Our TFS server was down today and I needed to get a Shelveset to a tester. Playing with the Power Tools PowerShell CmdLets I was able to basically pipe my pending changes to a zip file and give that to the tester. Getting the Power Tools PowerShell Cmdlets...

Almost a year ago now I started this small project, Boxstarter .  The project has sustained many interruptions as I have had busy spurts at work and involvements with other projects. It has gone through some serious refactorings moving from a scrappy...

There is a personal story behind this topic that I want to share. About five years ago I heard about this thing called Test Driven Development (TDD) . For anyone unaware of this, it is where you write failing tests first and then write “the code” later...

I work in Microsoft’s Developer Division (devdiv). We are the ones that make, among other things, Visual Studio . Our source control is in a TFS Repository (we make TFS too). A very large TFS repository and likely the largest in existence. I really don...

This happens to me on a particular VM setup framework we use at work about every couple months and I always have to spend several minutes looking it up. Well no longer I say. I shall henceforth document these steps so I will never have to wander the internets...

It has been a long time since I have blogged. Too long. I have changed roles at Microsoft moving to Cloud Developer Services and have taken on two new Open Source projects: Chocolatey and Pester , joining as a project committer to both. RequestReduce...

Late last year I blogged about a unit testing pattern I have been using for the past couple years. It’s a pattern that I initially learned from Matt Manela (@ mmanela ). I adapted the pattern to use Automocking with Richard Cirerol’s wrapper. Over the...

If you enjoy lots of dialog boxes that require you to take action before you can review any unique URL, then you will not want to use this: $AdminKey = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\` {A509B1A7-37EF-4b3f-8CFC-4F3A74704073...

About two and a half years ago I wrote a series of posts documenting the work my team had done to automate our build process. We had completed a migration from VSS to SVN and used a combination of nAnt and CruiseControl to facilitate continuous integration...

This week RequestReduce 1.8 was released expanding its range of platform compatibility along with some minor bug fixes. Key Features Released Syncing generated sprites and bundles across multiple web servers using sql server is now .net 3.5 compatible...

I might have also entitled this: “How to avoid TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute' “ But I didn’t. First, the moral of this story I am about to take you on a debugging journey that will make some...

As a software engineer my greatest ambition is to produce code that will have a lasting impact on my fellow humans. I want to make good things happen to both good and bad people. The last thing I want to do is destabilize the runtime. Whether it be my...

One of qualities that I think make a great Software Development Engineer not to mention a good human being is the ability to be nice. In fact if I had to list the top 5 things that have helped me in my career, being nice would be one of them. I’m not...

I usually don’t blog on bug fix releases. However the bug fix release I deployed today addresses a couple serious bugs (albeit edge cases) and their fixes forced a few significant enhancements I want to call out. Css that reference the same image twice...

About six weeks ago I blogged about an issue with RequestReduce and its limitations with resolving image properties of each CSS class. To recap, until today, RequestReduce treated each CSS class as an atomic unit and ignored any other classes that it...

So its New Years Day and I’m thinking maybe its appropriate to write a post that’s deep and introspective. Something that speaks to a broad audience and asks the reader to stop, reach deep within. Real deep. Ok even deeper…deeper still. Wait. Uh oh we...

I have been asked several times now how RequestReduce compares or is different to such popular minification and bundling solutions like squishit , cassette and the upcoming Asp.Net 4.5 Minification and Bundling features. Before I say anything let me comment...

I ran into this error on a RequestReduce bug and there was not a whole lot of information pointing to a cause and remedy. So I’m posting this in the hopes that it will help the Google Lords find a solution more quickly for others. So if you are using...

Here is a Keynote performance graph covering a few hours before and after launch. Looks good to me. A win for Microsoft. Another win for the Open Source Community Today Microsoft completed its onboarding of RequestReduce on its MSDN and Technet...

I’ve been wanting to get this post out for a few days since I launched this last Friday. I have to make this quick before I hop in the shower to go to work. I owe at least that to my coworkers. Less, Sass and Coffee script compiling I’ve...

This post was originally entitled Unit Testing ASP.Net Http Handlers and my intent was a quickie (5 minute) post on overriding ProcessRequest in a test friendly manner. Then, struck by diarrhea of the fingers, I found myself going off on unit testing...

In this post I am going to show you how you can be notified of new downloads of any Nuget package via email from a service that will poll Nuget every 15 minutes. If email sounds overly intrusive, there are other options. So If this sounds interesting...

Currently RequestReduce is unable to sprite alot of background images because of its limitation of treating each css class as an atomic unit. Inheritable dimensions and padding is lost which either makes an image unspritable by RequestReduce or the sprite...

Last week another team wanted to use an HttpModule I had written. The problem is that they had no access to the hosting platform of their content. Their DLLs are consumed via MEF by a rather large infrastructure affectionately known as MTPS or what the...

I just released RequestReduce v1.5 on Nuget and on http://www. RequestReduce .com . If you are currently on v1.4, you will definitely want to upgrade to this new version. There was a misconfiguration in v1.4 causing a Regex to recompile on every call...