Rants of a Hippie Coder

We're looking for a strong software developer in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. The job posting hasn't propogated out to the public Microsoft career listings web site yet so here's the job description: Are you passionate about delivering on the vision...

If you are experiencing problems with viewing TFS reports on a WSS 2.0 server and the message is describing a problem about reading the registry key " HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Visual Studio\9.0\TeamFoundation\ReportServer\80\_layouts ", then the fix below...

Check it out! http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx This is a particularly exciting release for me as I've recently taken over leading the TFS Setup, Admin, and Ops team and we made a number of improvements in deploying and managing...

We have a number of scenarios we'd like to enable in future releases of Visual Studio Team Foundation that would really benefit being part of a generalized workflow framework. Things like code review/checkin processes, build release and staging, etc....

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal several years ago. It's come up from time to time at work and most folks find it to be an amusing tale so I figured I'd post this before I lose track of it. In these dark days of dot-com despair...

Ed Hintz posted "How to Write a Team Foundation Version Control Add-in for Visual Studio" which is a great guide to writing an add-in to integrate with Team Foundation version control. I won't repeat that info her. If you want to do something that is...

The Bose SoundDock . Really. It is way cool. It is way expensive too but given the simplicity, elegance, and sound quality it is well worth it. Too many iPod docking units have subwoofers, separate speakers, lots of switches, look clunky, etc. When...

This example demonstrates how to flash a dialog in the taskbar after performing a long running operation from the command line. A good example of how this is useful is in the VS Team Foundation version control toolset. Naturally, it includes a command...

I'm a huge Robin Trower fan but haven't seen him live in many years mostly because he hasn't toured the US in many years and when he was touring he didn't come near where I was living. I was about to book a flight to England just to see him again so I...

In the Visual Studio Team Foundation version control UI, we display your pending changes in a ListView control. That ListView has CheckeBoxes set to true as we allow you to perform a variety of operations on the checked items. At the same time we want...

This program demonstrates how to use the AppDomain.AssemblyResolve event to help the .NET loader get assemblies loaded that it can't find. The VS Team Foundation edition ships with a number of assemblies you may want to reference in your own apps....

Heh.

There, I admit it. I watch American Idol. At least I've never watched Survivor or The Amazing Race. Pffft. So back to the question. Why is Kevin Covais (dubbed Chicken Little by the show's host Ryan Seacrest) still on American Idol? I get that...

The WinForms ListView has a few very handy collections - CheckedItems and CheckedIndices. SelectedItems is a collection of the ListViewItems that are selected. SelectedIndices is a collection of the indexes of the ListViewItems that are selected. Those...

CheckBoxes in a WinForms ListView are of course a bit simpler to use than dealing the underlying Win32 control directly. WinForms deals with the ListView structures and the WM_NOTIFY messages. Of course this comes at a cost. Here's a simple demonstration...

While working on improving the performance of the version control UI for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, I encountered a number of potential problems with the WinForms ListView control. As it turns out, adding items to a ListView can be VERY...

I added the Review command to TFPT back in August as a simple way to do a code review of files in any order I choose. Running TF Diff just cycles through the files one by one and is not that great for an interactive code review, particularly if I want...

Here's a couple of registry options that never made it into the UI anywhere that some of you may find useful. Don't Automatically Reconnect The first is a setting to control whether or not the Team Explorer and Source Control Explorer will automatically...

Actually in this case it'd be one of those weekends. I was working this weekend (at home fortunately) on getting some changes in for an upcoming product release and I just hit roadblock after roadblock. I have a name for my pain - it is GAUNTLET! Not...

At one point folks got carried away with drag and drop. For example: The system menu icon is a drag source in IE and Explorer windows. So you can use it to drag a shortcut to the current page/folder/document to anywhere you want. The icon in the address...

C++ magic in particular. What's wrong with this code? #define BLANK_IF_NULL(_s_) ((_s_) ? (_s_) : (TEXT(""))) We had a macro like this in MSN Explorer that would ensure you didn't pass a NULL string around. Well there's lots of things wrong with the code...

Howdy. I figure my first entry just ought to give you some of my background (IOW, the reasons to not take me too seriously). I've been at Microsoft almost 8 years. I started off working on the IE team. I worked on CDF channels, offline web pages, the...