scooblog by josh ledgard : Released PowerToys

Strong free one two combination for creating localized applications

jledgard — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:21:10 GMT

So you started your application and now realize you've hardcoded strings and you need to start offering localized version. There are two freely available tools you can use to help with this transition.

Step One: Remove hardcoded strings and put them in resource files.

Our team released the 1.0 version of the Resource Refactoring tool last month.

Step 2: Generate Translated Resource Files

Jeremy recently discovered this tool.

ResEx is the composite, translation friendly .NET Resource editor.

Enjoy!

Refactor String Resources to Resx Files in Vb.Net and C#

jledgard — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:43:41 GMT

Last week our team released the 1.0 beta of a new refactoring menu option for Visual Studio 2005. Bertan, the developer, has the details on his blog. The Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

We have finished working on the beta version of Resource Refactoring and just posted it to Codeplex. Also with this release Resource Refactoring Tool became a shared source project under MS-PL, so we have published the source code as well. If you want to help development of the tool please go to Getting Started with Development section on the project site.

New features and fixes for this release are:

ASP.Net web project support for C# and VB.Net code files. However your resource file must be located in App_GlobalResources directory otherwise no code is generated for it.

.....

Creating a simple multi-install package for your customers

jledgard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:46:18 GMT

If you've downloaded something like the "Google Pack" in the past and wanted something like that for your companies products. Something that, with a small footprint, lets users pick and choose a suite of components to install, downloads the requested components on request, and installs them all in one swoop. Then I'd recommend you check out the "Power Toys Pack Installer" project on codeplex.

With the beta release of our Power Toys Pack Installer we've also released the source code! This means that you can check out how we've done this and leverage our work to build something similar for your companies components. We'd of course love, if you did this, to get some credit and perhaps some source code back. :-)

Even if you aren't interested in using this tool for your own needs you might want to use it to download the additional development tools released by Microsoft. We'll be constantly adding new releases to this list and I expect it to grow significantly over the next several months.

We've already had one happy customer.

"Please add more to the download and setup list. This is great!!"

If you have an idea for a Microsoft tool we should include... please let us know.

VSCmdShell 1.1 Released to Codeplex

jledgard — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 06:06:36 GMT

To catch everyone up...

The VSCmdShell provides users with a shell window inside the Visual Studio IDE that can be used for Visual Studio commands as well. Current version allows user to use either Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) or Windows PowerShell.

Well, last month we shipped a 1.0 version for VS2005 to codeplex and this month we added a couple of features and fixed some blocking bugs that were reported by the community.

Bertan, the developer, has more details on his blog and you can go to the codeplex site to get the most recent release. Give it a try and leave some feedback on Codeplex for us.

John D'Addamio's blog : Power Toys and code coverage

jledgard — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 22:49:54 GMT

John is the lone SDET on the developer solutions team. He's fairly outnumbered by his developer and PM counterparts so, he spends a good amount of his time working on ways to automate and increase the amount of testing provided by unit tests and the other members of the team. Oh, and now he's blogging to.

My own experience suggests that “average” unit tests hit no more than 50% of the code. However, it is fairly easy to improve that to 65% - 75% code coverage by testing requirements using a “black box” approach. Getting to 85% or above often requires that additional tests be designed by looking at the code and figuring out how to make the code execute an untested path (i.e. “white box” testing).

Source: John D'Addamio's blog : Power Toys and code coverage

Help us find VSCmdShell Bugs

jledgard — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:56:39 GMT

Our team is going to release a 1.1 update of the VSCmdShell tool window for Visual Studio and we are spending the day looking for bugs. Because the project is public you can participate as well. Head on over to the codeplex site

http://www.codeplex.com/WorkItem/List.aspx?ProjectName=VSCmdShell

sign in, and file some bugs. You can see all the existing bugs we're filing as well. We'll be starting the bug fixing next week and targeting a 1.1 release by mid-September that will hopefully remove any adoption blockers.

Background...

VSCmdShell provides users with a shell window inside the Visual Studio IDE that can be used for Visual Studio commands as well. Current version allows user to use either Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) or Windows PowerShell.

