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How to turn on code coverage when running unit tests in VSTS 2010

2009-07-22T01:02:00.001+02:00

When running tests in Visual Studio Team System 2010, you can collect a lot of information about the code you’re testing and the environment the tests are running in. Previous versions were able to collect code coverage, but that’s was about it. VSTS 2010 provides a number of specific “collectors” that you can choose to enable for your tests. For instance, there is a collector for event log entries, system information and even a video recording of the test run (but this is not that interesting for unit tests :-)) The UI for enabling code coverage in VSTS 20210 has changed to accommodate these new features, and the code coverage settings is grouped together with the other collectors.

The easiest way to enable code coverage in VSTS 2010 is to open your existing Local.testsettings file (in VSTS 2008 these files had the extension testrunconfig), select the Execution Criteria category and enable Code Coverage in the list of Collectors:

Then you have to click the Advanced… button, which displays a dialog that is more or less equivalent to what you find when you select the Code Coverage category in the test run configuration in VSTS 2008. Here you select which assemblies you want to include in the code coverage:

You might not always want to run your unit tests with code coverage, so I recommend clicking Save As... in the Configuration Settings dialog to create a new test settings file.

Another interesting feature of VSTS 2010 is that Visual Studio can now identify which test you should run when modifying your code. This feature is implemented by a collector named Test Impact Collector, and should reduce the number of test you run while coding to only include the ones covering the code you have modified. When you create a new unit test project in Visual Studio 2010, it adds an extra test settings file called TraceAndTestImpact.testingsettings for this purpose, but I haven’t used this feature enough to get a feeling of how effective this functionality yet. I hope to publish another post about this in the future though.

How to update ReSharper 5 for Visual Studio 2010

2009-07-14T10:36:00.001+02:00

Now that the Early Access Program for ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010 has begun, I’m starting to feel comfortable working in VS2010 again. This is a very early build of the new ReSharper and there are some exceptions popping up here and there, but the overall experience is quite good.

One thing you need to now when trying out new builds is that ReSharper uses the new extension mechanism in VS2010. This mechanism allows for much faster installations and improved management, but currently you have to manually uninstall an existing version of ReSharper before installing a new build. You can do this through the Extension Manager window from the Tools menu:

I assume you can skip this step when VS2010 and ReSharper is RTM, because you can use the Extension Manager to search for updates to your installed extensions. You can even configure Extension Manager to automatically detect if updates are available.

You can create new project templates in VS with your own predefined settings

2009-07-09T13:25:00.001+02:00

When I create a new class library or another project type, there are a couple of properties I want to modify right away. This task can be a bit tedious (note to self: DRY), but luckily Visual Studio has a nice feature that allows you to create your own templates. It’s very easy, just make your changes and then select Export template… from the File menu. Make sure Automatically import the template into Visual Studio is checked if you want to use the template right away. What this checkbox does is simply to copy the resulting template zip file to the Visual Studio <Version>\Templates\ProjectTemplates sub folder under your documents folder.

Your new template is now available together with the other out-of-the-box templates when you create a new project:

For those who are interested, these are the class library properties I modify:

Application tab
- If I don’t name the project with full namespace, I change these two properties
  - Assembly name prefix
  - Default namespace prefix
- Assembly information…
  - Company
  - Copyright
Build tab
- Treat Warning as errors = All
Signing
- Sign the assembly
  I’m adding my own self generated strong name key file
Code Analysis
- Enable Code Analysis on Build
- For Visual Studio 2010: Rule Set = “Microsoft All Rules”
  I’m running all rules as default and suppress individual messages as needed, but I haven’t evaluated the other rule sets to see if one of those are more appropriate for my needs

I also make a couple of other change in addition to the strong name to satisfy the code analysis rules. The first is to add the CLSCompliant(true) attribute to the AssemblyInfo.cs file, and the second is to suppress code analysis warnings on my name because it thinks my name is misspelled in the namespace of the library.

