.net Brainwork

Microsoft acquires Teamprise Client Suite

Vasco Oliveira — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:58:06 GMT

Microsoft announced today the purchase of Teamprise Client Suite, from Teamprise.

Teamprise is a division of SourceGear and it's main focus is creating products and solutions for enterprise companies standardizing on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. SourceGear's most popular product is SourceOffSite. You have probably already heard of it.

Teamprise Client Suite consists of 3 components:

Eclipse plugin - Allows developers to perform all of their source control, bug tracking, build, and reporting operations from within Eclipse and Eclipse-based IDEs, such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop, and Adobe Flex Builder. It integrates into the menu system of Eclipse as a standard Team Provider plug-in, but also provides developers with specific views and forms for interacting with the Team Foundation Server. Developers using the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse have the ability to take part in the entire software development process in use by their organization without leaving the comforts of their development environment.

Stand-alone Explorer - Combines all of the functionality available to Eclipse developers using the Teamprise Plug-in into a stand-alone, cross-platform GUI application for team members working outside of a development IDE. Perform source control operations, browse the Team Foundation Server repository, edit bug reports, run work item queries, monitor builds, and view project reports all from within an application that has a native look and feel on the operating system you are using.

Command line client - Provides a cross-platform, non-graphical interface to Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, for scripting and build scenarios or for developers who prefer a command-line interface. The command line interface is compatible with the current Microsoft supplied command line interface so scripts are interchangeable. All of these components work on Windows, Mac, Linux and several flavors of Unix. In addition work is being done to explore providing these capabilities in mainframe environments to enable access to the Visual Studio ALM platform from there as well.

Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server

Exchange Server 2010 now available

Vasco Oliveira — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:08:48 GMT

Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop, announced today at the Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2009 conference in Germany, that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is now available worldwide.

"Exchange Server 2010 customers are already reporting cost savings of up to 70 percent thanks to a simplified high-availability model and support for lower-cost storage. Customers are also seeing productivity gains of more than 20 percent with a universal inbox that delivers e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and text messaging consistently across virtually any device..."

"Together with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the combined cost savings and improved productivity helps customers generate long-term business success." According to Stephen Elop, more than 45,000 partners are trained on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010, with several partners announcing new services and solutions today, including AMD, Avanade, Dell, EMC, Kaspersky Lab, Symantec and Unisys.

Exchange 2010 is now available for MSDN and TechNet customers, a trial edition is available at http://www.thenewefficiency.com

Tutorial: Windows Live Status on your Website

Vasco Oliveira — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:48:57 GMT

How about having a status button showing your Windows Live Messenger status? It’s pretty simple, and this mini-post explains how you can accomplish this.

To get the HTML code for Windows Live Messenger IM Control, login here with your Windows Live ID. First thing to do is log in to your Windows Live account. Then, confirm that you are in Windows Live Messenger > Web Settings and choose the “Create HTML” option, in the left menu.

You’ll be taken to a page where you can select the kind of integration you want to achieve. You can select a Messaging Window to enable conversations, a windows live status icon, and a windows live status button, each of them with customizable colors. All your changes are reflected in the generated script that you can copy and paste onto your website. You can see an example on this blog, on the left menu.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live, Messenger

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC Released

Vasco Oliveira — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:25:52 GMT

Telerik released the new ASP.NET MVC extensions that complemment the ASP.NET MVC framework by delivering a server-based framework that integrates with client-side modules based on popular JavaScript library, jQuery. Here's what you can expect from this release:

Pure ASP.NET MVC components

Built on top of ASP.NET MVC to leverage its values - lightweight rendering, clean HTML, separation of concerns, and testability.

Completely Open Source

The Extensions are licensed under the widely adopted GPLv2. A commercial license with support is also available.

Exceptional Performance

No postbacks, no ViewState, and no page lifecycle. The Web Asset Managers optimize the delivery of CSS and JavaScript, so no precious HTTP requests are wasted.

Based on jQuery

Telerik Extensions draw on the power of jQuery for visual effects and DOM manipulations.

Search Engine Optimized

The Extensions render clean, semantic HTML, which is essential for indexing your content in the major search engines.

Cross-browser support

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC support all major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.

You can download it here.