Developer Solutions Sprint 6: BPA Tool, 1.1 Releases, & The Developer Power Pack

jledgard — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 23:44:51 GMT

Today the Developer Solutions team has begun its 6^th five week sprint. Sprint 5 saw the release of the VSCmdShell tool & an Alpha of our Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.Net 2.0. There was buy-off to begin working with CSS on a detailed plan for a CSS involvement in released product communities.

We also prototyped a project that I’m excited about called the “Pack Installer” that has the potential to create a vehicle/channel for any team looking to ship aftermarket developer solutions to their customers.

In the next 5 weeks we plan to:

Ship a 1.0 release of the Best Practices Analyzer Engine w/ ASP.Net 2.0 Plug-In
Publish 1.1 Releases: VSCmdShell & TFS Admin Tool
Prototype a Power Toy Starter Kit, Online snippet publishing, Nunit Test Generator, & a developer forum Moderator Toolbar Services
Draft of Detailed CSS Online Community Presentation for September
Host a brownbag on developer division involvement in Shared Source & Power Toys aimed at making it easier for every team to get involved.
Create a public alpha of the “Developer Power Pack”

For other teams at Microsoft

By the end of this sprint we’ll be able to give you great guidance around Shared Source Projects, a solid delivery vehicle that does one step better for customers than just throwing random stuff on MS Download, and guidance on building aftermarket solutions/Power Toys that are consistent for our customers.

Thanks,
Josh

Detailed Sprint 5 Recap

Releases

VSCmdShell 1.0: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=VSCmdShell
Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.Net 2.0 configurations Alpha 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/joemorel/archive/2006/06/29/651082.aspx

Shared Source Leadership

Partnering with LCA to create a generic license for Power Toys
Power Toy Landing Page
Our most famous blogger speaking at BlogHer
Represented Microsoft at OSCON

Share and Collaborate Scenario

Snippet Editor that integrates with the VS IDE written and polished
Content Explorer for snippets, add-ins, templates, etc. prototyped

Power Toy Pack Installer

Pack installer prototyped that will allow customers to download groups of our tools and automatically install them
Pack installer specification drafted:

Best Practices Analyzer Tool

Test Plan Completed
Over 3,700 downloads of the alpha
Added updating mechanism

Answerme Search Page Completed: http://answerme/search.aspx

(This is our internal forum question assignment & search tool)

Other Prototypes

Resource refactoring tool that converts literals to resource files in Visual Studio
Forums MSN Search tool that constructs complex search queries against the metadata on forum questions: http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=eb5f1dc5-6868-4fde-9c78-909832315ccc

Support Channels

CSS Online Community Engagement Proposal to Execs w/ buyoff to continue project
MSDN Forums Over 4,000 questions a week/DevDiv over 70% overall answer rate

Next Prototype Tool: Resource Refactoring

jledgard — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 21:28:35 GMT

Bertan recently blogged about his next project. Feel free to leave him feedback. I saw the demo and it's a slick feature. Unfortunately not much dev work is going to get done in the meantime... he's out for four weeks on vacation to get married and enjoy a honeymoon... and when he gets back his office may not be in working order... I'm taking suggestions for that project as well. :-)

Now that VSCmdShell is released, I started working on a Refactoring power toy to help with converting strings in to resource files as it has to be performed manually now. It is primary feature will be to place selected string in to a resource file and replace it with the code to get that string from the resource file.

Source: Bertan's Blog : Resource Refactoring tool

Know & love your big picture

jledgard — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 01:00:00 GMT

This is a question that just about every PM at Microsoft has to answer frequently.

"What's your big picture?" or "How does this fit into the big picture?"

Our culture is one of visualization and we love our grand views. (Hidden pun most certainly intended... sometimes we love our big pictures a bit too much, but that's another blog entry). I suggest that you not only get used to answering this question if you work here, but that you also make sure everyone you know and everyone that you don't know understands your mental image. Because you never know where you're going to get that unexpected resource or vote of support. And when people know what your picture is they'll be on the lookout for your missing puzzle pieces.

"So your team writes these little toys (Developer Power Toys)?" Is a question/statement I get frequently. If that's all I can write on my review at the end of next year then I'll have failed. Our team writing these tools is only the first part of a vista that hasn't been painted yet. So let me paint a bigger picture for you that's task based.

