PSfD: Team Blog

Martin Parry from our team has recently written a MSDN article on how to place your own Windows Forms controls insde the Windows common dialog boxes, check it out!

I realise that this is a bit late for many people, but I have been helping one of my customers with a justification to move to Windows Server 2003 from Windows 2000 Server. It is specifically targeted at the main application that they develop which is...

In the development for Windows Server 2003, much work was done to improve the scalability of the kernel (the core set of functionality that the entire operating system relies on). Detailed analysis, with both software and hardware tools on systems with...

IIS 6.0 is a ground up rewrite of the previous incarnation of IIS, version 5.0. IIS has been redesigned to improve aspects of all the main feature areas: reliability, availability, manageability, scalability and performance. Fault-tolerant process...

As part of its commitment to reliability security and dependable computing, Microsoft has reviewed every line of code underlying its Windows Server family as part of its enhanced effort to identify possible fail points and exploitable weaknesses. Increased...

COM+ 1.5 forms an integral part of Windows Server 2003 and has been much improved over the version that shipped with Windows 2000 Server. Features designed to increase the abilities (scalability, availability and manageability) of COM+ applications have...

Steve has got some great articles on Registration Free COM, definately worth a read. This techique is particulary useful for scenarios where you want to run different (incompatible) versions of the same COM component on one machine (which wasn't possible...

If you've got some time definately consider checking out this Channel 9 Video on Avalon presented by the Avalon Product Team - it's great to see how Avalon is coming along and remember it will be supported on XP, Windows Server 2003 as well as Longhorn...

I've been working a lot with NDOC recently and find the new extensibility feature excellent. In the team I'm working with at the moment they wanted to be able to define a revision history section that would be displayed within the documentation, so after...

Recently a number of people have been asking about deploying assemblies into the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) using GacUtil.exe. Now GacUtil is strictly a developer tool, and is not intended to be used for general deployment of assemblies, but I can see...

Just in case (like me) you didn’t know in IIS6, the default is for every request to the server to be authenticated – even if new requests are using the same session. Read this for more. N ice easy perf win :-) --- Neil

Having just found out the hard way; the way the Framework deals with unhandled exceptions has changed. In v1 the framework will eat any unhandled exceptions that you throw. If you created a thread which threw an uncaught exception you may never know about...

This article describes how you can get a great design time experience from your custom Windows Workflow Foundation activities. For more details click here . For details about the Windows Workflow Foundation go to http ://www.windowsworkflow.net . ...

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), formally named Indigo, is part of the WinFX and is designed for inter-process communication and building connected systems. For a basic grounding in this technology check this article on MSDN: Learn The ABCs...

Team blog for Microsoft PSfD team. Look forward for announcements/technical content/updates. http://www.microsoft.com/microsoftservices/en/us/support_premier_devs.aspx

Users demand high performance reporting along with real-time data so when the reports they use are slow or even worse not functional, you’re sure to hear about it. Because performance issues, especially in a distributed product such as SQL Server...

Building security into a system is difficult especially today as applications are more diverse in nature and span multiple technologies. Never the less, curtailing exploits and vulnerabilities from a development standpoint should be a high priority for...

Anyone who has had to deal with services failing to start (i.e. logon permissions, setting recovery responses [run a program], verifiying dependencies, etc.) knows what a real PITA it can be to track down the culprit of the failure. Having said that I...

I recently was asked a question about the Entity Framework’s (EF) “Stored Procedure Mapping” context menu from the designer. There were actually two issues wrapped into one question. The first part of the question was around the ability...

I briefly touched on this topic in my last post but I wanted to devote more time to it as it’s an important piece of the software development puzzle. I’m not going to go into detail on how to construct a test plan as there are numerous examples...

If an Agile methodology is to be implemented there needs to be some tools for the participants to use. For developers that will most likely be Visual Studio (VS) utilizing Team Foundation Server (TFS) for source control and more. The business analyst...

While there are many different types of Agile implementations I think using MSF for Agile or Scrum is ideal. Before going to deep into both of those methodologies let’s start with what is “conventional software development” (CSD). CSD...

I’ve been creating quite a few videos lately as trying to convey to developers or other I.T. related staff a specific concept or how to accomplish a certain job via plain old text is sometimes a daunting task. Yes, KB articles, code samples, conference...

A lot of developers who I speak to have come up with some very creative ways to interact with Team Foundation Server (TFS) and while some of these methods aren’t fully supported it just goes to show that if there’s a need then there’s...

Virtualization technology certainly has changed the game when it comes to software development. Long gone are the days of hoping or guessing that the application developed will work on a disparate number of computer systems. Testing was possible but there...