I recently came across a helpful post on Jim Morris' IDeveloper blog. He describes how to get your SSIS packages "building" in MSBuild (allowing them to be built by Team Build as well).

The problem stems from the fact that Team Build uses MSBuild but SSIS projects are not written in MSBuild format. They are just plain old xml. So did you get MSBuild in your SSIS or did you get SSIS in your MSBuild? Not sure why this (and other BI) project type was not written using the MSBuild schema... In the meantime here is a solution to get your SSIS packages "building".

Here's a link to Jim's post:
You got SSIS in my MSBuild

I was working with a shared VPC the other day and I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on how to make them a little easier to work with.

Turn off the Shutdown Event Tracker

The Shutdown Event Tracker is a feature in Windows Server that prompts the user to explain why they are shutting down or restarting the server. While this is a useful feature for production servers, it's just annoying for shared virtual machines. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, here's a screen shot of the dialog displayed by the Shutdown Event Tracker:

To prevent Windows Server from display this dialog when someone shuts down the virtual machine, follow the steps below:

1. Run the Group Policy Object Editor (gpedit.msc)
   
   
   
2. Navigate to the Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System node in the tree control on the left and double click the "Display Shutdown Event Tracker" item on the right.
   
    
   
3. Click the "Disabled" radio button to disable the Shutdown Event Tracker.
   
   

Turn on Automatic Logon

Keeping track of logon credentials for shared virtual machines is cumbersome. You generally end up creating a text file with the credentials and placing that text file in the directory with the virtual machines files and hope that they stay together as a set. The easier way to do it is to enable automatic logon in the virtual machine.

1. Run the Registry Editor (regedt32.exe).
   
   
   
2. Locate the following key in the registry:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
   
    
   
   Double-click the DefaultUserName entry, type your user name, and then click OK.
   
3. Double-click the DefaultPassword entry, type your password, and then click OK. NOTE: If the DefaultPassword value does not exist, it must be added. To add the value, follow these steps:
   • On the Edit menu, click New, and then point to String Value.
   • Type DefaultPassword, and then press ENTER.
   • Double-click DefaultPassword.
   • In the Edit String dialog, type your password and then click OK.
     NOTE: If no DefaultPassword string is specified, Windows automatically changes the value of the AutoAdminLogon key from 1 (true) to 0 (false), disabling the AutoAdminLogon feature.
4. On the Edit menu, click New, and then point to String Value.
5. Type AutoAdminLogon, and then press ENTER.
6. Double-click AutoAdminLogon.
7. In the Edit String dialog box, type 1 and then click OK.
8. Quit the Registry Editor.

Note: To bypass the AutoAdminLogon process and to log on as a different user, hold down the SHIFT key after you log off or after Windows restarts.

Additional Software

Consider installing some additional software for to make the virtual machine more convenient to use.

• BgInfo. How many times have you walked up to a system in your office and needed to click through several diagnostic windows to remind yourself of important aspects of its configuration, such as its name, IP address, or operating system version If you manage multiple computers you probably need BGInfo. It automatically displays relevant information about a Windows computer on the desktop's background, such as the computer name, IP address, service pack version, and more. You can edit any field as well as the font and background colors, and can place it in your startup folder so that it runs every boot, or even configure it to display as the background for the logon screen.

If you have any other suggestions on how to make shared VPCs easier to work with. I'd love to hear them!

I was on SourceForge today and spotted this ad:

It's nice to see the Raleigh site called out in a Microsoft recruiting ad!

I've been a fan of TechSmith's Camtasia product for a long time so I thought I'd mention another great product they offer. SnagIt is a really flexible screen capture application that's been around for a long time. It's easy to use but also very feature-rich. TechSmith recently announced a set of output plug-ins for it including one for Team System that makes it really easy to capture a screen shot and attach it to a new bug in VSTS.

SnagIt Output for Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System

I've created a sidebar gadget for Windows Vista that lets you monitor a set of build definitions. It's compatible with Team Foundation Server "Orcas" Beta 1 and it should also work with Beta 2 once it's released. If you'd like a preview before you try it out, watch the video below where I walk through installing and configuring the gadget.

If you have any comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. The BuildMonitor.gadget file is attached to this post.

Note: I developed this gadget using nothing but DHTML and JavaScript. It has no dependencies on the Team Foundation Client object model. It does, however, get the list of team foundation servers from the registry key used by the client. If you wanted to, you could add these registry entries yourself or modify the gadget to let the user specify the server URI manually.