"My team wrote this cool tool we'd love to ship to customers before Orcas+1 ships... what next"

Guess who has experience here? We do. We can help your team:

Deliver a consistent user experience for customers using MSFT produced developer tools. This tool is integrated into the IDE, that one doesn't have an installer, I now have 4 different start menu folders added, why does this tool run in the system tray... these are all issues that can't be solves without a central team responsible for making sure there is some consistency across our aftermarket releases designed to drive up the overall quality.
Share the source code & create a top notch collaborative environment with customers that could lead to an even better tool. It may seem trivial to customers, but today "I'm going to post this code to customers" is not a trivial step to take at Microsoft. Our team is working with LCA to simplify this for folks & also come up with best practices for creating a healthy code community.
Meet & Exceed the MSFT required validations
Connect with other teams that are also looking into similar problems. I'm less shocked daily when I find out about the duplication of effort going on.
And potentially assist with our ideas, feedback, and development/test/pm resources.

"How do we get customers to find our tool?"

If your release plan concludes with "Publish the installer to the MS Download center & write a blog post about the tool" then you're probably missing out. Your download numbers are going to be poor & your tool is going to collect dust on the download center & it isn't going to have the impact you were hoping for.

This is a huge problem at Microsoft today. It's part of the reason we have such serious feature creep into our core products. There's a belief, that's been proven valid, that if it's not in the box then customers won't benefit from it. I know this is a problem because I hear about 2-3 useful tools a month that are simply tossed over the wall to customers... never to be heard from again... effort wasted.

What our team is going to do is give you a ship vehicle or "channel" if you will for your Power Toy/Developer Solution. It's an acknowledgement that our team can't possibly understand the need of every developer & doesn't have the resources to ship every develop resource we should ship as a company. What does this channel consist of?

The first part of that channel is a consistent URL for customers to get information about MSFT produced tools & the program in general. http://msdn.microsoft.com/powertoys
Second, as Jeremy Describes, we're working on a Power Toy Pack installer. This installer will not only let developers install all of our tools in one step, but any MSFT developer related tool. This means that developers will only have to find one tool to learn about all the others we produce as a company.
This installer could eventually be rolled into the primary Visual Studio install as a "final step" that lets users choose their add-ons after the main product install has completed or accessible via a "Get More Dev Tools" button... thus partially solving the "but if it's not in the box problem.
Finally, there are some awesome customer produced free tools out there... why shouldn't they be included... why don't we highlight their stuff? We will.

Keep in mind this is only the stuff our team is working on designed to help other teams be more successful with aftermarket solutions. This is only a corner of the team's charter. Let me quickly paint some of the other corners.

What about making it easier for customers to create and share Visual Studio content? Needless to say we've got some cool stuff up our sleeves around making it easier for you to share code snippets, samples, add-ons, etc over the Internet... or dump truck if you will.
What about our support communities? Product support is no longer a simple matter of manning a phone que waiting for customers to call. If a customer has to call... I believe we've failed. How are you making sure you've got a healthy online support community? How can questions from this community be escalated to official support? How can a customer get an "instant answer"? These are all questions and whole other blog posts we are working on solving to make customers feel (and actually be) more supported.
Oh yeah, we ship some little toys as well... every 6 weeks.

We're all here to make customers more successful with the product their using today and I love this problem space.

Solutions Developer Bertan Blogs

jledgard — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 02:38:00 GMT

I don't think I'd yet linked to another member of our team that now has a blog.

Bertan is blogging as well. (http://blogs.msdn.com/bertan/)He's a developer working on the Power Toys. Currently he's working on an update to the VSCmdShell project & a "Resource Refactoring Tool".

I've also udpated the widget on the right side of my page to include all of our team related posts.

ASP.NET Best Practice Tool Alpha Released

jledgard — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 06:59:00 GMT

Last week our team published a binary Alpha of an upcoming Power Toy for Visual Studio. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Via Joe

Announcing the Best Practice Analyzer for ASP.Net! It’s currently just an alpha preview version—a shell of the application we hope to turn it into, but it should give you an idea of what we are thinking about. The tool scans the settings for your ASP.Net application from your machine.config, root web.config, and site web.config files and notifies you of any potential errors, warnings, or suggestions to make your site configuration better.
We only have a few rules right now in the engine—this release is mainly to get feedback from the community and see what you think of the tool, but also to start gathering rules from the community. What best practice for ASP.Net configuration do you have to share? Let us know by leaving a message in our forum!
Sharing is the name of the game for this tool—this tool will be part of the Power Toys for Visual Studio, and the libraries we are using to make this an ASP.Net 2.0 focused tool will be 100% Shared Source!
Download the installer for the tool here.

