Bing it on

Bing Relevance Rocks!

2011-01-12T23:29:00Z

Very exciting to see news of a 3rd party company which did an adhoc test of relevancy to see which search engine did better and guess what? Bing beats Google! Woot!

It's definitely not definitive (if measuring relevance can ever be definitive in a true sense) but feels great none the less. Bing it on, baby!

Bing Operators

2010-11-17T02:17:26Z

One of the lesser known facts is the different operators that you can use when doing searches on Bing.

As an example you can do a noalter:microsft search to turn off the alteration service which alters {microsft} to {microsoft} by default.

Of course these are more useful when used programmatically, say via the Bing API.

By the way, very cool to see the number on the Windows Phone 7 Apps Bing visual search page at 2184 already! Way to go WP7!

Bing it on!

2010-10-09T02:06:19Z

After 3 years with the SQL Server Data Tools team, I have moved onto another exciting chapter within Microsoft, by joining the Bing team. I will be working in the Relevance team as a Test Lead and even though it's just been 2 weeks into the team, I am loving every moment of it!

I am also looking for great SDETs to come join our team - if you are passionate about testing, data mining, machine learning etc. send me your resume at nihitk@microsoft.com.

Bing it on!

ADO.Net Entity Designer in VS 2010 - Stored Procedure Return Type Shape Sensing

2010-04-23T18:23:31Z

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 by enabling discovery of the return type of stored procedures from within the Function Import dialog box. Further it allows the Return Type to be defined as a Complex Type which can be created or updated from within the same dialog box when the stored procedure changes without requiring an Update Model from Database operation to be run.

The corresponding Help documentation for the related features are as follows:

Let’s look at the feature with an example and some screenshots.

Let’s start by creating a new ADO.Net Entity Data Model file (an EDMX file) which connects to the Northwind database and pulls in a few of the stored procedures from the database as shown below.

Once the wizard completes, you will see that the sproc entries are present in the Store section in the model browser (which corresponds to the SSDL section of the file) as shown below. You can also see that buried under the EntityContainer node there is a “Function Imports” node which is currently empty.

Next, let’s go ahead and create a new Function Import, either via the Add context menu on the canvas (as shown below) or the Function Imports node in the Model Browser.

This will bring up the Add Function Import dialog box in which you can select the Stored Procedure for which you want to create a Function Import. Notice that when you select a sproc the “Get Column Information” button is activated.

Clicking on that button results in a call to get the shape of the stored procedure and this is then displayed in the grid below including information on what is the EDM Type and Db Type for each column, along with additional information such as Nullable, MaxLength etc.

Clicking on the “Create New Complex Type” button does what you would expect by creating a new ComplexType with the shape matching the sproc selected. You can also selected an existing Entity, a Scalar or None instead of the complex type option. Go ahead and save this function import at this point.

Now let’s go ahead and update the selected sproc to return an additional column so that the shape is different from what was originally sensed.

Now when you open the existing Function Import, you can do another “Get Column Information” to sense the new shape off the stored procedure which has been updated.

Which brings in the new column that the sproc is now returning. Viola!

But wait, there is more! At this point, you have the option to either create a new complex type matching this new shape, or conveniently update the existing complex type which makes managing changes to sprocs so much easier on the Entity Framework side. You don’t need to do an Update Model from Database operation and refresh the sprocs and then manually update the corresponding complex types to the new shapes returned etc. It can all be done conveniently from within the Function Import dialog box.

If you hit any issues while working with the Entity Framework Runtime or the Designer, be sure to report it on the ADO.Net Entity Framework Forums on MSDN and someone is sure to help you out. Hope you enjoy working with the Entity Framework in Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 is NOW available!

2010-04-13T00:44:31Z

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!

On the Entity Framework front, this is a huge release and some of the big features added on the runtime and tools side are called out in this EF Design blog post. I hope to expound on some of these areas, especially the lesser known ones in my future posts.

