Posts

Do you feel alone, nobody nearby who you can talk to about TFS? Well try the new virtual user group meeting in Second Life. Only issue is the meeting will be 2am UK time by my reckoning.

Back home now after a excellent two days at Alt.Net in London. As with the spring conference this was a thought provoking event. I really like the whole open space format, though there were four ‘main sessions’ the event started the night before in the planning session and the bar and carried on without a pause, including the train trip home. The main sessions can be excellent; but it is usually the chat walking to get a coffee or over lunch was where you get a nugget of information that completes a picture for you. It is great to find out you are not alone in the problems you have and refreshing to hear people speak so openly over the challenges and successes they have had. ...

I hit a problem today when trying to sign a powershell script as detailed on Scott Hanselman’s blog with a Thawte code signing certificate. The basic issue was that the certificate could be seen in the Personal section of the Certificates MMC snap-in. Also it was listed if I issued the Powershell command Get-ChildItem cert:CurrentUserMy but if I added the flag to only show usable codesigning (Class III) certificates it was not listed. ...

The next XPClub meeting is a double bill: Code Quality and Scala + Lift. and is being held at the usual venue the Victoria Hotel Leeds. This is a free event open to all. As usual drinks and snacks thanks to the club sponsors are free, also there will be a draw for one free personal license for any of the products by JetBrains - the new club sponsor.

Today I got round to upgrading our TFS 2008 (dual server setup) with Team Server 2008 SP1. I tried it first on my demo VPC I use for presentations (reminder I am at VBug Coventry at the end of the talking about TFS, a free event open to all). Anyway, this update went fine and did not take too long, 5 or 10 minutes. On the main system all seemed to go OK, but it did take around 45 minutes. I assumed the time it takes is dependant on volume of data in the DB, some sort of schema update I guess. ...

I have had a nightmare getting this going. Adding the ModalPopupExtender to a form is easy, you drop it on and tell it the two required controls parameters PopupControlID=“MyModalPanel” TargetControlID=“ButtonToLoadIt” And it just works fine, but is triggered by a client side click of the Target Control. If you want to do some server side code behind first you are meant to set the TargetControlID to a fake control that is visible on form e.g. “FakeButtonToLoadIt” IT IS VITAL THIS CONTROL IS VISIBLE AND HENCE RENDERED, but the control can be effectively hidden via CSS styling with something like Style=“display: none” In the code behind after your own processing you are just meant to call this.MPE.Show(); where MPE is the ID of your extender Well this did not work for me. If I clicked my fake control (when it was not hidden obviously) it all worked by the server side call just displayed my panel where it was in the underlying HTML flow - the extension never kicked in. ...

I am speaking at VBug Coventry on the 24th of September about Visual Studio Team System. For details have a look at the [VBug events](Elmbank Training, Juniper Room (Ground Floor), Mill Lane, Coventry, CV1 2LQ, GB) site, look forward to seeing you there.

For those who have not seen it eScrum 1.1 is now available. This basically a update for the installer so it works on VS2008 so you don’t have to go through all the manual fiddling you had to in the past. So if you want a nice simple agile team project process, with a nice web site to give progress visibility, give it a look.

When you are using a VSTO enabled Word Template inside a SharePoint custom content type you have to be careful which actual .DOTX file you use within the SharePoint custom content type. DO NOT - use the .DOTX from your VSTO Visual Studio project directory DO USE - the .DOTX from the the project’s ClickOnce publish location. The key point here is that until you have published the VSTO project via ClickOnce the .DOTX template does not know where to find the deployment of the associated assemblies. The copy in the project directory never actually knows this location as it is just a source file not a deliverable. ...

I posted about NBC Olympic coverage - today I discovered I cannot stream BBC provided media content from the Olympics on my Windows PDA using Opera via the Vodafone 3G service. Seems the BBC does not think I am in the UK. I know Yorkshire assumes it should be independent, but I don’t think it has happened yet. I suppose this is all to be expected, technology that allows reasonable media delivery over a mobile network at a vaguely sane price is new; especially when roaming between countries/networks. I doubt we will see this problem disappear soon unless the media rights are more commonly picked up by the telco providers such as Vodfone as opposed to the broadcast media companies like NBC and the BBC. ...