Naren's Blog

This issue took a long time for me to workaround. My browser works inside a corpnet proxy server. In a brand new Win8 machine, I setup hosts file under %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc to redirect a site to localhost. But it didn't work in IE and other...

This is one painful issue that took me too long to figure out, what a waste of time! I built a simple html5 webpage with a video & audio, works perfectly in VS and in localhost mode, but once I deploy in intranet, does not work anyme in IE9! Same...

I had a weird issue today. I am calling an external website using WebClient inside my WCF application, and I consistently got this error in WebClient call: "The remote server returned an error: NotFound". The error did not give me enough clues. To debug...

I had deployed a silverlight application in my location machine and tried to access it from another machine. Surprisingly, there was no response sent by server. I tried to go to http://<machinename> , no response, no error nothing. Using fiddler...

I was looking for a way to hide and encrypt folders. We search results were mostly pointing to commercial software that I need to purchase. Here is one very useful link that answered my questions right with reference to useful opensource software AxCrypt...

Everything was working, I did some refactoring and starting getting this error: Error: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application Code: 2103 Category: InitializeError Message: Invalid or malformed application: Check manifest In silverlight 3, it...

Silverlight was working great and one day I started getting this error on debugging: Unable to start debugging. The Silverlight managed debugging package isn't installed. Many web search links talk about solutions for beta 2 which is irrelevant...

So far I have been blogging purely on TFS in VSTS. It was great pleasure getting feedback from TFS customers on getting their problems addressed with my technical posts mainly on workitemtracking. After I left TFS team, I had stopped blogging a year back...

Last piece of powertool I worked on before leaving TFS is the integrated tool to easily create notification alerts for WorkItem tracking, source control and build items. It is released and part of power tools now. Checkout screen shots and download the...

This week I am moving over to new team in Microsoft. I love workitemtracking and TFS, but I need to move out of country for family reasons and hence had to leave TFS. So I am not expecting to write anymore posts on TFS. I *might* start writing more on...

Many asked me how linking is exposed in our Rosario object model, how to construct, run and use the results of link queries. I decided to build a power point on explaining it and attached is that powerpoint file: http://blogs.msdn.com/narend/attachment...

Team System Web Access 2008 powertool is released with TFS 2008 recently on Nov 19th (see here for WIT improvements in this release). So I expect more people will start looking into porting their custom controls over to Web Access or building new ones...

Many customers have asked for templates functionality in work item to easily create workitems. Also, there is strong need to apply changes to many work items in a shot without having to export to excel. You can do all that with templates feature in Sept...

As you know, Rosario comes up with rich linking abilities for workitems and object model to support it. Working with object model could be a bit tricky when it comes to comprehending directions of links and Durgaprasad wrote a nice blog on how to use...

Many customers have asked for a control to select multiple values for a field, or to tag work item with various tag strings & to be able to query on them. We might have such control built-in in future releases, but until then this can be solved with...

Few customers wanted to add a menu to context menu of workitems in result list. It seems like a great idea to show actions on selected work items, but we haven’t exposed the command ids for context menus in V1 and Orcas. We did expose the “Team” menu...

I heard this question few times: “I see the action named Microsoft.VSTS.Actions.Checkin to resolve work items in my tools, what other actions are available and how to use this feature to define my own”. What is a “custom action” ? Suppose you are...

If you built a custom control in VS2005 (Whidbey) and deployed in user’s machines, what happens if the user upgrades to next version of TFS (Orcas or Rosario)? The Orcas client will try to load the custom control, but the custom control was compiled with...

Rosario is next release of TFS after upcoming Orcas release. You can read a lot about Rosario from Brian's blog . CTP is available to try these features. This post briefly lists UI featuers in links control. By default, the new links control now...

Two custom controls are posted now in WIT custom controls codeplex project: http://www.codeplex.com/WitCustomControls . Controls are: Screenshot control for easily getting & attaching screenshots and WebSiteControl where a website can be hosted inside...

I have heard this feature request so many times: Requiring at least N levels of nodes for Area Path and Iteration Path fields. Unfortunately we AreaPath and IterationPath can not take any rules and it is a limitation. My program manager Gregg showed me...

Recently few asking me about how to implement custom validation rules in a work item form. Our rules in work item form XML is extensive and that covers lots of scenarios . But still it doesn’t meet everyone’s needs and it leaves some holes such as not...

Mathias sent me link to the custom control he built to capture screenshots . He also created a control similar to attachments control with capture button. Looks good! We hope to add it to custom controls codeplex project. I was not able to spend any time...

Alex has started blogging. He is my colleague specializing in work item tracking object model. Here is his link: http://blogs.msdn.com/abaturytski/default.aspx . From his blog, his plan for posts in nearest future are: Effective querying and accessing...

In Orcas Beta1, a bunch of client UI performance improvements are made, especially to reduce form load time when opening work items. Important ones are: - The constructed forms are cached and reused as needed. Upto 3 forms are cached by default. ...