I have an ASP.NET MVC project in which I wanted to track which users created an item. I’m already using membership and authorization, so I just have to annotate my controller methods with an [Authorize] tag. I added a “User” property to the model objects...

If you’ve tried to build a BIDS project in a team build, you’ve noticed that BIDS doesn’t support MSBuild. There are a couple of workarounds for this. Find MSBuild extensions for the various BIDS projects. They’re out there. Run the build through Visual...

I wanted one of my coded UI tests to work in different environments, and to do that I wanted to override one of the URLs. I wanted to set that up in a config file rather than a data source. So, I created my own configuration data class for a custom section...

John Robbins has a few tips on collecting minidumps in a blog post . Unfortunately,  you typically can’t debug a .NET mindump created on a 64-bit machine by Process Explorer or Task Manager. Satish Arvati describes how to get a 32-bit version of...

I show a lot of web applications on my laptop. One of the nice things about IIS is that you can have multiple host names associated with your machine (like “www.contoso.com” and “ftp.contoso.com” and “finance.contoso.com”), but you can have several sites...

I’m glad I set up the CTP of the new TFS SCOM connector . For one thing, it prompted me to set up System Center Operations Manager, which has the TFS SCOM Pack for monitoring TFS. I haven’t been able to show that until now, and it’s a good add-in to have...

Boy, is debugging in a strongly typed language easier than in JavaScript. I’m really glad to have NuGet in Visual Studio. Of course, I immediately ran “Update-Package jQuery”, and then merrily went along until I later discovered that my login and registration...

Disclaimer: This is just a blog post, and this isn’t supported code by any stretch of the imagination. It hasn’t been certified by anybody. I can’t say that customer support will help you if you’ve used it. It’s just me using the TFS API. I have an unusual...

The next full (2-day) camp is in Atlanta, at the Microsoft Alpharetta MTC, on March 30th.  Andrew Duthie and Chris Bowen will present on MVC, jQuery, Entity Framework, and OData on Day 1 .  Day 2 should be all hands-on labs. There are also events...

I moved everything from one TFS server to another TFS server, and I decommissioned the old TFS server.  I had some old workspaces from an old Team Build account, and they had left some items with pending changes.  I’d tried Buck Hodges old blog...

I moved a Team Project Collection from one server to another, and got a TF260078 error when I tried to run lab management.  It turns out, I needed to add my machine name as a SCVMM administrator (or that just fixed the problem, and maybe I could...

The instructions at Adding Dashboards and Reports to Upgraded Team Projects wasn’t really clear to me that you had to run the File.BatchNewTeamProject on the server where you were publishing the SharePoint site.  In my case, SharePoint and TFS are...

How did I miss this?  It’s an entire catalog of Visual Studio color theme settings.  And, they’re rated.  I just applied “WekeRoad Ink”, and it’s changed the feel of my editor.  You can get a nice, comfortable feel out of it.  ...

There is a SharePoint 2010 Developer Training Course over at the Channel 9 Learning Center .  There are a few places where I tweaked things a bit to make it work the way I wanted.  One of the labs is a LINQ to SharePoint lab. It has two parts...

If you’d like to see what an occasional test response looks like in your load tests, you can turn on test logging.  That saves the individual test responses—you get unit test results for unit tests, and web performance test results for web performance...

You’ve been able to parameterize web servers in web (performance) tests since 2005.  When you do this, it sets a context parameter that you can update to retarget to a different web server. Well, you can take advantage of that in load tests. ...

There is a huge troubleshooting guide at http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management/pages/troubleshooting.aspx .  I was running into a problem about my test agent always being “disconnected”.  The particular error I had was "TF276055: The machine...

I get asked or nagged about this every week—people want to work on the same projects and solutions in VS 2008 and 2010.  Generally speaking, there is only one attribute in one XML tag different between the two files, but there may be other differences...

I received a question about installers, and because of it I noticed that the latest WIX installer supports VS2010 and has the BURN chainer.  The version I grabbed is from Index of /releases/3.5.1512.0 . Over the past few months, I’ve been looking...

It was a great time at the ALEMUG meeting, even if I didn’t get a slice of pizza.  It was an open space, so the agenda we had was quickly abandoned in favor of whatever people were interested in. Some people were interested in training for Visual...

I was asked about configuring how much file space Intellitrace and video capture take up.  It’s something you can configure. For Testing, it’s set in the test settings—just open the test settings file for the solution.  If you don’t have any...

If you’ve written anything in SIlverlight 4 RIA Services, you’ll need to rewrite it.  There has been a lot of refactoring and namespace moves.  They’re documented in the document at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload...

We try to get MSDN into as many hands as possible, because it equips people with the tools they need cheaply.  It’s a good deal, but there are some organizations that just use Visual Studio Professional without MSDN because they just can’t find the...

One really nice aspect of blogging is that I when I’m looking for an answer I sometimes find it on my own blog—apparently, I sometimes repeat the same mistakes.  Because of that, I’m happy to write down a few links for later so that I can find them...

We’ve put out some nice talks at the Architect “innov8” series, and there are a couple more coming up.  Apparently, some of the recorded sessions will be moved to ARCast.TV once the past recordings process.  A couple of the past ones that I...