And lastly, I always remove the Class1.cs file :)

Microsoft recognizes long time community contributions

2009-04-01T18:33:00.001+02:00

Today, I'm very happy to announce that Microsoft awarded me a Connected System Developer MVP (Most Valuable Professional) title for the work I've done in the local .NET community here in Trondheim. NNUG Trondheim was established in august 2002 with me as one of the founding board members, and since 2004 I've had the pleasure of being the chapter lead of a community full of smart and interesting people.

Although appearing in the same list of MVPs (the list is not updated as of today) as Christian Weyer, Michèle Leroux Bustamante, Juval Lowy, Lars Wilhelmsen (country lead at NNUG) and many others makes me very humble, the Connected System Developer category suits me fine. I've been working with WCF for quite a while now, and my work on service oriented architecture is a perfect match for digging deeper into these technologies.

I also have some very interesting ideas for code name Oslo projects that I would like to explore, and my plan is to give a talk about creating DSL's, models and custom runtimes at one of our user group meetings after the summer break. My goal is to show why it might be preferable in some scenarios to allow users to modify and compose their own applications at a higher abstraction level than traditional source code.

Pål Fossmo, who is a friend and colleague of mine, also received his MVP title in the category Visual C# today. This proves that if you're enthusiastic and contribute to your local community, you will be recognized as a valuable professional. At least in the community, but also by Microsoft at a national and global level.

I don't think I would have gotten my title without the help of Rune Grothaug (Community Manager at Microsoft) and Morten Wennevik (C# MVP), so I would like to thank them both for nominating me to the MVP program. Also thanks to everyone twittering congratulations to @joaroyen.

PS: I'm pretty sure this is not an April Fool's joke, and now I just want to relax and enjoy some Alpine Legend on my Xbox 360 :)

How I've implemented GTD with Outlook 2007

2009-03-27T17:24:00.001+01:00

I've been trying to follow the Getting Things Done principles since I read David Allen's book with the same name, and I think I have much better control over incoming email and active tasks now. One important GTD principle is to organize incoming correspondence into what you can process right away, what you need more time to work on, what you probably will need in an ongoing project and what you can file for later reference.

After following this principle for a while, my inbox now contains just a handful of items that I have flagged for action, and I also have had the pleasure of achieving zero email bounce a couple of times. Yes, that is a completely empty inbox :) By flagging everything that needs attention, I’m also very confident that nothing will be forgotten or overlooked. The To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007 gives me a very nice overview of all upcoming tasks, and the default calendar view displays the items that are due each day:

This view has another great advantage because it also includes what I have completed each day. (This image is not grabbed from my primary work laptop, and I’ve been working on additional stuff during the week :) )

This can be done in Outlook by flagging emails and organize items in folders outside the main inbox manually, but it can be a tedious task in itself. I have therefore written a couple of macros in plain old VBA, that I can invoke from the keyboard. The macros are organized in a custom GTD Toolbar, that looks like this:

As you can see from the image, every function is accessible from the keyboard by pressing the Alt key and a number. By using these macros , I can flag items with various actions, move them to my reference or project folders or delete them if I’m sure they aren’t need anymore. I can drill down into the action menu and flag items with actions and categories that indicates I’m waiting for somebody else before I can proceed or items that I intend to read later. If the reference and project folders contain subfolders, I can also drill down into them and file the items exactly where I want. I’ve also implemented an undo feature, but remember that it only tracks what the macros do (with the except of the standard follow up functions on the action menu) and what you do manually in Outlook will interfere with this function.

Installation

This is what you have to do to try out these macros yourself in Outlook 2007:

Download the code in this zip file and extract the six files to a local folder:
Enable unsigned macros
- Open “Trust Center” from the “Tools” menu
- Select “Macro Security”
- Select “Warnings for all macros”
  This is a potential security concern, and you can sign the macros yourself if you want. Then you can choose to only trust macros signed by your own certificate.
Import macros into Outlook
- Open “Visual Basic Editor” from the “Tools->Macro” menu
- Click “File –> Import file…” and import each of the six files in the zip-file
Enable GTD when Outlook starts (This is optional, because you can also initialize GTD from the toolbar manually when you need it.)
- Still in “Visual Basic Editor”, double click on “ThisOutlookSession” in the project explorer
- Paste inn the following code or edit your existing Application_Startup method if you already have one:
  Option Explicit
  
