Sara Ford's Weblog

How to Insert Code Snippets in Discussions - #046

During our last deployment, we added the ability to insert code snippets into the discussion boards.

This will display a window for you to post in your code and to preview with syntax highlighting.

How to display ads on your project from The Lounge - #045

In a recent deployment, project owners can now use advertisements from The Lounge using a single click.

Project owner can see advertisements appear on the Home tab, the Downloads tab, the Discussions tab, and the Issue Tracker.

The CodePlex documentation has more information about displaying ads from The Lounge.

How to subscribe to the list of CodePlex projects using a specific tag - #044

And just yesterday i was thinking, “is the best use of my blog posting tips about CodePlex?” And then I saw Devon’s blog post today. Guess that answers my question. Let’s just say I took June off and now I’m back.

Currently, we don’t have any UI that exposes these RSS feeds. We’ve thought about creating a page that says “design your own RSS feed here.” But until then, here’s the RSS feed to subscribe to a specific tag:

http://www.codeplex.com/rss.ashx?behavior=bytag&tagName=<tagname>

And another fun one is the most downloaded project RSS feed

http://www.codeplex.com/rss.ashx?behavior=topdownloaded

Open Source Bridge 2009 Trip Report

Last week, I attended the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland. It’s a volunteer-run conference that came about because OSCON moved to San Jose this year. They had a great turnout and the organizers did an amazing job, especially for a first time, volunteer conference.

I was most impressed with Selena Deckelmann (co-chair of OSBridge) and her ability to network and organize this event. She had an initial goal of 50% female speakers (and to think this is for an Open Source conference). She was able to get 30% female speakers using the same quality bar as the guys. Now that’s networking.

To Selena, THANK YOU!!! Finally someone who truly, truly, truly gets the Women in Technology issue. It is a breath of fresh air to see someone really do something about this.

Highlights

• I started off my CodePlex talk mentioning how Selena accepted my talk because “peeking into CodePlex might give you ideas that you can embrace and extend.” I said, “Because of this, Microsoft has instructed me that you all will have to sign these NDAs.”  The room erupted in laughter. I am the stuff of legend, trying to get an OSS audience to sign Microsoft NDAs.
• Got called “the queen of open source at Microsoft” after my talk: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/06/welcome-to-codeplex.html
• Spent 2 hours at lunch chatting with faculty and staff of Ohio State University doing research into OSS communities and their behaviors. This area of HCI is like crack cocaine to me, so I definitely enjoyed chatting theories of human behavior and gaming the system.
• Had a geek dinner in Portland for the local .NET User Group to share my stories of the day.

Lowlights

• Only real lowlight was that I could only spend a day there. Our boss gives us one day a week to work on a pet project, so i used that day to drive down to Portland to give talks. =) 

Why I seriously have a phobia of plants

At the INETA party during TechEd 09, I told my “Uncle Jimmy Stories” for nearly 4 hours. Since I’ve had quite a few people ask me to blog these stories (and even more ask me to share photos), I’d thought I’d share my “kick-off” story of my childhood – why I (seriously) have a phobia of plants. Yes, ordinary household plants cause my blood pressure to skyrocket, and even the thought of just watering a plant makes me want to have a root canal instead. Here’s why…

Uncle Jimmy had a garden when I was little.

Now I need to pause for a moment to explain Uncle Jimmy. When I was 7, he moved into the shed behind the house, where he slept on a waterbed that would freeze in the winter. We had to run an extension cord from the house to the shed, so he could sleep on top of an electric blanket.

As I said, Uncle Jimmy had a garden when I was little.

He decided to experiment with a new way to grow the plants and vegetables. Now, my guess as an adult would be he tried to use oil. But oh no, that would be way too easy and simple.

Electricity. He tried to shock! the plants and vegetables into growth. He ran electric wires criss-cross throughout the garden. I was told as a little child (4 or 5 years old) to never, ever go near the garden or much less let the plants touch me, or I could get electrocuted. I must have seen him water the plants without turning off the electricity as a small child. Why else would I rather a root canal than to pour water into a little plant pot.

And to this day, plants stress me out.

How to view stats for the entire lifetime of a CodePlex project - #043

If this tip comes as a surprise to anyone, please let me know, as we have a major usability issue on our hands =D

For any CodePlex project, you can go to the stats tab, and select “project lifetime”

And you can get total traffic summary info at the bottom.

i was going to play the game “who can guess which project this is” but the referring traffic kinda gives it away.

CodePlex - Free as in Beer

Last week, I spoke at Microsoft DevDays 2009 in The Netherlands. After the conference, I was able to do a little sightseeing in Amsterdam on my own, which included buying a small souvenir from the Heineken Plant, a CodePlex labeled Heineken bottle.

The conference was held at The Hague (which btw is a city, and not a building). We had beautiful weather for the conference, so I was very happy to get a chance to go out to the beach and grab some photos.

Since i grew up on a coast beach facing South, I’ve never seen a sunset on the water before.

And one picture to prove I did actual work instead of just sightseeing, I tried to capture just how large the 400 seat room was, but alas, my poor little camera just couldn’t handle it. To give you an idea, there were 3 projection screens from behind the stage, and 6 monitors within the audience.

How to find a specific user’s profile page - #042

Currently, there isn’t a way on the site to search for users via their usernames. However, if you know someone’s username, you can access their profile directly by typing in

http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/<username>

Or, if you’re like me and can’t remember that link, here’s an alternative way to look up someone else’s profile. First, click on any CodePlex project, go to the people tab, and click on any username, just to get to a profile page.

Next, remove the current username from the address bar and enter the new username. for example, you can change

http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/saraford

to

http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/JustinJosefAngel 

Enjoy!

