Eric Lee - A Humble Blog

Hey guys, To better coincide with my company, my blog has moved to http://blogs.counterpunchsoftware.com ; I hope to see you at that new location! Thanks, Eric.

Hey guys, Sorry, in my Hemi tool, I’m using a 3rd party control from Component One. I have a license for their tools and they allow redistribution. The file you need is located here: C1.Win.C1FlexGrid.2.zip . Thanks to Grant for spotting this...

Hey guys, I've finally had a chance to update my work item moving tool to work with the RTM release of Team Foundation Server. Along the way, I made some modifications and changes that I've wanted to do for a while. I haven't thought of a better name...

Hey guys, Well, the time has come. After 8 years at Microsoft, I've decided to pursue a long-time dream of running my own business. My new venture will be in a Seattle-based consulting company, CounterPunch Software ( www.counterpunchsoftware.com...

Hey guys, As you can probably tell, the bright shiny lights of the soon-to-be-released products like Windows Vista and Office 2007 have caught my eye lately. I promise I’ll be back to Team Foundation Server blogging soon. I’ve been playing with...

Not sure what happened, but it seems like BlogJet is struggling with my build of Vista. In any case, my images are fixed up and I posted the full sample code here . Thanks! Eric

Apologies, I seem to have hosed something on my hosting site. Other than today, all of the images from my posts seem to be gone; hopefully I’ll have things up and running again soon. Thanks, Eric

Hey guys, Exchange is a Microsoft technology that I’ve used everyday for email, but never really delved into as a developer. I’ve been working on some Office 2007 stuff, so I figured I would give it a try. I was absolutely knocked out by how much...

Hey guys, When I first started at Microsoft 8 years ago, I was an awful presenter. I hardly made any eye contact and I spoke really, really, really fast. Over the years, I’ve had some training by some really good instructors and gotten a lot of practice...

I’ve been poking around the Windows Live stuff for developers ( http://dev.live.com ) and someting caught my eye. With Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), you can sign up for, as well as provide Alerts. These alerts get delivered to your device of...

Quite a few years back, I joined the Windows Server 2003 team as a developer. Windows Server 2003 is a massive organization – I was part of the UDDI team which resided under Directory Services. Our QA team had a suite of about 300 automated tests....

Hey guys, Earlier this year, I did some blog posts about how to create key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the software development data that Team Foundation Server collects. There are numerous clients for those KPIs, but the one that is...

Hey guys, David Anderson is someone that I’ve had the privilege of working with for the past couple of years. One of the things that I’ve found really interesting about his work is that he often takes practices from other industries and applies them...

I’ve just returned from Tech Ed Australia and New Zealand and I’ve got lots to blog about that. But before I do that, 2 features about Work Items caught my eye tonight that I really wanted to share. First, you can copy a single work item to another...

When I moved to Seattle, one of the most enjoyable things I learned how to do was ride a motorcycle. I really enjoyed the open air, speed and thrill of riding. Both of the bikes that I’ve owned – a Kawasaki Ninja 500 and a Ducati Monster 750 – were...

Team Projects have turned out to a more confusing feature than was intended in Visual Studio Team System. We are in the process of building some guidance for when to create them, but in the meantime, I thought I would shed some light on how we use them...

Much has been made about when and where you need a Team Foundation Server CAL; but until now, I don’t think anyone has talked about what one looks like. In my 8 or so years at Microsoft, I’ve never actually seen a CAL of any kind. So, a few weeks ago...

Hey guys, As you probably know, sharing is not a feature that is supported by Team Foundation Server. Buck Hodges’ and Brian Harry have both made some excellent posts about this. Sharing files has some advantages and disadvantages. It is nice to...

Rob Caron pointed me to David Lempher’s recent blog post about possibly doing impact analysis with Team Foundation Server. It’s a funny coincidence, because Bogdan Crivat and I were brainstorming about how we can take better advantage of the data mining...

One of the most useful aspects of the KPI is the ability to report a trend – that is, the value of a KPI compared to its value in the past. This is a really useful way to determine whether you are making progress or not. I had a chance to meet with...

Hi, Hope everyone is doing well, I finally had a chance to post my first KPI-of-the-week. This KPI reports on the amount of code coverage that we get from our test runs for our entire source base. What is particularly useful about KPIs in general...

Hey guys, Metrics and KPI’s can be a tricky thing to get adopted in a team. I think a general way of trying to get them accepted is to make sure they are used to help the team’s progress, not as a ‘big brother’ mechanism. ...

Hey guys, The videos I posted on YouTube are pretty fuzzy right now – I played with a bunch of different screen resolutions and video sizes without much luck over the weekend. I’ve got an email out to YouTube now asking for some help. As soon as I...

I think that my next few posts will be about the Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse, so I wanted to do a post about how to update this warehouse on demand. The Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse updates itself every couple of hours by default...

I joined Microsoft in 1998 as a software design engineer in test, otherwise known as a tester I worked in the Visual J++, Visual C++ and what eventually became the Visual C# team. In all of those teams, we did a lot of scenario based testing. For a time...