James Manning's blog

Team Foundation Server + PowerShell = Happiness

“Pasting” attachments to work items in Visual Studio

Today I deleted my CodePlex project TfsPasteAttachment It was (up until today) located @...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 04/20/2009

Sending feedback about “Send Feedback”

[EDIT: found the relevant blog post which points to the instructions MSDN subscribers have to use,...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/26/2009

Having to uninstall PowerShell (still) makes me sad

This isn’t new to Windows 7 (I got the same when upgrading from XP to Vista). However, it still...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/26/2009

upgrading to SP1 fixes VM Additions for Win7 Beta!

Many thanks to reader ajcg whose comment in my previous post was spot-on. Once I upgraded VPC 2007...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/10/2009

Windows 7 + Alpha Squad 7 = overload o' awesome

Clearly someone on the Win7 team is a fan of Colbert's comic! ;) At least, that's my theory and I'm...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/09/2009

Windows 7 Beta in Virtual PC 2007 - BSOD in Fs_Rec.sys after adding VM Additions

EDIT: UPDATE: SP1 fixes this! Yay!!! Others seem to have run it with no problems, and I installed it...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/08/2009

PowerShell V2: CTP3 now available!

Sea Tea Pea Three Whee! Go get it! The bits in the overview I want to call out (because I've seen...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 12/23/2008

powershell one-liner to expose some emoticons

While chatting with a co-worker about a bug I had fixed a few weeks back, Communicator unexpectedly...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 12/03/2008

pet peeve: full-screen + multi-monitor

I'm noticing silverlight pick up a behavior from flash that I don't like: kicking out of full-screen...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 11/16/2008

Common confusion - "Reporting Services Data Source Account" != account Reporting Services is running as

A few of us were working just this morning on trying to prevent this confusion in the next version,...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 09/18/2008

powershell script - find orphaned C# files

I ran across a C# file that had been removed from its csproj file, but it hadn't been deleted from...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 07/20/2008

macro to "organize usings" for a project

I won't claim this is efficient, or well-written, or whatever, but it WorksForMe and I figured I'd...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 07/19/2008

collection and property initializers are so nice

I happened to change a piece of code over the weekend and used both. It's a tiny piece of code, so I...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/30/2008

Hyper-V has shipped!

https://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v Many people on our team (including myself, of course) have been...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/27/2008

THE PowerShell book (Windows PowerShell in Action, Bruce Payette's book) now on Safari!

Just noticed in an email from Bruce that his book is now available on Safari! Yay!

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/25/2008

Another James loss == another customer win

For those keeping score, last time it was Windows Server 2008. For various reasons (that I won't...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/20/2008

HashTab - easily see the hashes for files

While wanting to verify the hash of a dd-wrt firmware I downloaded, I read about this app called...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/05/2008

Despite having a 1 Gbps Intel network card plugged into a 100Mbps switch, my Link Speed claims...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/05/2008

Giving full trust to a network share

Tan's post reminded me that I never got around to posting this silly batch script that I use. As you...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/05/2008

Screenshot-fest: Using SCVMM 2008 Beta to convert my old Vista dev box into a Virtual Machine

While you can certainly use Vista's Complete PC Backup to generate a vhd of your machine, it doesn't...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/05/2008

You can't run HyperV in a HyperV VM

I didn't think it would work, but I was trying it yesterday because of the OS requirements for SCVMM...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 06/04/2008

Just-In-Time sysinternals tools!

I'm a few days behind on posting this, but now you can run the current version of sysinternals tools...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/31/2008

Brian the Build Bunny ownz those Watership Down rabbits

Maybe I'm the only one, but that movie gave my 6-year-old self quite the nightmares. I don't think...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/28/2008

How does TFS 2008 pick which Reporting Services instance to use?

One of the painful parts of TFS 2008 install is that you can point (via the msiproperty.ini file)...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/15/2008

TFS + timesheets = TX Chrono

Jason mentioned their TXLooker back in early April, but not long after that, TeamExpand announced...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/14/2008

TeamReview - more integrated code reviews

The OOTB experience for code reviews isn't horrible (shelvesets work fine, in my experience), but...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/14/2008

Secure by default and the list of team projects

Another brown-paper-bag bug in TFS 2005 was that, by default, all valid users could see the full...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/13/2008

You can use your SVN clients (including TortoiseSVN) against TFS, including CodePlex

While there are projects like LizardTF, IMHO you're better off running SvnBridge and then using your...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/13/2008

TFS 2008 SP1 Beta - we support SQL Server 2008, but just the February CTP

While we already have the code so SP1 final will support the RTM version of SQL Server 2008, because...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/13/2008

When you want to destroy something already deleted, you need a deletion id

I helped a friend via email with this last week and just noticed a similar blog post.  If...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/13/2008

screencast on using Team Build 2008

Joel's 12 rules rightfully includes 2 entries on creating builds.  While many would argue that...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/13/2008

IntelliJ IDEA integration with TFS coming!

I'm about a month behind on this one, but based on their technology roadmap, TFS integration is on...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/13/2008

Properties, coming to TFS soon!

One of the things I miss when using TFS instead of Subversion is svn's metadata ("properties") that...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/12/2008

Flexibility in TFS 2008

Helen: You're late. When you asked me if I was doing anything later, I didn't realize you'd actually...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/09/2008

I lose, so customers win!

I made a failed attempt to see if we would be willing to make the next version of Team Foundation...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 05/08/2008

invoke-wiq.ps1 - "run" a .wiq file and get the results back

This request came in from an internal PS list. You can certainly make it fancier, and all it does...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 04/17/2008

ExtensionMethods - flavorful syntactic sugar

A potential place to use an extension method cropped up in our team this week, and I gave feedback...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 04/07/2008

LocalSystem==root, LocalService==nobody

This one is, unfortunately, very easy to get wrong, and lots of people do, even those inside...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 04/06/2008

gvimf.ps1 - easier way to get files into an editor

In the cmd world, I constantly had filenames that I had to copy-paste onto a gvim command-line,...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 03/04/2008

String.Contains really should have an overload with StringComparison specified

I've had this come up in conversations in the past (and it's been on feedback for almost 3 years...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 02/25/2008

Dynamic type support in C#? Sweet!

Ok, so it's just in the planning stages, but you may have run across Charlie Calvert's recent blog...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 02/21/2008

A type's static fields don't get initialized until the type is referenced

Most of you likely already know this, but I've seen 2 customers that were confused by this but I...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 02/06/2008

Does this object subclass X or implement Y?

A guy on my team dropped by to ask me how to do this, so I figured it'd be worth posting about. The...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 02/03/2008

TFS 2008 Setup/Admin: Lipstick on the pig

After leaving the version control team to work on the freshly created admin/ops team, we ended up...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/21/2008

What TFS admin screencasts are needed?

Recently we've been realizing that while we have docs around many of our administrative scenarios...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 01/20/2008

C# quiz answer - yes it compiles, and here's why

Got a few good comments to the quiz post, but nobody that commented got it right. I went ahead and...

Author: MSDN Archive Date: 11/24/2007

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