You can use wiki markup in the release notes section - #041

When you edit your release notes, you can use the wiki markup from the homepage, in case you want bulleted lists, bolded text, hyperlinks, etc.

How to connect to a CodePlex TFS server using Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 - #040

Thanks to Martin Hinshelwood, a Team System MVP, for sharing the following workaround with all of us!

Excerpt below copied from solution-to-connecting-to-tfs-using-https-over-the-internet.aspx

This problem it seams is to do with the way Visual Studio 2010 connects to your TFS server over HTTPS. The default value for “BypassProxyOnLocal” in Visual Studio 2008 was “False”, but it has been changed to “True” for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. It should be noted that this is currently a Beta 1 workaround and this behaviour may be updated for Beta 2 and RTM.

You can fix this by adding the following registry keys and restarting Visual Studio 2010:

You need to add a “RequestSettings” key to both of the following location that contains a string value pair of “BypassProxyOnLocal=’False’”.

32bit OS Key Locations:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TeamFoundationServer\10.0\RequestSettings

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\RequestSettings

64bit key locations:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\TeamFoundationServer\10.0\RequestSettings

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\RequestSettings

You can find out more on the “How to: Change the BypassProxyOnLocal Configuration” documentation on MSDN.

How (and why) to set a default release - #039

Whenever you create or edit a public release (show to public = yes), there’s the Default Release option.

Having a default release will change a project’s homepage from this

to this

DevDays 09 – 24 Visual Studio Tips

Tip #0 Know your Keybindings! General Development Settings

Searching Tips

Tip #1 How to behold the power of incremental search

Command: Edit.IncrementalSearch

Shortcut: Ctrl+i

Tip #2 Ctrl+F3 to search for currently-selected word

Command: Edit.FindNextSelected

Tip #3 F3 to search for last thing you searched for

Command: Edit.FindNext

Tip #4 Customize what files to find in

Find In Files – Look in – Choose Search Folders

Tip #5 You can use a reg hack for customizing search results

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Find String Find=$f$e($l,$c):$t\r\n

Editing Tips

Tip #6 How not to accidentally copy a blank line

Tools – Options – Text Editor – All Languages – General, Uncheck Apply cut or copy to blank lines

Tip #7 How to cycle through the Clipboard ring

Command: Edit.CycleClipboardRing

Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+v

Tip #8 How to use box/column selection in the editor

Command: Edit.LineUpColumnExtend, Edit.LineDownColumnExtend, Edit.CharRightColumnExtend, Edit.CharLeftColumnExtend

Shortcut: Shift+Alt+Arrow

Tip #9 You can copy a file’s full path / open windows explorer from the file tab channel

Command: File.CopyFullPath

Tip #10 Drag and drop code onto the toolbox’s general tab

Shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+x

Tip #11 You can use Ctrl+. to show a smart tag

Command: View.ShowSmartTag

Tip #12 You can insert a snippet by pressing Tab Tab

Type in snippet shortcut, then press Tab Tab

Customizing Tips

Tip #13 You can create temp or throw away projects

Tools - Options - Projects and Solutions - General, uncheck Save new projects when created

Tip #14 Change text editor font size via keyboard (Accessibility macros)

Command: Macros.Samples.Accessibility.DecreaseTextEditorFontSize

Command: Macros.Samples.Accessibility.IncreaseTextEditorFontSize

Tip #15 How to open a file without any UI

Ctrl+/ (or whatever Tools.GoToCommandLine is bound to)

alias fo file.openfile

fo <filename>

Tip #16 Guidelines in the editor registry key hack

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor  String RBG(128,0,0) 5, 20

Tip #17 You can create a macro for your import/export settings

Tools – customize – commands – macros – drag and drop macro to toolbar

Tip #18 How to not show the start page (or have the last loaded solution open)

Tools - Options - Environment - Startup, At Startup

Tip #19 File tab channel registry hack

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 key, you can create a DWORD UseMRUDocOrdering = 1

Tip #20 How to show Misc Files Project to keep your files around

tools - options - environment – documents, show miscellaneous files in Solution Explorer

Tip #21 Edit project file from within IDE (unload project)

Unload project, edit project, reload project

Debugging Tips

Tip #22 You can use tracepoints to log stuff in your code

Right-click in indicator margin, select breakpoints, select Insert Tracepoint

Tip #23 How to get the find source dialog back

Solution Properties, under Common Properties - Debug Source Files, Delete Do no look for these source files edit box contents

Tip #24 You can disable the exception assistant

Tools – Options – Debugging – General, uncheck Enable the Exception Assistant

You can assign work items to a planned release - #038

Yesterday’s tip discussed how to create a planned release. Today’s tip talks about how to assign work items to a planned release so that you can let your users know what you’re planning.

A planned release is treated the same way as any other release, so it will appear in the Issue Tracker just like any other release.

How to create a planned release - #037

When I first got started in the OSS world, I learned that one of the best ways to encourage contributions is to plan releases based on when feature work is done. For example, if you say, “I plan to release version 2 on such and such date” users will sit back and wait for that date to download the release (well, that’s what I would do!) But, if you say, “I plan to release version 2 when features x, y, and z are done,” there’s a better chance of getting community collaboration on the project.

On CodePlex, you can create a Planned release to indicate your intensions of what you want to go out into a future release.

To do this, you’ll need to create a new release and mark the Development Status as Planning.

Now your release will appear in the Planning section.

How to create a hidden release - #036

You can create a hidden release in case you need to archive older releases. Only project members can view hidden releases.

To do this, while you are editing a release, you’ll find the Show to public option. Selecting no will put the release under the Hidden section.