Sampy's Blog

Video!

2006-01-25T22:27:00Z

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=158154

Check out my Chicks Dig Unix t-shirt. I'm such a rebel.

It begins...

2005-11-17T04:22:00Z

Today I created the test project in Visual Studio Team System that will house the unit tests I'm writing for the Visual Studio publish component in Microsoft.VisualStudio.Publish.dll.

With my copy of Working Effectively with Legacy Code in hand, it's time to squash some bugs :)

Pluck + IE7 = Joy

2005-07-29T23:56:00Z

I just installed IE 7 for XP onto my work laptop and fired up Pluck, my RSS reader, half expecting it to crash or break. Thankfully, the only thing busted is launching Pluck from the systray. If you load IE manually, everthing works just fine. Not only is IE 7 cool on it's own merits but Pluck + tabs is just awesome. Now I can use the "lauch in new window" icon with impunity.

And yes, I know Firefox has had this for a while. I tried to use Firefox for a while, I really did, but I just don't like it. It's hard to say why.

Personal Blog

2005-07-28T00:16:00Z

I've started getting back into blogging more now that work is starting to wind down. You can find it on MSN Spaces here.

Entering division Ask mode

2005-07-28T00:09:00Z

I've blogged before about ask mode and tell mode here in DevDiv so I figured I'd give you guys an update as to where we are now.

The platform teams (runtime pieces) entered Ask mode this week while the design time teams (most of VS) remained in tell mode. The platform enters Ask mode early so they can lock down and start running long-haul stress tests on the framework. Us design-time guys are entering Ask mode Monday so we're scrambling a bit to get things done before then since the bar for what gets fixed goes up then.

We're so close to shipping I can feel it!

Vista Beta 1

2005-07-27T23:38:00Z

I'm watching the new Channel9 video and it's wierd how many similarities that I have with Chris.

1) We both run the same Vista build
2) We both have the same laptop bag.

I've been running that build since yesterday and it's pretty sweet. My video card (a GeForce4 TI) isn't cool enough to run the LDDM (or perhaps VDDM) which lets you have glass and all that stuff. But my purple Alienware machine at home has a Gefore FX (deemed cool enough by the Vista guys) so I should be rolling with glass an all that jazz as soon as I get a DVD.

I'll have to look around and see what build of Visual Studio I can install that will integrate with Avalon (now Windows Presentation Framework) and Indigo (now Windows Presentation Framework). Now that VS 2005 is winding down, I have some more time to play :)

Watch the video, post on Channel 9 and check out Windows Vista (if you can)!

Scoble stole my video!

2005-06-30T20:14:00Z

That crazy Scoble! He's interviewing all the people that I want to talk to!

Ugh

2005-04-08T05:07:00Z

Work is pretty slow going now a days. I'm slogging through a lot of bugs and it's just plain tiring.

Oh well, I still have World of Warcraft waiting for me at home :)

Week 2 so far

2005-03-23T18:15:00Z

I've got 6 fixes sitting on my machine now and I'm going to try and fix 2 or 3 more before I start another checkin this afternoon.

I haven't been working too late this week other than a late night on Monday. The team is bringing in dinners this week for people who want to stay late but I probably won't take advantage of that again. This week is spring break for my wife (she's a grad student) so I'd like to spend some time with her. But I have my smart card so I can always connect to work from home and get some stuff done at night.

Will post again with the bugs I'm checking in this afternoon. If you'd like to hear more about a certain bug, let me know and I'll tell you about the issue and the fix.

Day 4 and 5 - Back to fixing

2005-03-18T23:09:00Z

Sorry I missed you guys yesterday, we had a St. Patty's day party in the afternoon (my usual blog time).

I spent most of yesterday and today just fixing away at some bugs. I only have 2 right now that are marked as fixed available (I've got the code but I haven't checked in yet):

ClickOnce Automation: BootstrapperEnabled property throws a COMException when accessed
Cannot Undo/Redo dialogs on Publish Page

Did you guys know that the project designer supported Undo/Redo? Most people don't. Check it out (but not the security page, the fix to get it working with the undo redo engine won't make Beta 2).