We get this question often enough that I thought I would post the answer. In the future, I'll be posting answers to common Team Build questions as discrete blog posts tagged with "FAQ" to facilitate browsing or subscription via RSS.

If you’re trying to build a Visual Studio Setup Project (.vdproj) I refer you to the following MSDN walkthrough:

Configuring Team Foundation Build to Build a Visual Studio Setup Project

As an alternative, please consider using WiX and Votive.

After coming across a question regarding hosted TFS on Linked In, I thought I would post some information on the subject. Here's an excerpt from the attached TFS Hosting Brief. 

“Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a server product built on top of standard Microsoft technologies, including ASP.NET web services, SharePoint, and SQL Server 2005. TFS is traditionally self-hosted inside of an organization. A single Team Foundation Server can support up to 2000 users with the appropriate hardware configuration.

Team Foundation Server is available through the SPLA licensing program, enabling hosters to potentially offer a Team Foundation Server hosted offering. See the attached overview document for SPLA pricing details. To date there are no hosters offering such a service. However, we are running a pilot program with several hosters and a handful of customers to begin the process of building a partner ecosystem of TFS hosters.

TFS can be successfully deployed by a hoster using a dedicated server model or even a virtualized server model. This would mean that each hoster customer organization would have its own Team Foundation Server instance. Organizations who do distributed development or do not want to deal with the administrative overhead of maintaining their own Team Foundation Server may find such a hosted offering compelling.”

If you're interested in participating in this program as either a provider or customer, please contact us at tfshost@microsoft.com or post a comment here.

Admittedly, our inclusion of continuous integration (build queuing, triggers and drop management) into the Orcas release was a bit rushed and we didn't have time to implement everything we wanted. One of the bigger omissions was a means of notifying the user about build events and making it easy for them to respond to those events.

Well, we've worked up an initial design for a notification applet that would run in your tray (er, I mean "notification area") and keep you up-to-date on the status of the build definitions you're interested in. Here's an annotated storyboard that walks you through the design. Please post comments here and let me know what you think. We haven't even started implementing this yet, so now is the time to give us feedback.

Note that if you click the on SlideShare link you'll be taken to a page where you'll have the option of a full screen view of this document - which I'd highly recommend.

Those of you who have bitten the proverbial bullet and installed Beta 1 of Team Foundation Server Codename Orcas may have already seen the improvements to Team Build. For those who haven't, I'm posting the user experience specification for the continuous integration feature set. If you have any feedback, now is the time to let us know since we are in the final stages of the Orcas product cycle.

Note that if you click the on SlideShare link you'll be taken to a page where you'll have the option of a full screen view of this document - which I'd highly recommend.

I presented at the May 2007 VSIP Developer Conference last week in Redmond on extensibility enhancements coming on the upcoming Orcas release of Team Foundation Server. We had a great turn out and it was really nice to meet some of the terrific partners working to complement our feature set. It's exciting to see new development on our application life cycle management platform.

In case you're interested, here's the slide deck I presented:

Since Aaron tagged me, here are five things you probably didn't know about me:

1. I started programming when I was 12 on a TRS-80 Model III. I had wanted an Apple ][ but my Dad didn't want me to waste my time playing games. "If you want to play computer games," he said "you'll have to write them yourself." So I taught myself BASIC and when that didn't have enough horsepower I taught myself Z80 assembly language and used a macro assembler my older brother bought for me to patch the BASIC interpreter. I was a big fan of Turbo Pascal 3.0 through 5.5 (object Pascal), but when I was introduced to C++ I didn't look back.
2. I'm a Desert Storm veteran having served aboard the USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) as an intelligence officer for a tactical electronic warfare squadron (VAQ-140). The Navy paid for my education at U.Va. and I probably would have stayed in if they had offered me Naval Postgraduate School. While serving I had the opportunity to fly (as a passenger) in the EA-6B Prowler, A-6 Intruder, H-3 Sea King, SH-60 Seahawk, E-2 Hawkeye, and P-3 Orion. I wish for a swift end to hostilities in Iraq and the safe return of the men and women serving there.
3. My wife and I appear in an episode of HGTV's Designing for the Sexes and I helped Michael Payne's son get an internship at Symantec where I was an architect at the time. It was a great experience and we really enjoyed working with Michael although shooting the scenes for the show was more tedious than we expected. Despite the way we're portrayed for the benefit of the show, we actually get along famously and have very similar tastes.
4. I am a (somewhat) reformed car nut and, prior to joining Microsoft, I sold a heavily modified santorin blue Audi S4 wagon to a Microsoftee in Redmond. Apparently, it was used as the basis for an S4 that appeared in Project Gotham Racing 2. I've also participated in organized track events at the Spring Mountain Advanced Driving School, Sebring International Raceway, and Roebling Road Raceway. Please remember that the left lane is for passing only.
5. I am the youngest son of an artist and a civil engineer and they deserve most of the credit for how I turned out.

