Robert Horvick's Weblog

Every once in a while I get a message that at first baffles me but once I understand the problem it's hand-smackingly obvious. This error message was one of those. "hexadecimal value 0x07, is an invalid character" By now I’ve run into this problem...

I wanted to read Twitter.com search results (tweets) using C#.  I started by deciding that a tweet looks something like this: public class Tweet { public string Id { get ; set ; } public DateTime Published { get ; set ; } public string Link...

Many times new work-items are the by-product of an email thread. Sometimes it a question that turns into a feature request or a bug report from an external customer. When this happens I need to move the email message to one screen and open VS in another...

Previously I talked about how to find the contributor to a merge (e.g. the source item of a merge operation). This information is all on the server however (in my opinion) it is not presented to the user in the most obvious form. In this post I’ll walk...

If I could do it all over again I would take auto shop class in high school. I didn’t know it at the time but I really enjoy automotive technology. I have bought several text books used in automotive tech classes and read them cover to cover several times...

SharePoint does not have persistent hyperlinks for all document revisions. More specifically – SharePoint has two methods for linking to documents: the canonical path and the revision paths. The canonical path is the latest copy of the document...

When running the VSS to TFS converter (VSSConverter.exe) one of the most common questions I hear is how to create a UserMap.xml file for users who are no longer with the company or have had their accounts renamed. My first suggestion is that any...

[migrated from my other blog] I can never leave well-enough alone. If I read “this is how this works“ then it's only a matter of time before I write my own example to proof what I just read. This post is another example of that... There...

I often need to answer some seemingly simple questions like: What has changed between these two builds? How do the contents of these two branches deviate? What % of the files in a child branch have deltas from the parent branch? To answer...

Another in a series of working with merge history using the TFS client API. Last time I discussed a simple framework for describing merge history. This time we'll walk through calling QueryMerges to reveal the source item of a merge....

Prior to using Hyper-V as part of my daily development and test efforts I wasted man weeks every year.  I lost days at a time configuring machines and recovering from updated NDP builds.  I wasted hours every week repeating the same steps over...

In my previous rant I made this statement (quoted out of context): Migrating WSS content to TFS? Piece of cake. Just enumerate each WSS change and replay the action in TFS. If you are doing an incremental migration then just enumerate those changes...

[Since people asked - I re-posted this from my other blog. I didn't “steal“ it.] Recently on Raymond Chen’s blog he had a post about not trusting return addresses . Specifically to not use the _ReturnAddress() intrinsic and GetModuleHandleEx...

I was using a website today and they wanted to make sure I was human and not some automotronic roboform hell-bent on spamming the Intra-Web with ... well ... who knows what the kids are spamming for today with their rock-and-roll music and dual-core processors...

Yesterday I made the comment that I thought that the handling of 0x07 was a bug in the TFS client APIs. I was wrong. Buck called me out on this and after researching it in more depth I believe that the client OM is doing the right thing (or at least...

As Matt has mentioned on the TFS Migration blog we’re working on a migration toolkit and, specifically, a sample converter tool to keep WSS document libraries in sync with a location in the TFS source control server. One of the most common questions...

This week is the one year anniversary of my move from the Fargo, ND office and the Business Framework team to the Durham, NC office and the Team Foundation Server Version Control team. I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on the last year. This is...

Happy New Year and all that. I spent the long weekend at Myrtle Beach soaking up rain or sun - depending on the moment you checked. I’ve been out of Fargo for a year now, after nearly 30 years living in Minnesota and North Dakota . I wasn’t timid about...

This week is the one year anniversary of my move from the Fargo, ND office and the Business Framework team to the Durham, NC office and the Team Foundation Server Version Control team. I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on the last year. This is...

Interested in writing a migration tool targeting (or synchronizing with) Team Foundation Server version control or workitem tracking? Then check out the pre-release of the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit on CodePlex! http://www.codeplex...

As Matt noted on the migration blog a working copy of the toolkit specification has been released. You can download it and leave feedback from this link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948851.aspx If you have feedback on migration scenarios...

At this time 98 people have downloaded the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit . Ok - some of you are saying "100? What's the big deal? A picture of a rabbit with a pancake on it's head gets more downloads every hour!" And they would be right...

When you read bad code you learn what not to do. You learn to identify the many classes of errors and the patterns that often lead up to them. When you read good code you learn how to write good code. You observe “tricks” of good programmers...

Yesterday we introduced the CodeDOM and covered some fundamentals. Creating a namespace , a class , a member method and a method body. Today we’re going to cover conditionals. I know I promised loops too but conditionals is taking enough space that...

Tomorrow … next week … read: the next time I post. Specifying an integer range is one of the problems we need solve to have a reasonably robust task generator. It’s one thing to say that a property is assignable from an int, but...