  Private Sub Application_Startup()
  Set gtd = New CGTD
  gtd.InitializeGTD
  End Sub
- Close “Visual Basic Editor”
Initialize GTD
- Open the “Macros” window from the “Tools->Macros” menu
- Select “Initialize” and click “Run”
- The GTD toolbar is floating by default, but you can drag it everywhere you want

Customization and issues

You can customize the name of the root project and reference folders in the GTDConstants file, but if you have multiple Outlook data files the folder names have to be the same in each file. If GTD can’t find folders with the configured names the corresponding buttons will be disabled. You can also customize the categories that are used to tag items you like to read later or those you are waiting for, and the maximum number of items to keep in the undo stack (only meta information abut the items are stored in the stack). The undo stack is implemented as a ring, so when the stack is full, the new element will overwrite the bottom position and become the new top element.

If something goes wrong, you can usually press the Initialize button to recover from an error. You will loose the undo history, but everything else should work fine. There is one known exception though, and that is if you create a sub folder of your reference or project folders and they didn't previously have any subfolders. The reason for this is that the toolbar button has to be exchanged with an toolbar menu instead, and there is a bug in that code that I haven’t bothered tracking down. This is a rare problem, and it has a simple workaround:

Right click on the toolbar and select "Customize..."
Select the "Toolbars" tab
Select the "GTD" toolbar and click Delete
Follow the initialization steps above to recreate the whole toolbar from scratch

Conclusion

I’ve been using these macros for some time now without any problems, and I’m very confident in how I handle the emails I receive. This system also works for notes in OneNote, because you can assign an Outlook task to any text or page in OneNote. You can then track these tasks in the To-Do Bar like any other task or flagged email.

This isn’t a complete GTD solution though, because I still have flagged blog posts in FeedDemon and a list of web pages in the Firefox extension Read It Later. I’m not 100% sure it is smart to have everything in Outlook, but I want to check out News Gator Inbox and see if it can only synchronize the items I have flagged in FeedDemon.

Disclaimer: This code is released as-is without any warranty. If you have questions or comments you are welcome to post a comment on my blog.

ReSharper 4.5 Early Access Program has started

2009-01-24T12:24:00.001+01:00

I’ve been using an early build of ReSharper 4.5 for a couple of days, and must say I like it quite a lot. I tried the latest tested nightly build, and the first thing I noticed was the improved performance. I don’t have any empirical data to support my findings but Visual Studio seems to be a lot snappier than with previous versions. Devenv+ReSharper still likes a lot of memory, and I haven’t seen any significant change in that respect.

Another cool feature for us that use Microsoft’s unit testing framework is that ReSharper now supports this framework in addition to Nunit and a couple of other testing frameworks. You can run your tests in ReSharper’s test runner, and you can also profile your tests if you have dotTrace Profiler installed. The current build only traces ReSharper’s own test runner code and not any of my code, but I expect this to be fixed in later builds.

If you use Team System, I think Visual Studio’s test runner is better in most cases because it’s better integrated. You can for instance submit bugs to Team System based on the result of the tests, but if you only have Visual Studio Professional, ReSharper improves how you manage and run tests.

Please note that this is still an early build, but If you want to try it yourself you can download the nightly builds from JetBrains ReSharper Early Access Program: http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+4.5+Nightly+Builds

How my desk at work looks like

2008-12-16T17:59:00.001+01:00

I was just tagged by Anders Hammervold, who asked me to take a picture of my desk at work for the whole world to see. I like to think I’m and organized person, and I think I managed to hide most of my stuff behind the monitors :)

Hans Jørgen Grimstad started this desk fetish, by paraphrasing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in

and I would like to pay it forward and asks to see how Pål Fossmo and Kjetil Klaussen are treating their desks.

