john_peel_memorial.html)I've been meaning to post about this for a while. While driving into Belfast I spotted this bit of grafitti. In a city infamous for murials of a different kind, I think John may have appreciated the tribute.
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 ReadingMy wife was treated to the "Martin Woodward Excited Dance" this evening after I watched the trailer for the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy film. Superb. Looks like they have managed to update the story line while sticking to the Douglas Adams humour.
Continue 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 ReadingWell. It had to happen. I seem to have disappeared from Google when you do a search for "Martin Woodward". My iPodder profile now shows up at the number 2 slot, but I've no idea how to edit this profile to include a link back to my page.
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 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 ReadingBroker - John Grisham" date: 2005-02-01T22:11:22.000Z post thumb images: "/images/post/2005-the-broker-john-grisham.jpg" #author author: "Martin Woodward" description description: "temp_placeholder" Taxonomies categories: ["technology", "books", "gadgets", "web", "podcast"] tags: ["blog", "archive"] type: "regular" #...
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 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.
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 ReadingGood post on Paul Vick's blog about the characteristics of Black Hole projects at M$. This got me thinking about some traits I recognise:-The goal of the system cannot be summed up in a sentanceThey involve more people than you can fit on a busThey must have completely unrealistic deadlines.
Continue 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 Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/images/blog/20041118_snow.html)It's the 18th November and it's snowing!!! Really heaving. Looks cool - might go outside and build a snowman. Wouldn't mind but I have to drive across 3 countries tomorrow. Doh!
Continue ReadingFantastic news. Belfast is to host the 2005 World Toilet Summit, very near to where I work. According to Cleanpoint.com:- Hosted by The British Toilet Association, the Summit is being supported by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, Belfast City Council, the International Fund for Ireland and Belfast Visitor...
Continue ReadingJust found out about the various extensions to RSS 2 that allow information about comments to be included in the RSS feeds. I have revised my feed to include the full article along with links to the comments in it, numbers of comments etc.
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 ReadingInteresting article in Wired about "Numbers Stations" that broadcast on Shortwave. These are high-powered transmitters across the planet are are broadcasting strings of numbers, letters, backwards music, or even the noise of a fruit machine.
Continue ReadingI've recently come across Podcasting (or blogcasting as it is sometimes called). Basically it makes use of a feature in the RSS spec called enclosure that allows links to downloadable content - in this case audio content.
Continue Reading[](http://www.tenbyten.org/)Ten by Ten is a new interesting project to capture the words and images that are making the news every hour of every day. The top 100 word and images are placed in a 10 x 10 grid for you to browse.
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 ReadingAs I may have mentioned to anyone that will listen to me - I am currently getting up at a daft time of the morning to beat the traffic into work. On my journeys I have noticed a completely new invention that I have never noticed before but one that is such a good idea.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/moblog/world_wind.html)So, how about a desktop application that allows you to zoom in to any part of the world, move around and view in 3D? How about the appliation coming from NASA, which means you have a NASA directory in your Program Files, and a cool NASA icon on your desktop?
Continue ReadingWhat a fantastic morning it was today. I currently have the rather sad misfortune of getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning to drive to work, however it was an absolute pleasure today. Walked out the house to see this view (looked better than this rather poor picture taken on my phone shows).
Continue ReadingTook 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 ReadingBeen wondering what to do with all those GMail invites? Well thanks to a couple of new developments you can now mount a gmail account as an external file system. First up, for lovers of penguins we have GmailFS a mountable filesystem for linux.
Continue Reading[](http://www.woodwardweb.com/ballycastle_big.html)After a sad delay, I'm now back online! We have moved to Ballycastle in Northern Ireland. Lot's of things going on, including starting a new job. Expect to see lots of posting about dotnet and c# soon!!!
Continue 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 ReadingJust watched SpaceShipOne go into space for the first of its X-prize runs. Looked like a natsy spin at the towards the end of the rocket firing but it seems to have sucessfully crossed the boundary into space and is now gliding back to Mojave Spaceport in California (sporting its fancy new Virgin logo).
Continue ReadingJust installed Pocket SharpMT on my HP4150 (what is rapidly becoming my favourite gadget). So far it seems pretty fully featured. In fact I think some aspects are easier to use than the full version. However my handwriting needs to get a lot better if I want to use it in anger. Either that or I need to buy a keyboard.
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 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 ReadingFantastic news. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is set to be extended this year with new editions of the radio series and also (finally) the movie that Douglas Adams tried so long and hard to get made. Update: 24/9/2004 Just listened to the first of the new radio series and it is superb.
Continue ReadingSo, took the plunge and installed XP Service Pack 2 today. Wanted to see if the changes to Internet Explorer did anything strange to website I have designed, but also if the Service Pack would work on my HP Compaq nx7010.
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.
Continue ReadingStarted using the :: w.bloggar :: windows based desktop blogger client. So far so good. Though the client only supports a subset of the features available in Moveable Type, however it is very convienient to do quick blog entries.
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 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.
Continue ReadingTim Robertson has now upped and gone to Australia to be an excellent surf dude. We miss him, however the regular updates on his blog keep us up to date with all the things that can kill you down under.
