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June 2004 - Posts

Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:13 PM

Automated Continuous Integration and the Ambient Orb™

Every time someone visits our project team, they always ask what the “light” is for. We explain that it reflects the overall health of our source code and that it will flash bright red if something isn't working properly. That's when we get the puzzled
Posted by mswanson | 4 Comments
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:45 AM

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1

Lots of announcements at Tech·Ed Europe : the new Visual Studio 2005 Express products (including SQL Server Express ), the MSDN Feedback Center (a site to monitor Visual Studio bugs and issues), and of course, the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 (available
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Saturday, June 26, 2004 10:37 AM

Tech·Ed 2004 Presentations Online

If you weren’t able to attend Tech·Ed 2004 this year (and even if you were), you can now view the presentations online and download the associated PowerPoint slide decks. There’s a lot of good content here, and if you’re serious
Posted by mswanson | 9 Comments
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Friday, June 25, 2004 1:19 AM

CLR Performance and Garbage Collection

If you’re curious about .NET CLR performance characteristics, you’ll want to add Maoni’s new blog to your list. I know I’ll be watching. Maoni has already posted some good information on .NET Garbage Collection. For additional
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
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Friday, June 25, 2004 12:53 AM

My Current Bookshelf

People always ask me what I'm reading, so I figured I'd post a photo of the books that are currently on or above my desk. Some of these are older, but many of them are books I've either recently read or are currently referring to. This is a small subset
Posted by mswanson | 16 Comments
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Monday, June 21, 2004 10:24 AM

Database Unit Testing

We’ve struggled with database unit testing on our NxOpinion project, if only because we’re using a third-party object-relational mapping tool that doesn’t normally expose its transaction. Fortunately, we were able to make some slight
Posted by mswanson | 1 Comments
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Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:50 PM

.NET Show: Longhorn Fundamentals

A new episode of The .NET Show is now available. In this episode, Sanjay Shenoy and Glenn Pittaway cover some of the core architectural concepts associated with several of the Fundamentals of Longhorn (User Experience, System Security, Application Deployment,
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Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:33 PM

FotoVision

From the capable group at Vertigo Software (the same folks who produced the venerable IBuySpy and Quake II .NET ) comes FotoVision , a suite of applications that allow you to organize and manipulate digital photos and share them on a web site. A full
Posted by mswanson | 7 Comments
Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:39 AM

Monitoring HTTP Traffic

Over the past week or so, I’ve had a few people ask me questions that end up relating to HTTP traffic (usually ASP.NET-related). If you’ve never actually watched the traffic between your client and the remote server, you’re missing out
Posted by mswanson | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, June 15, 2004 7:17 PM

Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 2 Preview

And I quote: “To aid IT professionals in planning and testing for the deployment of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Microsoft is making available this preview, based on Release Candidate 2 (RC2) of SP2.“ I've been running Release Candidate
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, June 15, 2004 8:59 AM

New Features in ASP.NET 2.0

MSDN has published a good article on the new services, controls, and features in ASP.NET 2.0 . I remember attending an internal Microsoft conference about a year ago, deciding to sit in on Scott Guthrie ’s talk on the upcoming version of ASP.NET,
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Sunday, June 13, 2004 1:31 PM

Unit Testing in Visual Studio .NET 2005

Adding my vote to the petition : Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System. The benefits of Test-Driven Development (TDD) are too important to ignore, and there’s no reason why
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Sunday, June 13, 2004 12:26 AM

Code Review and Complexity

I’ve been writing software for a little over 25 years now (wow, that seems like a long time), and many of you have asked me to share my experience and opinion instead of just links to newsworthy items with a few personal comments. So, I figured
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Saturday, June 12, 2004 12:29 PM

Walkthroughs for Visual Studio 2005 CTP May 2004 Edition

As reported by Rob Caron , we have posted seven walkthroughs for the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technical Preview May 2004 Edition (what a mouthful). The walkthroughs focus on unit testing, web testing, load testing, profiling and code analysis. This
Posted by mswanson | 2 Comments
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Saturday, June 12, 2004 12:19 PM

Visual Basic Power Pack

As reported on Robert Green’s blog , some members of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET team have created a freely available Visual Basic Power Pack that contains seven WinForm controls to help you create more powerful client applications: ·
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Tuesday, June 08, 2004 1:38 AM

Make Your Own Mini-Galaga

Inspired by the Paper Arcade that I've posted about twice now, I decided to try my hand at creating one of my favorites: Galaga. I owe thanks to Namco , Arcade Art , and everyone who helped create the original Paper Arcade. This is my first attempt, and
Posted by mswanson | 11 Comments
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Monday, June 07, 2004 10:41 PM

Microsoft Expression: A Free Vector-Based Illustration Tool

As reported by Damir and Tim Sneath , we have released a vector-based illustration tool that we acquired last year from Creature House called Expression 3 . Downloads are available for both Windows and Mac. There’s also a quick feature tour . From some
Posted by mswanson | 1 Comments
Monday, June 07, 2004 12:33 PM

Computerworld Article on NxOpinion

The NxOpinion project I’ve been working on was nominated for the 2004 Computerworld Honors Award by Steve Ballmer, and it is one of six finalists in the Medicine category . The awards ceremony is tonight in Washington, D.C., and we’re hoping
Posted by mswanson | 7 Comments
Saturday, June 05, 2004 11:18 PM

Mini Pac-Man with Sound

As you may have read in my earlier post about mini-arcade machines , I did end up building the Pac-Man model . But, not satisfied with just a paper model, I decided I’d add some official Pac-Man sounds. Do you remember those greeting cards that record
Posted by mswanson | 18 Comments
Saturday, June 05, 2004 9:24 AM

Visual Studio Team System Tech·Ed 2004 General Session Demo

If you missed Tech·Ed 2004 (and even if you didn’t), you can now download a video of the general session that covered our new Visual Studio Team System.
Posted by mswanson | 1 Comments
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Thursday, June 03, 2004 10:07 PM

Mini Paper Arcade Machine Cabinets

I’m slightly embarrassed (okay, not really) about how excited I was when I found this site the other night. I was up until 2:00am printing Defender on my inkjet printer, cutting out the pattern, and painstakingly gluing everything together. I’m
Posted by mswanson | 4 Comments
Thursday, June 03, 2004 9:29 PM

MSDN TV: Introduction to Visual Studio 2005 Team System

MSDN TV has just published a new episode that introduces the Visual Studio 2005 (formerly known as “Whidbey”) Team System in a little over 11 minutes. Not directly related, but there’s also a short 10-minute video overview of the features
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Wednesday, June 02, 2004 8:20 PM

Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta

The Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta is now available for download . In addition to some of the new resize modes , the Auto Sync feature sounds pretty useful: “Auto Sync can be set up to automatically start downloading specific content to
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
 
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