Say what? Microsoft Malaysia One ISV Technology Blog : Visual Studio 2008

Cloaking in TFS

hoongfai — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:09:43 GMT

In the past couple of days, I've been delving into prescriptive architecture guidance for Team Foundation Server (TFS). Along the way I learnt something new, something I never knew existed in TFS. It's called cloaking. Allow me to quote the following text from the Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server prescriptive architecture guidance (search under Chapter 4):

Cloaking

You can use cloaking as a performance optimization when you want to prevent a part of the source control tree from being retrieved. The following are typical scenarios for using cloaking:
• You want to build the project locally and a folder is not needed for the build, for example a documentation folder.
• You are part of a large team project and you only want to retrieve part of the project.

For either of the above scenarios you can cloak folders to stop the client retrieving those folders. You cloak folders on the client by editing the workspace and changing the status of the working folder from active to cloak.

Keep the following recommendations in mind when you cloak:
• Do not cloak individual files. This is likely lead to maintenance problems later in the project.
• For a large project, map out the root folder and cloak sub folders rather than creating multiple workspaces for the project.

Having said that, I went ahead to put this to practice on Visual Studio TFS 2008. Before I got started, I paid close attention to the statement that says, "You cloak folders on the client by editing the workspace and changing the status of the working folder from active to cloak.".

The question that begs is "What is a Workspace?".

Workspaces Explained
A TFS workspace is a client-side copy of the files and folders in TFS source control. A workspace maps source control folders to local file system directories. When you make changes to files within the workspace on your local computer, the local changes, referred to as pending changes, are isolated in your workspace until you check them into the server as an atomic unit. The collective set of changes, checked in as a batch is referred to as a changeset.

As a good measure for practice, I didn't want to edit my existing default workspace, so I created a new workspace. This new workspace will map the source control folders to a new folder in my local file system. These were the steps I took to create a new workspace:

Create a new workspace.
In your Source Control Explorer, go to the Workspaces combo box. Click Workspaces... (as shown in the following diagram)
This brings out Manage Workspaces window.
Click Add.
Then, I mapped the solution folder in my source control to a local folder as shown below.
Since the Doc folder is not required in the building of my solution, I want this folder cloaked. Another reason why I would want the documents folder cloaked is because there may potentially be very large files that I do not want to update from the source control every time I get latest changes.
After I've cloaked the Doc folder, when I get latest version from the source control, it will not get the files under the Doc folder, and the folder appears as grey in the Source Control Explorer.
Done!

Please bear in mind that you can only cloak folders that have a mapped parent. Otherwise you get an error message like the following.

I'm presenting at Softec 08 - Software Testing Conference

hoongfai — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:38:12 GMT

Woo hoo! I get to show off how test-driven development is done, with Microsoft VSTS at the cockpit. In fact that is the exact title of my presentation. I was invited by the Malaysian Software Testing Board to present at its software testing conference. Check out my speaker profile here. My team mate, Poh Sze, will be delivering a 2-hour tutorial on how to use VSTS Test edition at the same conference.

Outlook To Go, anyone?

hoongfai — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:58:17 GMT

The final session I delivered at TechEd SEA 2008 was one titled "Outlook Application To Go! Building an Occasionally-connected outlook add-in using Outlook+Services Blueprint". I tag-teamed with Patrick Yong, for this instructor-led lab (ILL). Patrick developed a workflow hosted as a WCF service, and it serves as an Issues Tracker. With oil price only increasing, and the cost of living skyrocketing, people need a solution to keep track of their issues. :)

Essentially this lab introduces a manifestation of Software + Services, in the form of an Outlook application to go! Outlook + Services is one of the blueprints published under Software + Services Blueprints. You need to install the Software-plus-Services Blueprints, and the Software-plus-Services Blueprints Manager which is a Visual Studio 2008 extension that gives you all the nifty features of developing an Outlook add-in at blazing pace.

This lab was developed by both Patrick and myself, hence it was exclusive at TechEd SEA 2008. I've developed the lab manual in simple steps, which do not require you to type in code. I've also prepared a bunch of code snippets (all C#), which you could use the keyword shortcut to insert into your code. I've also setup all the bookmarks all over the classes so that all you need is to follow the sequence of the bookmarks. Bookmarks in Visual Studio 2008 is an excellent feature to guide both the presenter as well as the lab participants on where to insert code. The shortcut is as follows:

Go to the bookmark item.
Say this is the first todo item, type "todo1", and press the Tab button twice, and VOILA!