Questions about the Developer Solutions Team

jledgard — Wed, 24 May 2006 07:17:00 GMT

Here is my reply to a mail that I can post publicly. The mail was from a team in another organization that had some questions about how our team is working.

I saw the recent announcement about the v1.0 Power Toys and that generated some questions from my team that you could probably answer.

I like questions I can answer. :-)

I can’t recall how your team is staffed, could you remind me of the breakdown of your team members as far as PM, Dev and Test?

Very soon we’ll have 3 devs, 3pms, and 1 SDET. We also have one open PM and one open dev position. If we were just doing the Power Toys then you’d be right in saying that we are very PM heavy. However we also own driving peer to peer developer communities. Most of this work (forums, Product Support Team engagement, codezone, VS community integration) is very PM heavy. Oh, and then there’s management overhead… that would be me.

I can’t recall how your team is staffed, could you remind me of the breakdown of your team members as far as PM, Dev and Test?

The developers, tester, and at least 2 of the PMs are focused on Power Tool projects. But yes, the entire team is essentially dedicated to the mission of making our customers more successful with the released products by enabling great community support channels and addressing limitations/pain points through the Power Toys initiatives.

Because we are a small team we are organized as more of an "engineering team" rather than a classic team with very well defined roles. Our PMs may write code and the developers do some testing.

Thinking specifically about shared source projects, what type of commitments has your team made to managing this project? For example, will you be actively be participating in the CodePlex community as far as managing the project, checking in code updates, etc? How much of your team’s time is spent doing this?

This is more of an unknown at this point. We are tentatively costing that we’ll have roughly 20% of a person dedicated to managing each released project. We could learn that there isn’t much interest in ongoing development for a project and that number is way high. Or we could learn there is a lot of interest in a project and it is more like 50%.

Ultimately our engagement is likely to initially include managing check-ins and changes that lead to a 1.1 release and then stepping back and handing the project leadership over to community members if there is interest. If there is not then no new release may occur and our role would be limited to answering questions about the code that potential new community project managers and developers would have.

How do you split your time between the two sides of the Developer Solutions charter of making support channels great and addressing product limitations and pain point through community efforts?

90% of the making support channels great effort is influencing other groups and teams and the tools effort is something we can deliver directly to make an impact. The support channel improvement is mostly a PM role and the tools include both PMs and developers. We have set division wide metrics for the support channels and a schedule of advances we want to make in each space.

It’s not really much different than costing, scheduling, and balancing between several potential features. We know there is a set of requirements we have to meet and there is some room for innovation on top of those requirements. Within each bucket we attempt to work where we are going to get the best bang for the buck.

On a more general level, how do you keep the vision of your team vital within the DevDiv organization?

I wish I had some great secret sauce for you here. I’m partially blessed with an executive and management chain that believes in making existing customers more successful as a top priority. Another part of the organizational faith comes from a history of making good incremental progress in the customer connection space. We didn’t start with a team of 8 people dedicated to this stuff. We had a couple people with some direction, got some wins, made a case for more, and had bigger wins….

One key, along the way, is getting key individuals/groups aligned on some common goals so that you are no longer X people going in X directions, but rather X people going in 2-3 directions so that you get the multiplier effect rather than a scatagory customer connection effect.

Good Comments on Source Code Release Best Practices

jledgard — Fri, 05 May 2006 19:48:14 GMT

I asked for feedback on keys to successful source releases and it’s started to trickle in. I figured I’d post what we’ve heard so far.

Will says that communication is key: “Along the lines of your "Experts" point - it might be taken for granted, but I think an easy method of talking to the developers is vital. It doesn't matter what the method is (and multiple methods are good), as long as it is appropriate for your audience…”

Kim wants pictures: “I like pictures, lots and lots of pictures so... 1. Architectural overview diagrams. 2. Relationship trees not just for classes but also for project dependencies… “

Stefan makes the case for extensibility: “Extension points, plugins ... whatever you want to call it: Give people an opportunity to contribute something small yet useful. “

Stuart likes the permissive license: “While I agree with your points, I'd also suggest that the license can be a significant factor. The new Microsoft "permissive" license is beginning to be (correctly) recognized by the open source community as a real Open Source / Free Software license, and I strongly suspect that projects released under that license will get more interest from the open source community than projects released with more restrictions. “ Mike +1’s his suggestion on the importance of the license.

