My team frequently creates wizards that run in Windows PE as part of a Configuration Manager task sequence, and we write them in C++. I’m a big fan of TDD, so when I started to work on a new architecture for our wizards, I wanted to write all the code...

The MSF for Agile process template that ships with TFS 2010 includes a nice Iteration Backlog workbook. Because this is an Excel workbook, it’s completely customizable. However, as far as I know, there isn’t any documentation on how to go about customizing...

I wrote an article about six months ago on code coverage in C++, which is part of my article Agile C++ Development and Testing with Visual Studio and TFS . In that article, I showed how to use a command line to create code coverage because I was under...

Our group has switched over from the MSF for Agile to the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template. We really like the Scrum process template. Particularly now that we’ve fixed the work items so we can resolve bugs and task: Marking Tasks and...

The Product Planning Workbook does not work with the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template out of the box. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much work to modify the workbook so it will work with the Scrum template. Note: For information on the...

In my previous post, Writing Unit Tests in Visual Studio for Native C++ , I described the approach I’m using to write unit tests for native C++ code by using C++/CLI, which is C++ code that runs inside the .NET runtime. Because of this “mixed” programming...

I’m working on a program that needs to read Configuration Manager task-sequence variables while running in the full operating system (as apposed to Windows PE). Reading task sequence variables is really quite simple. However, all the examples are either...

Our Team Foundation Server (TFS) cube has been running just fine. But a couple of days ago, right after we updated the passwords on the service account, it stopped updating the cube. Here I’ll briefly describe how I found the problem, and also what appears...

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our team has been working our way up the testability pyramid . We started with unit tests, and now have about 670 C++/CLI unit tests that are testing our C++ code. However, we didn’t have any automated acceptance or...

As part of our effort to become a highly-effective agile team, we’ve been working on switching from an individual to a team focus. During sprint planning, we want to know that we haven’t taken on too much work for each discipline. And on a daily basis...

I’m building a Windows Store App in C# and XAML, and I wanted to allow you to remove/edit/move items in a GridView control, just like you can in the Finance application: When you right-click an item (or swipe down with touch), the item is selected (MSFT...

You would think that simply running coded UI tests with everything setup for capturing code coverage would just work, right? And if you’re running your coded UI tests on a 32-bit operating system, it will. However, if you’re running your tests on a 64...

I recently needed to retrieve the results from a TFS tree query using .NET code, via calls to the TFS API. It was easy to find examples for retrieving a set of work items from a flat query, but I couldn’t find any information about how to retrieve a tree...

OK, so “I have a dream” isn’t original, and perhaps neither is my dream. However, the path to my dream is the road less traveled, and I believe we should have a super-highway instead of a dirt road. Imagine you could build software without fear of breaking...

On September 13, 2010, I started a new journey. This was my first day as an official Microsoft employee, and my first day in a new group, MPSD (Managed Platform and Service Delivery), which is a part of System Center. Before this I spent almost 5 years...

My team is fairly new to agile. During my first week I talked to the PMs and the developers to get a sense as to where we stood and what the issues were. I first asked about user stories. Me: “Do you have user stores?” B: “Yes. We have these three stories...

How many times have you been working on a feature only to discover a new scenario that you feel is important, but isn’t included in the estimates for the current sprint? And what did you do? If you’re like most programmers, you probably just wrote the...

We recently added C# unit test projects to our existing C++ product and unit test projects, but they weren’t being built by our gated check-ins. I did some research and found lots of blog posts. The closes one, and the blog post that got me pointed in...

Ten months ago, when I joined my current team, we had a C++ application that was written as many applications are, with a number of classes, inheritance, and classes creating other classes they needed in order to do their work. The trouble was that writing...

You’ve finally gotten code coverage results for your C++ code. But now your code coverage numbers are lower than you expected. Why is that? And how do you get around it? There are several issues that make C++ code coverage data “noisy” and/or inaccurate...

This should be easy, right? Just set the link options to delay sign the assembly with an SNK file. There were two issues I ran into, which I’ll describe here. Fixing Delay Signing in SP1 I used the /DELAYSIGN and /KEYFILE settings in the properties page...

My goal was simple. I needed a smaller arrow in the WPF Expander control to help conserve screen real-estate. Here is the before and after: Before: After: The arrow on the right is 80% of the original size. So how did I accomplish this? It turned out...

I really like BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and it’s structure for helping to focus on behavior instead of implementation when you write unit tests. Some time ago I ran across a blog post by my former colleague in the patterns & practices group...

We needed a single-select list box for a web application we’re building. We also needed each item in the list to have rich formatting, so we didn’t want to use the built-in list box. I knew that jQuery UI had a Selectable widget that looked very promising...

Here is the problem. We built an English-only C++ application. However, now some of our customers are asking how they can translate the application into other languages. We don’t have the budget to provide translated versions ourselves, and they’d be...