My brain is pretty fried on code right now so I think I'll work a little on some test driven development stuff until my head clears.

Day 3 - Checking in

2005-03-16T19:16:00Z

I'm going to have to cut out a little early today (early being 5:45) so I'm going to focus on getting my bugs checked in today rather than fixing new ones. In order to get ready for Gauntlet, I first have to get a code review from another dev on my team. Once that's done I submit to Gauntlet and wait. Hopefully that won't take all afternoon (the code review, I don't have to wait on Gauntlet) and I can get a few bugs in today.

Day 2 - Product Usage Scenarios

2005-03-15T17:45:00Z

So today, I won't be fixing a lot of bugs but rather, I'll be putting on my QA (Quality Assurance, our testing unit) hat for a while.

QA is focused on Beta 2 right now so they're not paying much attention to what's going on in our RTM branch. When dev goes off bug fixes for 2 months with no QA safety net, bad things happen. To stave off the decrease in product stability that untested coding always results in, we're doing a few things:

Running QA test automation - we run it against the daily builds from our private branch to ensure we don't break anything.
Run QA Product Usage Scenarios (PUS) - A PUS is basically a demo of the feature and how in interacts with other parts of the product. Since I work on ClickOnce in VS, my scenarios involve making an app that does something interesting (uses the ClickOnce APIs to download files on demand, access a local SQLExpress server, etc.) and then publishing it and installing it. All in all, these take about 4 hours.

So today, I'm running theses scenarios. I was supposed to run them last week as well but I was out sick that day and since then we've re-scheduled when we run them so I get another crack at it :)

New Day in the Life category

2005-03-15T01:53:00Z

I added a new category for the posts that I started today. If you're interested in following what I've doing during this bug fix push, subscribe to the feed :)

Dark - Day 1

2005-03-15T01:50:00Z

Fixed 3 bugs today, not bad. I spent most of the afternoon banging my head up against a build problem having to do with my Win Forms designer created resx files. If I can't get it going in the next hour or so, I'll probably just work with my team tomorrow to get it fixed.

Today's Bugs:
Publish Property pages should be disabled when the output type is changed to a non-publishable type (like class library)
FxCop Violation: The ResolveKeySource MSBuild task is too complicated
Signing Property Page UI clean up (the divider lines look wrong)

Do you like this sort of day by day, blow by blow account of my day? You find it interesting? Let me know!

Gauntlet - Measuring success one checkin at a time

2005-03-14T18:23:00Z

On the VB team, we don't checkin to our source control system (Source Depot or sd) ourselves like mere mortals, we use the automated checkin system called Gauntlet. Gauntlet runs as an .hta app that collects your unsubmitted changelist, asks for some information for the checkin email it will send if things go well, and the bugs it should close in our issue tracker (Product Studio or PS). You run the app from inside our build environment so it has all the right environment variables and stuff it needs to collect you change. After it gets all this data, it uploads it as XML to a server where you wait in the queue.

Once your job gets picked up, it is passed to a build machine which builds your fix and outputs it to a known path on that machine. The controller machine then picks up those changes and puts them on a public share and instructs the test machines to begin. These machines pick up your private fixes and run a pre-defined set of tests you picked when you submitted the job to Gauntlet (you pick what sub-team you work on and it runs all of those tests). If the tests pass, your code is checked into the depot, the bugs are resolved, and the checkin mail goes out (woohoo!). If the tests fail, you get mail indicating which suites failed, what build flavor (debug or release, checked and retail in our language), and links to the logs output by the tests.

When I got in this morning I got a bunch of suite failure mails for 2 checkins that I started over the weekend. Shortly after I parsed through all of them, I got a mail from our Gauntlet admin letting me know we had some machine issues and that's why all the suites failed. Thankfully, it's easy to re-activate a failed job through Gauntlet's web UI. Unfortunatly, I'll be at the back of a long line :P