The Entity Framework in .Net Framework 4.0 contains a bunch of new functionality mentioned here and here . This blog post will talk about some of the details of a lesser known feature in the the Entity Designer in VS 2010 which enhances user productivity...

After a couple of grueling years, one of the biggest and best releases of Visual Studio is out – Visual Studio 2010 . Please download and take it out for a spin. It’s been an extremely gratifying experience to have been part of the team that shipped Dev10...

I am very excited to see the latest version of Spec Explorer (which is available even for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 ) now available publicly for everyone in the world to leverage. It is available via the MSDN DevLabs page and the Spec Explorer team (the...

Found this exceptionally inspiring, interesting and informative talk (I saw an internal version of the same talk) by James Whittaker (please subscribe to his blog if you remotely care about software quality), who is a pioneer in the software testing world...

Right on the heels of VS 2008 SP1 the VS 2010 CTP is available for download as a Virtual PC 2007 image (so it is HUGE - best to use a tool to download the image). Check out the new WPF based XML Editor (basically building on top of the new WPF Text Editor...

has released . w00t! For the XML Tools team this is an especially big release since SP1 is the vehicle in which two of our big investments went out for the first time. Congratulations to the feature teams involved in getting these out to customers. XML...

It's great to see a lot of the work that has been going on in our product unit finally get into the hands of customers with the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta . Nice to read Scott's post on the Beta in which he talks about among other things some...

Sure - it's a little late in coming, but still feels good to say that Visual Studio 2008 has shipped ! You can try the 90-day trial versions or the FREE Express Editions of Visual Studio 2008 right now and get started. There are a ton of cool new features...

After a memorable ~5 years on the Commerce Server team, I recently changed gears and have joined the world of SQL Data Programmability . There are a ton of cool things happening on this front and the area my immediate team will be working on currently...

Great to see the MSDN Tester Center go live! You can expect to see this evolve as a central portal for all-things-test and a window into a lot of the great test minds working at Microsoft! Check out the great set of Whiteboard Videos already available...

Oh well...I am biased since I worked on this...but I really think this is a COOL demo of silverlight and AJAX and what eCommerce scenarios can look like. I especially like the use of videos which I was initially skeptical about but I think can actually...

In the last 2 posts we have looked at what we mean by a model of a system and defined what States and State Variables are. In this post we'll look into Actions and Action Parameters. We can define an Action as something that modifies or exercises the...

This is a continuation of the Elements of MBT series of posts which I started last time with Part 1 and covered what is meant by a model of a software system. In this post I shall be covering additional concepts which you will need to know to gain a better...

In this series of "Elements of MBT" posts, I will be covering some basic concepts used when trying to build models of software systems for use in Model Based Testing . The aim is to give an explanation of the various elements involved in defining a model...

And so can you. Simply while chatting with your buddies . What I find quite amazing about this initiative is the no-limit on the amount of donation made to each organization. i’m is a new initiative from Windows Live™ Messenger. Every time you start a...

You know your team members are really catching onto this whole model-based way of thinking when they pull your leg over a few drinks in a bar and say (tongue in cheek): "So Nihit, the ' Action ' of having this drink will take me from a ' Sober ' state...

Question to the community: How can you best test a delete operation? For e.g. When you test the following API - DeleteObjectFoo("ABCD") - what should we test to verify that this function actual deleted "ABCD"? This API is just a placeholder for an API...

The Process Monitor looks like a great tool to help in debugging issues and includes a bunch of features from a diverse set of sysinternal utilities such as RegMon, FileMon etc. I think this is the first tool offering to come out since the acquisition...

The much anticipated Starter Site for Commerce Server 2007 is now available for download. With the release of the Starter Site we have also officially launched the Commerce Team Blog which is what will be used going forward for all Commerce related blog...

Do you get a kick out of breaking code and finding bugs in software? Do you have a passion for coding? Are people around you always telling you to stop testing the phone or VCR or PDA or XBOX or the browser? Well, if the answer is a YES then I would love...

Commerce Server 2002 SP4 is now live and available for download ! SP4 rolls up all existing QFEs and hotfixes, and can be applied to both CS2002 SP3 and FP1 installations. You can go through the main SP4 Readme document to learn more and also go through...

Finally managed to make at least the first basic robot using the Lego Mindstorm NXT kit which I ordered recently. Still haven't tried the Microsoft Robotics Studio (which recently announced the October 2006 CTP release) but that will be the next (or should...

The StarterSite CTP is now available for download. This should help and get everyone started on a solid ground with developing a Commerce Server site. Max Akbar has begun blogging with a vengeance and it is awesome to see the large number (and high quality...

I know this has been asked a million times by now - When are we getting the StarterSite? Well Ryan has the answer . The short answer is next week - but not for production sites. The long answer is October 2006 . Hope that puts a lot of those questions...

This was a question recently posted on one of the Commerce Server newsgroups and I thought I’d write a post on it since it seems like it should be of interest to others as well. In this post I shall give a step-by-step overview of how to create a custom...