To keep this going, I'll tag Cameron Skinner, Sachin Rekhi, Adam Singer, Noah Coad, and Sam Guckenheimer.

It’s been a while since I last posted, so I apologize for “going dark” to use the Microsoft parlance. I am now the program manager for Team Build as well as the acting program manager for Administration and Operations (excluding eventing, linking and area/iteration pathing). I’m working hard to ramp up on my new areas of responsibility and I hope you, dear reader, will feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have. We’re currently planning the features to include in our next release, so I’m especially interested in your feedback and suggestions in that context.

I've compiled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) regarding the many aspects of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) in this article. If you’d like to suggest a FAQ(answers are appreciated too!) please add a comment to the article or email me directly at jimlamb@microsoft.com.

Read the FAQ.

Since joining Microsoft seven weeks ago, I've seen more PowerPoint presentations than I had seen in the previous five years. It quickly became apparent to me that the primary forms of communication at Microsoft are email and PowerPoint.

You may be familiar with Edward Tufte's scathing indictment of how PowerPoint is generally used to communicate information. I have, however, recently come across some presentations that I thought were terrific examples of using slides to compliment an oral presentation rather than serving as a teleprompter.

Dick Hardt's "Identity 2.0" presentation:
http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

Lawrence Lessig's "Google Book Search" presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l2nrbmBQXg

Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" presentation:
http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html

You'll notice that Lessig uses a typewriter-style font that's quite a bit difference from Courier New. I haven't been able to get the actual font he's using, but here's one that works pretty well:

I find this style of presentation far more engaging than the usual deck of titles and bullet points. It may sound strange, but it actually reminds me of the bumps on Cartoon Network's [adult swim].

Have your own PowerPoint tips? Please share them by posting a comment here.

While it's great to be able to live in an area like Raleigh-Durham and work for Microsoft, it does have its complications. To schedule meetings that include staff from both Raleigh and Redmond you have to keep the time difference in mind and, while Outlook has some features to facilitate this, it's not totally straightforward. So, here are some tips to help you juggle meetings across multiple time zones:

Use Outlook's Dual Time Zone Support

If most of your meetings are limited to participants in two time zones, this will go a long way towards simplifying your scheduling tasks. From Outlook's main menu select Tools, Options. Then click Calendar Options, then Time Zone. Here you can set a second time zone and switch back and forth between the two.

Use the Day or Work Week Calendar view to see the two time zones in the left margin. The corresponding context menu (right click on the time) gives you quick access to the Time Zone dialog where you can swap time zones.

Note that swapping time zones in Outlook changes the time zone in Windows as well.

Bracket your Work Day with placeholder Appointments

Create two recurring appointments for weekdays. The first should begin at midnight and end whenver you normally start work in the morning. The second should begin when you leave work at the end of the day and end at midnight. You can set the "Show time as" property to "Out of office". This will make your office hours much more obvious to those trying to schedule appointments with you.

Use Microsoft Time Zone

From the Microsoft Download Center:

Microsoft Time Zone installs as a small tray icon that allows you to specify as many as five cities to watch the time on while you are working on your computer. In order to schedule meetings and trip the Microsoft Time Zone application also lets you compare times at different places in the world without changing your system time.

This is a handy utility to refer to before you call someone in a different time zone to make sure that it's a reasonable time to call.

Use Office Communicator

It's handy to check someone's status on Communicator before giving them a call. It will give you a quick (though not always accurate) indication as to whether they are available, in a meeting, on the phone, or away from their desk. When I want to talk with someone in Redmond (as opposed to just sending them an email) I'll wait until they are Online in Communicator then IM them to see if they have some time to talk before calling them. It's not the same as strolling by their office and catching them at their desk, but it comes pretty close when I'm 3,000 miles away.

Have any scheduling tips for teams spanning multiple time zones? Please share them by posting a comment here.