August 2005 - Posts
This is worth checking out if you haven't seen it yet: http://blogs.msdn.com/powertoys/
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Came across this today and it seemed interesting. Video from Osellus on "Enacting IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP®) in Visual Studio Team System" http://www.osellus.com/solutions/microsoft/rup-vsts/
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I had the chance to watch a first time profiler user go through a profiling scenario this morning. We got everything humming but there was a learning curve and some less than helpful error messages along the way. Here are the takeaways: Permissions: Realize
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There is some key information that needs to be passed to team members who want to start using a team project. Namely the TFS server machine name and also the team project name. You can get all of this information and more in the text field summary pane
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Disclaimer applies, if you have better suggestions please leave comments. One of the unit test features is the capability to automatically generate unit tests for ASP.NET 2.0 code inside the App_Code folder. In my experience this is one of those areas
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One of my ISV buddies is looking for beta testers for a new voice commenting system they are developing. The idea being you can attach a microphone and then leave a voice comment describing your code with a special comment tag totally integrated inside
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This is probably spam for most of you but it's more of a public service announcement for anyone like me living near Microsoft. If you want someone to refer your friends, neighbors, family, to when they have computer problems so you don't have to fix them
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Soma officially announced the logistics of Visual Studio 2005 + Team Foundation Server scheduling this morning: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2005/08/22/451026.aspx
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One of my ISV buddies needed to help a customer declutter the "Send To" menu, here's how: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article05-404
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Show Off is an evening event held at the PDC where you can show off your application, tip, tool, technique, animation, or anything cool that can help or inspire other developers. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=102337
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More testing advice. Sometimes you hit a bug you know is going to be hard for the dev to repro, and more to the point, you know ahead of time that when you do find a bug it is going to be terribly difficult to repro it. If you value your relationship
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On our internal dogfood work item system I have had an interesting experience these last few days. A custom work item type we have has grown into a situation where we are sticking aggregated information into the comment string field of the links tab instead
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Daisy presents a persuasive argument for focusing on test coverage discussions when bug counts are low: http://quality-assurance-software-testing.blogspot.com/2005/08/bug-count-vs-test-coverage.html
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Ch-ch-ch-changes... I thought this was old news but the parallax effect of July CTP users trickling in makes me think this may be something you are wondering about. This is just a note to the VSTS power users on CTP bits, if that's not you, you can disregard.
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Multimonitor machine, hosting two virtual PC's with one virtual PC multi-monitored into the other virtual PC. Don't say I'm not looking out for you. These are stories the mainstream media absolutely refuse to carry! http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/08/17/452726.asp
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there's a chance to chat directly with the VSTS test team going on right now if you're online http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2005/08/17/452716.aspx
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I got a chuckle out of this quote today: "In the world of software, Web designers are called programmers. Programmers are called engineers. Engineers are called architects. And architects never get called!" - Alan Cooper
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Security researchers have all the fun. This paper describes how the Strider HoneyMonkey Exploit Detection system uses active client honeypots (AKA "honey monkeys") to find web sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities. ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2005-72.pd
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An old friend sent me a new testing link by email today, looks like a community site for software testers. For anyone looking to start a software testing blog on the cheap their "free registration, free blog" offer might be worth looking into: http://www.testingreflections.com
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There is probably some official page somewhere that defines these terms better. But since I toss them around around all the time, I probably owe it to some readers to explain what they mean. Here goes, from least to greatest: CTP - community technology
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If you want to create new test projects on the July CTP you will need to apply this fix: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=69609
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Give a welcome to John Lyon-Smith who just joined our team by subscribing to his blog! First post - counting bits: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnls/archive/2005/08/09/449655.aspx
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ScottGu is looking for help smoothing out any bugs in the ASP.NET 2.0 migration wizard: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/08/07/421827.aspx
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PDC marketing team says they are within days of selling out. Self-fulfilling prophecy? :) http://blogs.msdn.com/pdc/ (and the PDC for free contest: http://channel9.msdn.com/PDC/ )
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James Bach asks us to give up the idea of "Best Practice" ( http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/james/archives/000187.html ), claims it is something that cheapens our craft, and I find myself agreeing. Maybe software testers can replace the idea of "best
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If you want to run the performance profiler on your managed windows services, this is a must read: http://blogs.msdn.com/angryrichard/articles/Profiling_Windows_Services.aspx
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Testers out there may find this interesting. QA Labs , a Canadian QA Services company is starting up a series of discussions on QA topics. http://www.qapodcast.com - it's MP3 - they could have called it QAPocketPCCast or QAWindowsMediaPlayerCast but I'll
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Nutshell: In the dialog to generate your unit tests pay close attention to the default language it is going to create the test project in to make sure it is what you are expecting. Monstrosity of verbosity: When creating unit tests (right click on the
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Ran into this the other day, when creating a team build it allows you to associate a test list with a build. If there are no pre-existing test lists, you find yourself in a bit of pickle on Team Developer. You can however use Team Test to create the test
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Can't find the VSTS window or feature you're looking for under the View menu? There are options sprinkled all over the menu in VSTS. First of course make sure you have the TFC client installed right (and in the right order - VS and then TFC), or you won't
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This is not a Microsoft sponsored talk, and the term "webinar" makes me cringe, but it might be worth it for testers in the crowd: "In this Webinar, the primary author of all three books of the "How to break.." series will take you on a journey through
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http://www.icecontact.com/
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I remember a few years ago at a software quality conference in Portland telling people in the hallway after talks about these cool static code analysis tools we had, but then having to admit they were just internal. Fast forward to today, the news is
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Walking my daily gauntlet for you, I was stymied by some seemingly conflicting icons in the load test results viewer: (experimental image hosting on imageshack.us - we'll see how it goes) I expected warning thresholds to be less severe than critical thresholds.
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OK, so this is more performance enhancement for the tester brain than it is about wrangling the VSTS bits. So you can start practicing this advice on whatever work item tracking system you are currently using, until you can upgrade to Team System work
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