Brian Randell gave out MSDN premium subscriptions at his pre conference talk about VSTS at PDC 2008

2008-10-31T02:33:00.001+01:00

PDC 2008 has been a fabulous experience, and I have many impressions and a lot of information and bits to digest when I come home. As an extra surprise on the last day of the conference, I was the lucky winner of a MSDN premium subscription. Brian Randell gave out one subscription on Sunday during his pre conference talk, and I got a ticket for the other subscription during the week and won the big lottery today.

Thanks Brian.

How I've pimped my Visual Studio

2008-10-25T21:42:00.001+02:00

Gøran Hansen just tagged me and asks what I have added to a plain Visual Studio installation. Lars Wilhelmsen started by presenting his favorites, and I'm happy to share my setup also.

Visual Studio Team System isn't really an addon, but it adds a lot of great functionality to Visual Studio Professional. The most important features I use is source control, the testing framework, build system and code analysis, and the main benefit is that everything is integrated in Team Foundation Server. I haven't spent much time with Team System 2008, but I'm attending Brian Randell's pre-conference at PDC08 tomorrow and I expect I'll have a deeper understanding of the product tomorrow. I also hope to see more of Team System 2010 at PDC in the coming days, but until then Channel 9 has a lot of great videos of some of the new features.

Addins

JetBrains ReSharper
JetBrains dotTrace Profiler
Consolas True Type font
Innovasys DocumentX!: WYSIWYG editor of code documentation inside Visual Studio, and a help file compiler.
Guidance Automation Extensions and various software factories from Microsoft Patterns and Practices
Web Services Enhancements 3.0 for creating secure web services in VS2005. WSE doesn't support VS2008, but Jason Young has a solution that I want to try out soon.
Axialis IconWorkshop Lite: I haven't used this much, but it is a great free addin when you're working with icons inside Visual Studio.
StyleCop. Like Code Analysis/FxCop, but checks the formatting of your code.

Keyboard shortcuts (with Visual Studio keyboard mappings in ReSharper)

Alt+Enter: Drop down ReSharper's smart tag
Ctrl+.: Drop down Visual Studio's smart tag
Ctrl+Alt+Space: ReSharper's smart completion
Ctrl+Shirt+Enter: ReSharper's complete statement function
Ctrl+Shift+F: Find in Files

Other tools

.NET Reflector and ildasm: Tools for inspecting assemblies.
WiX: Powerful framework for generating setup files.
fuslogvw: Great tool for debugging assembly load errors.
Visual Studio Theme Generator. I ended up with just a slight modification of the standard Visual Studio Theme, but this tool allows you to quickly generate color schemes that matches your preferred primary colors.
Sandcastle: An alternative to DocumentX! that I use when generating help files whit long file paths due to long and nested namespaces.

I probably have forgotten a thing or two, because I've recently reinstalled my laptop and from my hotel room in Los Angeles I don't have access to my file server where I keep a copy of every thing I add on to Visual Studio.

I met Steve Ballmer yesterday

2008-10-01T01:47:00.002+02:00

At MSDN Live in Oslo on September 30 2008, I and the other chapter leads from NNUG got the opportunity to meet Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer. Steve kicked off the event with an energetic keynote, and after his session me and my colleagues got a couple of minutes with him. I really enjoyed the presentations by Gøran Hansen, Anders Norås and Rune Zakariassen, but I think meeting Steve was the highlight of the day.

Thanks to Rune Grothaug and the rest of the DPE team in Norway for making this possible.

I had a talk at NNUG Trondheim tonight

2008-09-25T22:21:00.002+02:00

At this evenings NNUG meeting in Trondheim, I gave a talk about JetBrains ReSharper and showed many of its great features. During my work on the presentation I discovered many things I didn’t know about ReSharper, and my main point in the presentation is that to get the best value out of ReSharper, you have to invest some time in learning the various features and their keyboard shortcuts. I therefore created a demo solution that shows most of the features of ReSharper and their respective shortcuts. The examples are grouped into classes based on each main topic in ReSharper’s help file, and can be used by anyone looking for a quick repetition of how to work with ReSharper. The solution doesn’t compile, but that is by design so I can show the code analysis functionality of ReSharper.