Technoratti Tags: jQuery, jQuery UI, Javascript, ASP.NET MVC

ADO.Net Entity Framework CTP Released

Vasco Oliveira — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:49:34 GMT

The EF team announced today the release (and availability of course) of Entity Framework CTP 2. The updated includes many requested improvements and features, and supports installation with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Some of the improvements and added features added since the last CTP include:

Enhancements to Code Only, including:
- Fine Grained Control over model
  - Specify Navigation Property Inverses
  - Specify Property Facets
  - Complex Types
- Customizable Mappings
  - Change Table Name, Column Names
  - Specify Custom Inheritance Strategy
  - Entity Splitting
  - Join Table Mapping

- Help keep this blog alive -

The Self-Tracking Entities template, allowing code generation of EF entities that facilitate ease of use in WCF/N-Tier scenarios-
- Foreign Key associations: Self-Tracking Entities can take advantage of the Foreign Keys in the Model feature added in .NET 4.0 Beta 2 and can contain both navigation properties and Foreign Key properties for the same association. Fix-up logic has been tidied up to be aware of FKs.
- Support for Silverlight 3: Generated entity types can be compiled to target Silverlight 3 and can be used in combination with Silverlight-enabled WCF services.
- Databinding support: Generated entity types now implement INotifyPropertyChanged and use ObservableCollections allowing them to work better with WPF and Silverlight databinding.
- Richer concurrency control support: Self-Tracking Entities now support the same variations for optimistic concurrency control as the Entity Framework. Original values are preserved for all required properties according to their concurrency mode in the Entity Data Model.
- Improved independent association support: The approach for managing entities with dangling references has been reengineered to avoid unnecessary database round-trips.
- New and improved methods: AcceptChanges, StartTracking, StopTracking where added and the existing MarkAsX methods are now extension methods.
- Generated code improvements and refactoring: The ApplyChanges implementation has been moved to the Context template so the template has no binary dependencies besides Entity Framework. Generated code for entity types have been refactored.

The CTP is available here.

Technoratti Tags: Entity Framework, ADO.NET

Microsoft cuts 800 more jobs

Vasco Oliveira — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:40:33 GMT

Microsoft recently announced that it's making additional job cuts today. A total of 800 job positions will be cut around the world, and affecting several product groups. It has been said that about a quarter of the job cuts are in the Seattle region.

With these cuts, Microsoft says it has now completed its plan, announced in January, to eliminate 5,000 positions over 18 months. The latest cuts also go a step further, taking the cumulative number of layoffs beyond the original 5,000-position plan, spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed, without saying how much further they go.

Hang in there guys...

MSN.com with new design

Vasco Oliveira — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:27:00 GMT

Microsoft updated it's MSN.com with a cleaner look and more structured information. It has a new logo (I'm not too convinced, I'm still getting used to it) side by side with the Bing search area.

Besides the latest news and weather, the new MSN homepage allows you to view your facebook news feed, connect to Windows live and view your tweets.

Check out the preview here.

Tutorial: jQuery Javascript Library

Vasco Oliveira — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:04:41 GMT

In this tutorial, I will be explaining what jQuery is, how it can help you in your web projects, and then you will be taken on a trip through the process of enabling jQuery on a web application. Trust me: if you’ve never tried jQuery, you’re in for a treat! Besides the library itself, jQuery also has a UI part, that allows you to easily integrate widgets in your UI. You can read it here.

Tutorial: Installing Php 5 in IIS 7 with MySQL 5.1

Vasco Oliveira — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:13:47 GMT

I needed a flash response to a recent personal project demand that required PHP and MySQL. As such, I needed to start coding ASAP a flash install of both platforms was in order. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to get PHP and MySQL running on your computer.

Tutorial: Disabling IE Enhanced Security Configuration

Vasco Oliveira — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:04:43 GMT

Internet Explorer’s enhanced Security Configuration is a windows add-on that adds extra security functionality to Internet Explorer by limiting web access and browsing.

You can see it as a recommendation or best practice of server web browsing security configurations. I’ve been asked a few times how to disable Internet Explorer’s Enhanced Security Configuration that comes enabled out of the box in Windows Server 2003, and this weekend it happened again.

So I thought of putting out a small and simple article that shows how to disable this feature, although this should be well thought. Check it out.