When you ship software, you really ship at least these things. Features Bugs Defects/Technical Debt Features are what we mean to ship. Bugs are what customers see and don't like. Defects require a bit of explanation. Defects are all...

This code is by way of the awesome Ben Schaefer. This should have been a native function included with Microsoft Test Manager. This code will allow your tests to retrieve environment speficic settings from Microsoft Test Manager. It's got the ability...

First skim this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465192.aspx Next, run this script to dump most of the data you need from TFS. You will still need to get some settings from MTM. The last line of output will show you what you need...

My team is switching from the 2008 style builds to the workflow builds in 2010. We have a lot of customized post build activities. We wanted to preserve the legacy .cmd files that run the show, but still get the automatic symbol management in the new...

While trying to add some customization to my build process (you know, those wheel spinners) I ran into this error TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \Sandbox\SandboxWithPostProc: Cannot create unknown type ...

My next adventure is modifying my teams build template to allow us to do some custom post processing. We have it working in 2008 .proj files, but we want the symbols from the new 2010 template. I couldn't "compile" my workflow activities. pUnkOuter has...

In part 1 I promised to continue the configuration to allow running tests from TFS with Microsoft Test Center. In order to run tests cross domain, you need to have completed Part 1 . The best practices for work and production networks require some...

Suppose you have an ASP.NET page that is giving users some vague error message like "An error has occured" when they do certian actions. You might very much like to get a debugger on the web server in question and diagnose the issue. In some cases this...

This is a super article on selection bias. http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=390 In software development we are often guilty of pinning results on people, techniques or external influences that may not have had anything to do with the...

Here is a screencast I created that it a quick tour and walkthrough of how to use the new manual testing features in VS2010. The video runs 26 minutes and covers the basics. See the resource links and MSDN for details. Here are the resource URLs...

Test Sign Off , n: 1. A promise from the test team that all tests have been run and are passing to the teams satisfaction. (Secretly also means 2. The condition of having assigned blame for all missed bugs to the test team. 3. An impediment to shipping...

If you have found out, please share with the rest of us. The pen keyboard is mightier than the sword One of the coolest things the professional software tester has at his or her disposal is the ability to easily share how we do stuff. Saddly, it...

Top 3 must haves for writing good bugs bug reports Brian, another tester at Microsoft, and myself were discussing bugs over the lunch the other day. Sad but true, we actually had a good time talking about what makes a good bug report . There are 3...

There is a problem with the Bing Maps map app test tool and the latest SDK we launched for Tech Ed. The URL in the documentation is http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/?developer=1 and that should work. However, some people are getting an exception. The...

Mark Pilgrim in his Dive Into HTML 5 recomends that you don't validate email address. http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html "You'll get it wrong," he says "[it is] unbelievably complicated...really, really complicated." He provides some links to prove the...

Working on Bing Map Apps has gotten me a little deeper into Silverlight than I had been before. It wasn't long till I found the Farseer Physics Engine and Andy Beaulieu's Physics Helper for Silverlight, WPF, Blend, and Farseer. Check out http://farseerphysics...

Here is a cool little application that will allow you to easily create a "virtual tour" in Bing Maps. http://darksun.lunarpages.com/BingMapTour/ It does a good job showcasing just how fast Bing Maps does animations from one location to another. It's almost...

The Australian Physicist, Sir Richard Threllfall (1861-1932) remarked in 1898 - "Though, no doubt, a great deal can be done with inferior appliances where great economy of money and none of time is an object, the writer has long felt very strongly...

Creating URL configurable Visual Studio Web Tests I recently joined a project with a lot of web based APIs. This is pretty typical and Visual Studio 2008 let me start creating load tests literally within hours of being accepted onto the project. I...

Consider replacing strings with Enums in resource references. I see code like this all the time in test and XNA and I really dislike it. MyCustomResourceClass resources = new MyCustomResourceClass(); MyImageClass currentImage = resources...

I have noticed some code in various places that creates some conditions for mysterious test failures. You know the kind; “It works on my machine but will never seem to run in the lab.” In our tests its sometimes desirable to have a unique identifier...

Something tests end up doing a lot of is working with permutations and combinations. For those of you who didn't have the benefit of a good statistics class in college (or some gambling experience after) doing the math can be a hassle. Generating all...

When I speak of unit tests, sometimes there is a slight communication breakdown. Just becuase a developer wrote a test in the unit test harness does not a unit test make. This post does a good job of drawing a line in the sand.

Please stop re-inventing the wheel. There are a lot of software wheels that get re-invented all the time. Re-inventing is a time consuming waste that many projects can cut. In almost all cases it’s much better to do some due diligence and use an off...

Writing code for today and tomorrow Any developer working at a pace that will allow them to stay employed creates bugs. Testers get excited about a lot of different bugs. Testers should be lobbying for fixes that will have the biggest impact on the...