I also managed to cram in a brief demo of dotTrace Profiler by running profiling on ScrewTurn Wiki, but I didn’t have much time to discuss this product in any detail. The attendees did seem to like the presentation, and I hope they have a better idea of what ReSharper and dotTrace Profiler can do for them.

After the talk we did something different than usual, because instead of ordering pizza and have it brought to us, we went to a local pizza place nearby. My employer Acando sponsored this event, and we had a great time socializing and chatting in an informal setting.

I have uploaded the slides and demo code to the meeting page on www.nnug.no, but for those of you that aren’t registered members you can download them from here also:

(in Norwegian)

(in Norwegian)

Important:The embedded links to SkyDrive isn't working quite as expected, but if you click on the name of the file they should work. If you click elsewhere inside the embedded frames you should be redirected to SkyDrive, but if you for instance use the PDF Download Add-on to Firefox it will catch the link and think it's a valid PDF file although it isn't.

Disclosure: JetBrains will provide me with a ReSharper and dotTrace license after my talk at NNUG, but they are in no way influencing what I think of the products or what I share with you on this blog or in my presentation.

How to navigate to your recent edits in Visual Studio

2008-09-22T19:26:00.001+02:00

I’m still working on my talk about ReSharper at this thursday’s NNUG meeting in Trondheim, and I’ve discovered a lot of cool functionality that improves my experience in Visual Studio. One thing I regularly use is “Navigate Backward”, to back track my steps and locate previous lines of code I have modified. The problem with this command is that it also navigates to places you only have positioned the cursor, and not only to where you actually made the changes. In addition, if you close a code window it’s history is lost, and the edits aren’t persisted between instances of Visual Studio. Here is an example of how this looks, after I made multiple modifications to multiple files that I later closed:

Tip: If you don't see the "Navigate Backward" and "Navigate Forward" buttons on the standard toolbar, you probably doesn't use the General Development environment settings. You can manually add the buttons by customizing the toolbar (they are located in the View category), but when I tried that I didn't get the drop down functionality as shown in the screen shot above. What I did instead was to import the menu and toolbar settings from the General Development template by following these steps:

Select "Tools -> Import and Export Settings..."
Select "Import selected environment settings" and click "Next >"
Choose if you want to save your current settings or not and click "Next >"
Select "General Development Settings" and click "Next >"
Remove all check boxes
Check the node "All Settings -> General Settings -> Menu and Command Bar Customizations"
Click "Finish" to reset your toolbars and menus

ReSharper has two commands that help improve on these limitations. The first is a simple "Last Edit Location" command which move the cursor to the previous line you edited. The second command is "Recent Edits", which pops up a list of the last 30 locations you have modified:

Here you see every location I’ve edited in the solution, and even closed files are listed. This example is from my demo, and I’ve documented the various shortcut keys, and with ReSharper’s Visual Studio keyboard binding the shortcut for Recent Edits is Ctrl+Shift+,.

Note: The edits aren’t cleared when you select "Clear Caches" from ReSharper’s option dialog, but you can manually delete these items by removing them from the RecentEdits element in ReSharper’s user configuration file. The file is named <SolutionName>.4.1.resharper.user and resides in the solution folder.

Who wrote "The Great Gig in the Sky"

2008-09-15T21:24:00.001+02:00

Richard Wright sadly passed away today at age 65 from cancer. Richard was one of Pink Floyd's founding members, and did contribute to most of Pink Floyd's albums including writing the The Great Gig in the Sky for The Dark Side of the Moon.

I was lucky to attend Pink Floyd's Division Bell tour in 1994, and have very found memories of Richards performance. I haven't followed Richard's career very closely after his last solo album Broken China from 1996, but I watched Pink Floyd's brief reunion at Live 8 with great enjoyment. The most resent appearance I have of him is from David Gilmour's live DVD Remember That Night, where he plays keyboard and has lead vocal on his song Wearing the Inside Out and Syd Barrett's famous Arnold Layne on disc 2.

Thanks...