The lab content is explained well in the manual. Enjoy reading the manual.

Extract the code snippets into My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets

SharePoint To Go!

hoongfai — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:15:00 GMT

I'm back. My apologies to those who have been waiting for me to upload the bits after my breakout sessions and ILL session from TechEd SEA 2008. I'll start off with my session that is titled OFC311 SharePoint Applications To Go! - Building Occasionally-Connected SharePoint Applications Using the Microsoft Sync Framework.

You can go ahead and create a list on your SharePoint site. Update the part of the code that points to the SharePoint List Web Service, which I have bookmarked. You need to open this solution using Visual Studio 2008, go to the Bookmarks windows, and navigate through all the bookmarks in sequence.

At a later point, I will provide more meat to this, but in the meantime, check this out.

I'll also talk about what I've been doing since I went MIA.

Just Released - Enterprise Library 4.0 for Visual Studio 2008

hoongfai — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:18:35 GMT

Enterprise Library has been revised based on customer requests to cover key scenarios for successful development and deployment of .NET applications.

Download the latest version of EntLib

Visual Studio Team System Licensing White Paper

hoongfai — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:36:25 GMT

Visual Studio Team System Licensing White Paper Now Available

This month we published a white paper describing Visual Studio Team System licensing scenarios. It is synchronized with the April 2008 Product Usage Rights (PUR) document.

I'm so relieved that a VSTS licensing white paper is now available. I often field tones of questions from my ISVs about VSTS licensing.

VS2008 SP1 Beta and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta is now available

hoongfai — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:40:33 GMT

We will be releasing the beta of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework SP1. Each of these releases contains a significant amount of new functionality and bug fixes for developers which will further enhance their experiences with our products. However, this bulletin is focused on new functionality specifically in .NET Framework SP1 and Visual Studio SP1 for Client development.

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for WPF development. This release includes numerous bug fixes and the following feature areas:

· New and improved graphics capabilities for both 2D and 3D

· New controls and extensibility

· Performance improvements for startup and runtime, as well as streamlined setup

· Interop with HTML (DOM) as well as DirectX

As part of the streamlined setup we are introducing a new .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile which is a perfect subset of the .NET Framework 3.5 targeted exclusively at client applications and clients scenarios. The Client Profile will work with ClickOnce application deployments.

The beta is intended as a mechanism to allow early testing and feedback. As a beta release, it is recommended that you only install the service pack on test machines (VPCs would be great for that purpose). Note that there are a few known incompatibilities with this service pack including: Expression Blend, the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK, and the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008. A new version of Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview has been released here that is compatible with this service pack. These issues will be resolved for the final release, but it is important that you start testing your apps for compatibility and provide feedback to us.

Here's how you provide feedback to us:

Windows Presentation Foundation Forum for feedback and questions regarding this release of WPF.
Visual Studio WPF Designer Forum for feedback and questions related to WPF features in Visual Studio 2008.
Expression Studio Forum for questions and discussions related to WPF features in Expression Blend.

Wanted: TFS Installer

hoongfai — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:48:46 GMT

I reckon someone could just make a living out of doing TFS installation and deployment. It would be a lucrative job. For the past couple of weeks, I've been neck-deep into TFS and VSTS 2008. It's been an enlightening experience to say the last.

One of the things I learnt the hard way was to do with TFS and the SQL Server collations. One of the pre-requisites to installing TFS 2008 is to install SQL Server. I chose SQL Server 2005 because SS08 has not gone to RTM. I read the installation steps careful enough not to miss out any steps (also learnt this the hard way while installing TFS 2005). But little did I notice how important it is to choose the right collation settings for SQL Server 2005.

It's imperative to know that TFS does not support case sensitive collation settings, nor does it support accent sensitive collation settings. And when you're at the SQL Server installation step of selecting the collation type, pay extra attention. DO NOT select the defaults. Select Latin1_General, case-insensitive, and accent-sensitive. Remember, do not even check any other boxes. There's no turning back is you missed this very important step.

In a later post, I will talk about TFS Build, and also the possibility of introducing a TFS Build proxy that will act as the "load balancer" for all the registered build agents. Until a later post.