The Scenario Throughout the article, I will refer to the AdventureWorks database and use the following hypothetical customer scenarios: Customer browses list of all products Customer checks status of order through web portal showing all previous...

Introduction The LINQ framework offers a basic pattern of sequence operators, allowing for primitive behavior such as filtering, grouping, and joining over collections and types. The support of the high level query comprehension syntax in C# 3.0 is...

Preparing Your Idea The first real step in preparing a proposal with a greater chance of success is finding a subject you’re passionate about. Even if you present all the data to support your idea, your lack of passion for the subject will give you the...

During the development of internal tools we often have to stop working on features and clean up after ourselves to ensure that strings and such are embedded in the appropriate resource files and not hard coded into our applications. This can be a very...

More of an acute fascination than anything else I expanded my use of memoization for computation to use a more efficient means of calculating Fibonacci sequences for values of n greater than 40 (previous Fibonacci example takes several minutes to compute...

  When I observe developers writing solutions using LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework, I see a number of conversions occurring time and time again. Below are some of the more trivial utility method extensions I used when developing solutions based...

There is a technique that allows optimization of repeated calculation results for a set of inputs called memoization . This technique is particularly helpful when working with numeric computations, pathing, such as for tree searches, etc. where the time...

I had a recent comment come in that I wanted to share: I was wondering what your take was on Consulting firms. Although it is not offshore outsourcing, in some sense, it is still outsourcing their projects to firms. I totally agree with you regarding...

After months of waiting, I can finally say that Visual Studio 2008 was released last week. There are hundreds of new features, language enhancements, and technology integrations in this version. To help you get your head around what is new in Visual Studio...

Not to say that all offshore projects fail, I have both been a contributor and leader in projects that have been a great success and those that have been complete failures. Each project had its own reasons for failing and were defined by the business...

Having been included in two separate teams where our outsourced projects don't go as well as expected I cannot help but to take a step back and ask why things are consistently failing with separate teams, and separate organizations. The commonalities...

Today the Team Foundation Server team announced the release of version 1.2 of Team Foundation Power Tools (formally known as Power Toys). What are the Power Toys you say? They're extra functionality delivered out of band for Team Foundation Server including...

A few things before we get started: You will need the HTML Help Workshop installed September CTP of Sandcastle My September CTP Sandcastle Targets File (attached) This file needs to be copied to your %programfiles%\MSBuild directory Next...

Based on a past post, I have an external targets file you can place in your $(MSBuildExtensionsPath) folder (attached in zip). You can call it like this: < Import Project = " $(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Sandcastle.targets " /> < Target...

There have been several instances when working with multiple teams that they need to build different build configurations on the same build machine. For example, we have a central build type that encapsulates the compilation of the bits, database installation...

First, we created a cmd file to do the build for us. Syntax for calling the file is Build.cmd "PathToBinaries" "Name of the documentation" (more on this later) @echo off PUSHD %1 "%programfiles%\Sandcastle\ProductionTools\mrefbuilder.exe" *.dll...

I'm on Channel9! http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=220125...

While nothing to do with VSTF or VSTS, I thought I’d share my challenges with everyone regarding an issue I was having with my Outlook 2007 instance and how I overcame it. Each time I launched Outlook 2007 I was prompted for my exchange server credentials...

Leaders need to think beyond themselves and engage in conversations with their employees or subordinates. I recently had a 1 on 1 with the director of my group and was recognized for some of the points of leadership I am taking with my project and cross...

In order to effectively execute an IT strategy a roadmap must be created to contain and identify what common areas exist for the business' solution that could be leveraged by other systems in the enterprise or organization; or which capabilities the solution...

...

First I want to start out with some observations: The Business expects IT to provide a technology advantage with the right capabilities at the right price at the right time A business strategy alone is not sufficient for IT planning Business rarely...

How do VSTF and VSTS help developers, operations, solution architects and business analysts think more strategically about their projects?...

How can we learn from the Japanese Automotive manufacturing industry about driving accountability and quality...

Version 1.0 of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider has been released to the web ! This is very exciting for me--the MSSCCI provider allows the integrated use of the new version control system available in Team Foundation Server from...