DSLs can be textual

2008-09-13T13:37:00.001+02:00

DSLs or Domain Specific Languages are designed to solve particular problems in particular domains, by using models or other constructs that are better suited to describe what our intentions are than traditional programming languages. I first read about DSLs in Jack Greenfield and Keith Short's book about Software Factories, and the latest version of Web Services Software Factory contains DSLs with graphical editors to define service contracts and service hosting environments. The Distributed Systems designers in Visual Studio Team System for Architects are other examples of DSLs that are currently shipping by Microsoft.

One can also argue that LINQ is a textual DSL embedded in another language, and you can create a DSL your self by defining a fluent interface where the classes and methods represents the syntax of your language. Anders Norås has blogged about this earlier, and at his talk about SOA at MSDN Live (you can still catch his presentation in Oslo on September the 30th) he gave a quick glimpse of how Boo could be used as a DSL to configure a message bus in his demo. I've not looked at Boo in any detail, but Tore Vestues and Gøran Hansen had a brief discussion on Tore's blog about how you can extend Boo with your own keywords, and by that defining your own DSL.

I think the concept of DSLs are becoming main stream sooner rather than later, and after reading Douglas Purdy's post He who defines the language… this week I'm looking forward to what Microsoft will reveal at PDC in October:

You are going to be hearing a lot more about (textual) DSLs from me and others on my team.

Martin Fowler, who I had an opportunity to meet a couple months ago, has a quick Q&A that is worth reading if you would like to be educated about the space.

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/DslQandA.html

See you at Doug's talk about "Oslo" and at Chris Anderson's and Giovanni Della-Libera's talk about Textual DSLs in Los Angeles.

ReSharper is smarter than Visual Studio

2008-09-08T18:24:00.002+02:00

As I blogged about previously, I'm working on a talk about ReSharper for NNUG in Trondheim, and today I noticed something that isn't as important as the other features of ReSharper, but it demonstrates that in many respects ReSharper improves on the base functionality of Visual Studio.

We all know that the C# compiler can generate some useful warnings (which we of course correct immediately :)) , but it misses some obvious issues. In my example I have a method with a couple of unused variables:

As you see ReSharper correctly identifies both var1 and var2 as unused by coloring them gray, but the C# compiler lists just var1 as being unused:

JetBrains has a very transparent development process

2008-09-04T18:20:00.003+02:00

I’ve been using ReSharper for some time, and I think it is a great add-on to Visual Studio. I’m working on a presentation and a demo of ReSharper and dotTrace for our next NNUG meeting in Trondheim on September 25, so I’m not going to discuss any features just jet. But I want to share something I really like about JetBrains, and that’s how they handle their development process and their relationship with the community.

The first version of ReSharper I tried was an early version of ReSharper 3.1, which I got through their early access program (EAP). This program allows users to download betas, release candidates and even nightly builds of the software. These builds have trial licenses that are renewed throughout the program, so if you're interesting in evaluating and maybe help improve the next version this is a great way to start. One thing you should note is that some of the nightly builds may contain serious bugs, but if you stick with the official betas, release candidates or the builds that have passed JetBrains' tests you should have a pretty easy ride. Neither ReSharper nor dotTrace have an active EAP today, but I expect new programs to start in time fore the next main releases.

Even if you can't download any early software right now, you can still submit requests for what you want to see in the next version. This is done through JetBrains JIRA, which is used to track various issues. Here we can submit suggestions and vote for those we think is most important to us. The issue tracker is also used for bug tracking, and whenever ReSharper encounters an error you get the option to automatically submit the exception to JetBrains JIRA. I've submitted a couple of exceptions that I got during editing of MSBuild project files, and I am able to track them through JIRA. None of them is fixed yet, but I hope JetBrains will consider them for the next release.

JetBrains also has a blog and various forums for their products, but I think it's the EAP and public issue tracker that separates JetBrains from other developers. Microsoft Connect is a similar web site, and I think more companies should do the same and open up to their communities. This will at least make me trust the companies more, and it's much easier for me to recommend tools from such vendors.

Check out JetBrains' Community Center for more information about their community commitment.

Disclosure: JetBrains will provide me with a ReSharper and dotTrace license after my talk at NNUG, but they are in no way influencing what I think of the products or what I share with you on this blog or in my presentation.

