I was inspired by Lovett 's post about Visualizing Runtime Object Graphs to create my first debugger extension that takes the output of !gcroot and creates a graph that one can interact with easily in Visual Studio 2010. So, what does my extension do...

I was working on a small project for personal use that I wrote in C++ and I wanted to test it. Since it’s a tiny project, I didn’t bother installing a well-known test framework that ships with a plethora of features. I just wanted a simple test runner...

If you use Data Contracts , then probably your classes implement the IExtensibleDataObject interface to allow (de)serialization of different versions of the data contract. I won’t go into details about the use of ExtensionDataObject , the type of the...

If you try to add a static member to an interface, you will get the following error: The modifier 'static' is not valid for this item In this case, you should create an abstract class instead of an interface, because interfaces are contracts and should...

Acceptance testing is basically black-box testing done by the QA team to sign off. It’s very important to have clear pre-defined goals for acceptance testing as early as possible during the planning phase. In fact, the requirements specifications should...

Multi-threading is used in almost all real-life applications. I summed up my thoughts on use of locks and deadlock prevention in the following related topics: Thread Safety From a thread safety perspective, resources (memory) is classified as either thread...

Attach the debugger to the process Load SOS ~* e !clrstack to view the CLR stack of all the threads and where they are Look for System.Threading.Monitor.Enter(System.Object) in the top frames Load SOSEX.dll from http://www.stevestechspot.com/SOSEXUpdatedV11Available...

Inheritance (C# Programming Guide)

Throttling, generally speaking, is tricky. Get the limits low and you may be prone to DoS and clients timing out trying to connect to your service in vain; Get them high and you may end up with an overloaded service that’s eating up machine resources...

Beta 2 is here , give it a try and let us know what do you think.

In C++, if you call a virtual function form a constructor, it won’t be polymorphic, meaning that the following code won’t behave as you may have expected: class Foo { public : Foo() { whoAmI() ; } virtual void whoAmI() { cout << "Foo::whoAmI()"...

Selection algorithms are very useful in many instances, like finding the majority. Given an array of size n that contains a majority item (an item that's repeated more than n/2 times), we can find that item in O(n). Basically, we can consider it as a...

Just in case you needed to, you can wrap an array into a struct/class and pass it by value to a function: template < typename T, int N> struct array { T value[N]; T & operator []( int i) { return value[i]; } }; template < typename T, int...

One of the useful design patterns is the proxy design pattern, it allows you to control access to an object via a proxy and also saves you the startup and cleanup overheads as you instantiate only what you use upon request (lazy initialization). Take...

Just like design patterns, the use of test patterns will make your life easier. A lot of the common testing methods can be reused. Along with the benefits of reuse, using patterns makes it easier to explain to others what you are going to do in a word...

To do this, you can't call query labels with a wildcard character, you need to do the following: - Get all items blow $/Dir1 using GetItems - Loop through them calling QueryLabels on each one. Here's a code snippet: VersionControlServer sc = tfs.GetService<...

A very handy power tool is tfpt unshelve. It’s capable of migrating a shelveset from a branch to another, it does that by performing a baseless merge, so you will need to resolve the conflicts produced. The syntax of the command looks like the following...

You can receive a daily email that has a compiled list of notifications, but you will need to subscribe programmatically: IEventService eventService = ( IEventService ) new TeamFoundationServer ( "http://tfs:8080" ).GetService( typeof ( IEventService...

protected (C# Reference)

You can run: tf diff /shelveset:shelvesetName;DOMAIN\ownerUserName Please note that this will diff the shelved changes against the unmodified version, not necessarily the latest version, just like what the you get from clicking compare in the shelveset...

You can achieve that behavior by running: tf hist rootItemSpec /r /version:LstartLabel~LendLabel Here’s my scenario: tf hist /i File.cs Changeset Change User Date Comment --------- -------------------------- ------------- ---------- -------- 65 edit mohamedg...

You can use tfpt history /followbranches to follow the history of an item across branches. We are looking into supporting this in the history dialog in the next version . You can see which versions are ported over during the merge operation if you use...

If you have an IDE that uses the MSSCCI provider, like VS 2003 or VB6, and you want to switch between TFS and VSS because you have projects on both systems, you will have to change the provider every time you switch. The thing is that setting is stored...

Well, the answer to this one is pretty easy and straight-forward. You can accomplish that using a check-in policy. For example, to force users to link check-ins to work items that are not closed, you may do the following: Add a Team Query to the desired...

TFS uses a temp folder to get files that you view. The location of that folder is %TMP%\TFSTemp. It’s not configurable via TFS, tf.exe, or Visual Studio. However, you can just set the TMP environment variable. Simply: set TMP=D:\Temp set TEMP=%TMP% md...