SQLBits IV registration is open

You can now register for SQLBits IV in Manchester on the 28th March, hurry if you want to attend as these free conferences do tend to full up quick

February 11, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My session has been selected for SQLBits IV

Thanks to everyone who voted for my session ‘Making the SQL developer one of the family with Visual Studio Team System’, it was successful in the selection process and so will be on the agenda at SQLBits IV on 28th March 2009 in Manchester Hope to see you there.

February 8, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Missing .NET framework installing a VSTO application

I have been getting the error “The required version of the .NET Framework is not installed on this computer.” (event id 4096 in Event log) when trying to install a VSTO application from both a ClickOnce deployment and a local copy. This is interesting as the .NET framework is installed (on my 64bit Windows 7 PC) and the VSTO application was developed on the self same machine (and works in Visual Studio 2008). ...

February 7, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Free events in the coming week

I know of two free events next week in Yorkshire next week for those interested : On Wednesday the 11th is the regular meeting of the Agile Yorkshire user group, where we will be enjoying a presentation on Test Driven Development by user group regulars Adam and Neil from Masternaut ThreeX. This will start at 7pm as normal, but some of us are planning to arrive about 6:30 to discuss some administrative issue of the user group. So if you are interested just turn up at the Victoria Hotel. ...

February 7, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Which way to fake an item in Typemock

I raised a question on the Typemock forum concerning a problem I was having mocking Sharepoint SPFarm objects. It was all down to which way to fake items using the various techniques in Isolator. It was interesting enough, I thought, to repeat here as a blog post. I had written some tests for a method that got a list of SiteCollections that a user had rights to access. The key point being the need to access the static property SPFarm.Local to get a list of Sharepoint services to iterate across. If I ran each test by itself it worked; but if run as a batch in TestDriven.Net or MSTest the first passed and the rest failed. ...

February 5, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Developer Day Scotland Voting Opens

The voting process has opened for Developer Day Scotland being held on the 2nd of May. I would like to draw you attention to my proposed session on testing for Sharepoint developers where I will show what can be done with Typemock and good use of design patterns to allow the building of complex tests that can be run of build servers that do not require Sharepoint to be installed. But even if you don’t fancy this session please still vote, and when it opens sign up to attend DDS. In my opinion DDS was the best of the DDD events I went to last year. A great venue and atmosphere. ...

February 4, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Old assemblies appearing in the _PublishedWebsites directory with Team Build

I have been having a problem with a new automated CI build under Team Build that I have added to an old Visual Studio solution. The solution is fairly big, but in essence it contains a shared data type assembly, a web site front end and a back end web service. The problem was on the Team Build drop share in the _PublishedWebsitesproduced by team build I was finding a old version of the shared data type assembly. However in the release directory of the same build I found the correct newly built version of the assembly. ...

January 29, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

PostBuild events not running on TFS Team Build

I have been struggling today with a problem that a PostBuild event on a C# project works fine on my development PC but failed on a Team Build box. The project is based on the Codeplex SharePoint Visual Studio Project Template that uses post build scripts to create a deployment WSP. It turns out the problem was an unwanted condition on the PostBuildEvent in the projects .csproj file. It was like this: ...

January 28, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

We are hosting Microsoft's Azure Technical Briefing

Interested in finding out more about Microsoft’s Cloud computing strategy and the technology behind Azure? Yes - well you are in luck there are more UK Microsoft road show events in February. They are in Cambridge, Edinburgh and the one we are hosting in Bradford on the 13th. For more details and links to registration see http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev/archive/2009/01/14/new-dates-for-azure-technical-briefing-announced.aspx

January 28, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Writing a webpart to work inside and outside Sharepoint when talking to WCF

I have posted in the past on porting our ASP.NET bug tracking systems into Sharepoint and also linking it to TFS. The idea being that the initial customer support contact is tracked in the call tracking system e.g. is it switched on, is there paper in it….., and then escalated to TFS when development effort is required. To do this escalation my webpart calls a WCF service to access the TFS API - why you ask? The TFS API is 32bit only and you cannot call it directly inside a Sharepoint 64bit server farm. ...

January 28, 2009 · 2 min · Richard Fennell