The database development in Visual Studio had also seen a huge set of improvements between the VSTS Database project system enhancements and the ability to develop Data-Tier Applications in Visual Studio. Lots of exciting things delivered! Kudos to everyone involved.

Spec Explorer 2010

2009-12-02T16:51:03Z

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 fact that there is a team dedicated to pushing this tool makes me immensely optimistic about it’s future) even has a wonderful new MSDN blog dedicated to Spec Explorer.

Kudos to the Spec Explorer team and I look forward to wonderful improvements coming from them in the years ahead to help leverage Model Based Testing in a more pervasive way across the software industry.

Future of Testing from James Whittaker

2008-12-27T02:55:19Z

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. He also has a series of blog posts on this topic in which he covers more details.

In fact it was so inspiring, that when I tried to save this post in Windows Live Writer, I got the following dialog + a crash:

instead of a simple message followed by a SaveAs dialog which would have been so much better if there was simply no space to save this on disk.

In defense of the Live Writer test team though there were quite a few "different" things that I was doing and it just makes the same point of how diverse the usage scenarios end up being from our labs.

I have my "My Documents" setup to automatically redirect to a share for backup purposes.
I also had the blog I was targeting set to a different one instead of my MSDN blog. This is my personal site blog and since I blog on it from home, I cannot use the externally visible form of www.sitename.com (since I am behind my router on which my server is also located), I was forced to use the http://server format for that blog setup.
I was creating the draft from work, where the http://server format does not work for my personal blog anyway.
I tried to save and switch the blogs (from personal to MSDN) at the same time.

Ah, but I shouldn't be surprised. First I used to think that I was an innate tester who just naturally found bugs. But over the years, I have sadly realized that almost all our users are just as gifted as me. Thanks to the quality of our software.

Just today morning as well I got all excited reading about Microsoft Research AutoCollage software and took it out for a spin. But at the end when I tried saving and exiting the app it crashed on me. The weird part was that all along, I was expecting it to crash so it didn't bother me. Why? I think subconsciously for a couple of reasons - it was MSR so I was not expecting released product quality from it, even though we are selling the software on our brand spanking new www.MicrosoftStore.com and secondly because it was doing a lot of fancy, CPU intensive image processing which made me just hold my breath and wait for the inevitable crash (though to their credit it didn't quite occur during the processing). Oh! We have such a long way to go.

Anyway, this talk is all about the future and not the present. The present sucks, we all know that. But fear not, for we brave, intrepid testers will fix all of that (or at least find all of that - we'll need some devs to fix it for us - we can't touch the product code you know!) :)

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP

2008-11-08T04:54:22Z

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) as well as the brand new XML Schema Designer (more of a viewer currently though) which adds to the XML Schema Explorer in Orcas SP1 and add multiple designer views such as a Graph View and a Content Model View to make working with XML Schemas really easy and intuitive.

Here are some screenshots of the improvements that we shipped in this CTP. We would love to hear your feedback about any of these tools.

(New WPF based XML Editor)

(Content Model View of the new XML Schema Designer)

(Graph View of the new XML Schema Designer)

VS 2008 SP1

2008-08-21T00:00:37Z

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 Schema Explorer which adds to the already rich set of XML Tools such as XML Editor and XSLT Debugger that we ship in VS.

ADO.Net Entity Designer which is a first class designer to help customers adopt and work with the new ADO.Net Entity Framework shipped in .Net FX 3.5 SP1 for the first time.

Both of these tools are incredibly cool (since they are WPF based) and provide a good sense of the direction all our tool offerings will be taking in future versions of VS. Please provide all your suggestions and comments through this MSDN Forum.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta

2008-05-13T19:03:13Z

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 new XSD Browser integration support upcoming in VB (in the final RTM release of SP1) and the cool new Entity Framework Designer which let's you graphically create and edit EDMX files. The XML Editor also includes bug fixes for customer reported issues such as around the way Outlining works in XML documents (much better with SP1).