Kevin Rose sold me a copy of Ratatat's new album

2008-09-01T19:03:00.001+02:00

I enjoy listening to good music, but lately I haven't bought many new albums for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that I simply haven't heard something new that I really liked for a long time. It was therefore very nice to check out Kevin Rose's (from Digg and Diggnation) Muxtape compilation of Ratatat's new album LP3, and I liked it immediately. Ratatat is an electronic music duo, which reminds me of Röyksopp and a little bit of Air, and if you like those bands I recommend you check out Ratatat.

It appears someone don't like this kind of marketing, because now Kevin's compilation isn't available any more from his Muxtape page at http://krose.muxtape.com/. I, on the other side, got to listen to the album before it was taken down, and I ordered a copy of the CD. Kevin has a link to a downloadable MP3 version of the album from Amazon on his blog post, but I prefer to have a CD in my collection. If you're interested, you can still get some samples of the Album from Amazon and on the bands MySpace page, so it is still possible to get a taste before you buy.

You can be alerted of failed builds in Team Foundation Server 2008

2008-08-30T12:13:00.010+02:00

In Team Foundation Server 2008 you can configure a project alert that sends an alert to your email address when a build completes. This is a very useful if a build fails, but if you enabled continuous integration your inbox will probably contain many alerts of successful builds. The out-of-the-box functionality for configuring alerts is very limited, but luckily Microsoft has released Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools which is an add-on to Visual Studio 2008.
One of the tools in this package is called Alert Editor, and it lets you subscribe to build faults in a few simple steps:

Select “Alerts Editor…” from the “Team” menu.
Click “New” on the toolbar to create a new alert.
Select “Failed builds” from the “Build Alerts” sub group, and click OK.
You might have to enter you e-mail address in the Send To field if Team Foundation Server can’t resolve your name.
This alert has a filter that only sends an alert if StatusCode is not Succeded. If you already has an alert, you can add this clause to your existing alert definition.
Select another alert or close the window to save the changes before testing the alert.

As you see in the previous window, the Alerts Editor is very powerful and you have much more control over your alerts than by only using the standard functionality in Team Foundation Server.

Update: Thanks to TerrenceJ in my comments for recommending an improved filter.

You can create a windows service in a few minutes

2008-08-28T22:03:00.006+02:00

At today's Norwegian .NET User Group (NNUG) meeting in Trondheim, I gave a short zip talk about windows services. I didn't pretend to give a thorough discussion about the ins and outs of windows services, but showed the steps necessary to create a project and install and run the service. I did however talk about some of my own experiences, and focused on the importance of threading and exception handling.

If you're a member of NNUG you can log in and download my simple demo from the following web page:
http://nnug.no/Avdelinger/Trondheim/Moter/NNUG-Trondheim---28-august-2008/

I created this blog to share things that I think is cool and interesting

2008-08-27T22:00:00.005+02:00

This is my second post, and first of all I just want to say thank you for subscribing.

To give you an idea of what to expect, I currently think that the contents of this blog will be about .NET and related technologies. My goal is to write short and informative posts from my own experience, and I hope you'll at least find some of them useful. I will try to avoid repeating information that can be found elsewhere, and instead focus on particular tips and tricks that I think is cool and interesting. I also want to share thoughts on other issues that is important to me, and this will hopefully make this blog more personal.

You can create a blog in a couple of hours

2008-08-27T21:07:00.009+02:00

I've been thinking of starting a blog for quite some time now, and I must say that it was much easier than I thought. I started by buying a domain name, and luckily I have a very rare name and joaroyen.com was still available. I bought the domain from GoDaddy, used Diggnation's promotional code, and for $35.75 I have the name for five years.

Next I did a search for blogging software, and landed pretty quickly on Blogger. The main reason is that I didn't want to do my own hosting right away, and Blogger seemed to have the features that suited my needs best. In addition, Blogger has very good documentation of how you can connect your own domain to your blog.

The last thing I set up was FeedBurner so that I can track traffic to this blog (thanks to the two of you that are reading this). In addition this gives me better flexibility if I want to switch to another blogging software in the future.