Continue ReadingJez Stephenson has done a rather fantastic Mountain Bike Routes site. He keeps adding stuff to it so if exercise is your thing (you crazy fool) then take a look.
Continue ReadingVisit Paul Thompson's excellent and sometimes disturbing site. His photographic artwork it superb as is his humour.
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've been a regular user of programs from Sysinternals for a while now - today they just saved me again. I've just been getting an "Access is deinied" error when I was trying to delete a directory telling me that it was is use by another process. I re-booted the machine and the directory was still in use.
Continue ReadingThe first commercial E-Ink product is about to hit the market in Japan. According to the BBC the Sony LIBRIe 1000-EP will cost around 200GBP and be available in April. While this is the first version of the technology, it looks like it may well take off.
Continue ReadingEver wanted to connect your toaster to the internet, turn a skyscraper into a giant display, add a web server to your filter coffee machine or make a furby say things that will severely disturb the kids - then have a read of Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks by Scott Fullam.
Continue ReadingBBC Four recently broadcast an interesting documentary Tetris: From Russia With Love which was a very interesting account of the battles behind this simple but addictive game set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions. Rupert Murdoch's access into the Russian political system is also highlighted.
Continue Reading[](http://www.hpstore.hp.co.uk/itemDetails?sku=DJ342T)The spec of my free laptop has been announced. It is a HP nx7010 Centrino. Best bit if the 15.4" 16:10 WXGA display. Might need to upgrade the memory but apart from that it is a pretty good machine - very good for the price!
Continue ReadingI've won a laptop!! Amazing, never really won anything before (unless you count 1st prize in a fancy dress competition dressed as Worzel Gummage). All thanks to those every generous people at Intel Developer Services. Will post more details as soon as it arrives.
Continue Reading[](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0007102860/woodwardwebcom) Got given this fantastic book by my wife. It is a very interesting account of the trade in ice from America to rest of the world.
Continue ReadingBeen using the Beta version of Intellij 4.0 on my last project. It is now on late release candidate builds and is fantastic. Previously I was an Eclipse fan, however this version has me sold. Haven't tried out the generics support for Java 1.
Continue Reading[](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 ReadingJust started to leverage BuzzWhack. Some very funny - some a bit too close to the mark (see Salad Doger)
Continue ReadingThe new version on the Core J2EE patterns book is now online as part of the updated java.sun.com site.
Continue ReadingWent to see the new Matrix film - Revolutions. My expectations weren't that high as the reviews I had read were not particularly encouraging. However, it was okay. Worth seeing to pass the evening. It didn't stand up as a film in it's own right but the effects were good. Thinking of seeing Kill Bill next week.
Continue ReadingI've finally joined the broadband masses as my exchange has just been enabled and my nildram account has been activated. Works a treat as well, which I was suprised about.
Continue ReadingJust had a look at this page on the Eurdora web browser (on the palm) and it works really well. It seems to use the stylesheets but igore the display:none bit. It is text only on my m125 however due to the re-design it still works fine. I guess dropping tables was the right way to go!
Continue ReadingManaged to get my Palm to connect to Blogger via wapblogger. My graffitti needs to get a lot faster.
Continue ReadingGot my GPRS connection to my mobile phone (a Nokia 6310i) to my Palm m125 using IR. Works a treat. However I realise how handy a bluetooth connection would be. Thinking about getting a Palm Bluetooth SD Card.
Continue ReadingMy order for broadband has just gone in to Nildram. Decided to go with them in the end as I wanted a static ip address with an email account and webspace etc. According to ADSL Guide they have been consistently rated as one of the fastest ISP's. I have also heard nothing but good things about their Customer Service.
Continue ReadingWell, I have finally completed my site update. It is now using stylesheets for layout instead of tables. I'm also using Blogger to publish to the site. Hopefully this will mean that the site get's updated with content more often...
Continue ReadingMIT course note are now available online at MIT OpenCourseWare. This reminds me of the time I attended a full lecture course and actually typed up the notes. It was about the only exam I passed. Anyway, if you are interested in learning more about anything from anthropology to particle physics then this looks good.
Continue ReadingOne of my collegues pointed me at the css Zen Garden. I have to admit, I knew CSS was powerful - but I had always avoided learning it due to the flakey support in some browsers. Now nearly everyone is using a decent browser it may be time to stop using tables for layout purposes.
Continue ReadingThis is an entry from the toilet at work using GPRS via my mobile phone. Cool, blog while you log.
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.
Continue ReadingInvolved in different sections of this site that is very complex, with many legacy system interfaces and high transaction numbers. There were so many good people involved in this project that I can take no credit for any one part. I never did get the airplane to fly while waiting for the ticket booking screen...
Continue ReadingDemonstration of the CONTENTEDITABLE attribute that was introduced in IE 5.5 Show Example.
Continue ReadingMember of the team who produced the pioneering online check-in site for BA. Full J2EE n-tier application, however the best bit is the "little man" interface where you can click on a seat to select which seat you want and the little man moves.
Continue ReadingThis site is noteworthy as it was the first live deployment of a jsp page on the BA site - before then it was all jhtml. Other than that not really proud of this one as I had 4 days to get it designed, written, tested and live due to an upcoming marketing campaign that this site was supporting.
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