Recently Packt Publishing sent me a copy of ‘Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010’ by Peter Ritchie, I have to say I have rather impressed by it. My only major issue with it is that of the title, this book covers much more than the refactoring features of 2010. It provides a very clear example driven discussion of the use and application of both refactoring patterns and design patterns. I think this would be an excellent book for a developer who want to start to apply design patterns to their C# code. The examples being more real world than Head First’s ‘Design Patterns’ (and the examples are in C# as opposed to Java) and the book being a far easier read than the classic ‘Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software’ ...

There is a call for speaker for DDD in Dublin on the 9th of October, that is not that far away is it! [Updated 1 Sep 2010] The link would help http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/dddie10/

Test Professional, after the Lab Management update, now uses Expression Encoder 4.0 to create it video of screen activity. This means that when you run a test and record a video you end up with an attachment called ScreenCapture.xesc. Now my PC did not have the Expression Encoder 4.0 installed, so did not know what to do with an .xesc file created within our Lab Management environment. To address this the answer is simple. On any PC that might want to view the video either: ...

Interesting user too stupid error today whist adding some CodeUI tests to a Lab Management deployment scenario. I added the Test Case and associated it with Coded UI test in Visual Studio I made sure my deployment build had the tests selected I then ran my Lab Deployment build, but got the error Build directory of the test run is not specified or does not exist. This normally means the test VM cannot see the share containing the build. I checked the agent login on the test VM could view the drop location, that was OK, but when I looked for the assembly containing my coded UI tests was just not there. ...

I have been using the ExternalTestRunner 2010 Build activity I wrote. I realised that at least one of the parameters I need to set, the ProjectCollection used to publish the test results, was hard coded in my sample. It was set in the form http://myserver:8080/tfs/MyCollection This is not that sensible, as this value is available using the build API as BuildDetail.BuildServer.TeamProjectCollection.Uri.ToString() It makes no sense to hard code the name of the server if the build system already knows it. ...

Access MVP Ben Clothier has posted an article and video on Going beyond Web Macros: Using Event Receivers & .NET with Access Services. This takes some of the techniques I was proposing for .NET/Access integration and added to them using Ben’s extensive experience in the Access space. Well worth a look if you want to make Access a RAD front end to legacy systems.

Just spent a while battling a problem whilst install the TFS 2010 Test Controller. When I launched the install setup program off the .ISO I could select the Test Controller installer, but then a command prompt flashed up and exited with no obvious error. If I went into the TestControllers directory on the mounted .ISO and ran the setup from a command prompt I saw the error “program too big to fit in memory”. ...

I am very impressed with the iPlayer Media Center Plugin I found on the Australian Media Center Community, I like most people found it installed fine but that it failed to add itself to the start menu. However this was easily fixed using Media Center Studio once I got my head around the Media Center Studio’s user interface. The basic process is: Load Media Center Studio Go onto the Start Menu tab At the bottom of the screen look for the entry points section (needs expanding usually) In here you should find the iPlayer application (has a red’ish pay button logo) Drag it onto whichever part of the start menu you want, but be aware there are some limitation as to where it can go, Extensions worked fine for me Save the changes Restart Media Center Once this is done you should be able to view WMV based iPlayer content from within Media Center. I have seen it take a while to start buffering content, but other than that it seems to work well and certainly looks the part. ...

Another follow up post, this time to the one on MSDeploy. As I said in that post a better way to trigger the MSDeploy PowerShell script would be as part of the build workflow, as opposed to a post build action in the MSBuild phase. Doing it this way means if the build failed testing, after MSBuild complete, you can still choose not to run MSDeploy. I have implemented this using an InvokeProcess call in my build workflow, which I have placed just before Gated checking logic at the end of the process template. ...

I posted a while ago on using my Typemock TMockRunner Custom Activity for Team Build 2010. I left that post with the problem that if you wished to customise a template after you a had added the custom activity you had to use the somewhat complex branching model edit the XAML. If you just followed the process in my post to put the build template in a new team project and tried to edit the XAML you got the following errors, an import namespace error and the associated inability to render part of the workflow ...