Philip asks to lower the barrier to entry: “…I can't tell you how many open source projects I've wanted to contribute to and didn't because it was near impossible to create a build environment. …”

I’ll +1 on all of these suggestions. I’m not saying we’ll hit all these in the first wave of our source releases, but they are good things to keep in mind.

Leave your feedback below. :-)

What makes for successful source code releases?

jledgard — Tue, 02 May 2006 05:55:00 GMT

We’re preparing to release the source code to the latest Power Toys for Visual Studio and the question has come up a few times. What makes for successful source code releases? Specifically… what makes for successful releases if you’d like to encourage community driven development rather than simply tossing code over the wall?

Personally I’m not a believer that simply throwing the code over the wall is good enough. I’ll give you the list of things I think are important. I’d love to get your feedback on missing items and the priority of the items.

Parachutes that come with the code

Well formed code: Code that’s easy to understand, jump in, and contribute to. Code that’s self explanatory and follows coherent coding guidelines.
Unit tests: I’d love to know, if I’m contributing, that I’m not breaking anything.
Scenario tests: Beyond basic unit tests these tests would validate end to end scenarios with the code.
Design documents: These are dev focused documents that aim to teach people about the code in a way that code comments can’t.
Code comments: Well commented code is still a requirement. Even with good design documents.
Test Spec: Think of this as a design document for the testing. It explains all the concerns about the code, what tests are the highest priority, how to run the tests, any manual verification that can be performed, etc.
Documentation: This is sort of a requirement for any release. : - )
Vision document: What’s the vision of the application? What features may have been requested, but not completed that are in-line with that vision? What’s easy to accomplish and what’s harder?

Intangibles that can’t come with code

A good project leader: Someone to spend 10-20% of their time organizing the contributions of others, setting a schedule, etc. (Time estimate based on small isolated projects like the Power Toys)
Experts: People that know the code well enough to help onboard new contributors, answer design questions in a timely fasion, etc. Expect to spend around 10-20% of someone’s time in this role.
Popularity: Releases with little or no potential consumers won’t attract experts.
Completeness: If a solution is tightly scoped and fairly complete there really isn’t going to be much of a need for community driven development. There probably aren’t many popular releases that fall into this category, but sometimes there’s just no place to go.

What’s missing? So far I think we're ahead of where we were with the VS 2003 Power Toy source releases. Is there anything more specific that should be listed? What about wiki’s/forums/blogs? What’s the best bug/feedback model?

Mickey Gousset on why you should join the Developer Solutions team

jledgard — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 01:36:00 GMT

Previously on scooblog…. I asked why somone should work on the Developer Solutions team (we’re hiring for dev and pm). Mickey from www.teamsystemrocks.com provided a great answer…

Now remember, this is all from my perspective, but for me, I would push how much of an impact what you are working on can have in the developer community. Let's take money out of the picture for a second. And let's assume that yes, everyone likes everyone else and all that. At the end of the day, I want to feel appreciated. Everyone does, its human nature. Obviously, one source of that appreciation can come from your management, as well it should. But when you get the same kind of respect and appreciation from the "development community cloud", its a whole different kind of rush.

The fact is, at least from my perspective, you would have the chance to really influence the development community, and how Microsoft interacts with that community. You get to take some of the existing ideas, such as the forums, and figure out how to make them even better. You get to build the tools that would help you be more productive, and then share them with the rest of the community, with enough exposure where they are going to be used and appreciated. You get to really help the community grow through your direct contributions.

I would also point out how much support (I hope) exists for these development community initiatives. I feel confident the support is there, but knowing that upper management is "backing your play" so to speak would really allow a team member to take some chances, or throw out some ideas he might otherwise keep to himself.

Talk about some exciting work!

Anyway, I don't know if that answered the question, or was just me going off on a tagent, but those are the points you could use to sell me on it, at any rate.

That was a great answer… probably better than I could do. Anyway, if your interested in dev or pm positions drop me a line with your resume and an explanation of why you’d like to work on the developer solutions team.