March 2005 - Posts

Geek Breakfast, Vancouver, March 30

I'll be hosting an Architect's Breakfast on Wednesday March 30th in Vancouver. We've been doing these in Toronto and Kitchener over the past 6 months or so and I really like the format. We break the mold of sitting in rows facing a presenter and gather Read More...

VSTS Architect's Boot Camp Next Week (Mar 29/31) in Ottawa & Vancouver

Next week I'm travelling to Ottawa (Tuesday) and then Vancouver (Thursday) to do some boot camp training on Visual Studio Team System. This 1 day hands on, gives folks a chance to play with the new modelling and testing features. I'll also be demoing Read More...

Say goodbye to Whidbey's System.Data.SqlServer namespace

Pablo Castro writes in the new Data Access Team Blog that they are unifying System.Data.SqlServer classes into System.Data.SqlClient. If you are asking “What is System.Data.SqlServer?” the answer is that it's a ADO.NET managed provider for accessing SQL Read More...

End of VB6 Support, it could be worst.

As you may have heard, VB6 is coming to it's end of free support shortly. Apparently a bunch of VB6 developers who haven't made the move to .NET are a bit upset. I've declined to comment on the issue as I don't really have much to say one way or the other. Read More...

Using VSTS to Stop Estimating

David Anderson [ Agile Management Blog ] suggests we stop estimating. He’s premise is that you can burn a fair amount of your capacity generating estimates which we know to be rather inaccurate. Instead we should just tell our customers that based Read More...

Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Walkthrough

Akash has posted two articles explaining how to use the conversion tool, VssConverter.exe, to migrate from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Source Control. Walkthrough for migrating from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation via [ Buck Hodges ] Read More...

Back Home exploring SQL Genetics

Over the past month I've been doing some Whidbey/Yukon training. First in Ottawa, then in Toronto (home) and most recently last week in Calgary - a city I haven't visited in 10 years, and has grown up a lot since then. I really enjoyed Calgary. I'm spending Read More...

Microsoft wakes up and smells the ajax

http://start.com/1/ Click News, Add Rss Feed, Click around, smell the ajax ? What's next draggable mappoint maps? Read More...

Getting Schema information from a Database

Yesterday in my class I was going over the new GetSchema API in Whidbey and I learned from one of my students about another technique that I wasn't aware of - SQL ANSI 92 Information Schema Views. They are also supported in Oracle. There are almost too Read More...

Not your father's NGEN

Mr. Reid “NGEN“ Wilkes has a good article in MSDN magazine about NGEN 2.0 coming in whidbey. NGEN is the command-line tool that pre-compiles MSIL into native PE code....which has been around since .NET 1.0. It's can be a good performance kick Read More...

VSTS Work Item: Percentage Completed

During one of my demos this past week on VSTS, somebody commented that typically developers want to provide project managers more information on a task other than “completed” or not. What they really want is a percentage complete. John Lawrence Read More...

More Class Designer Productivity Potential: Batch Editing.

Daniel Moth says that he's not excited about the properties box in the class designer and would prefer to use the code editor to make those kinds of changes. It may not be obvious but one of the things you can do with that properties pane that you can't Read More...

Installing Visual Studio Team System Dec CTP

I'm getting a fair amount of questions about this topic lately so worth a blog entry. The best way to install any beta (or even more so CTP's) is to use Virtual PC. This will save you from having to reformat your entire machine a few times. I don't think Read More...

Temperature User Defined Type for SQL Server Yukon

In SQL Server 2005/Yukon you can create user defined types using managed code. User defined types can be used in declaring variable and table columns. It is generally considered to only make sense for scalar types - things that can be sorted, compared, Read More...

Modeling as a Productivity Enhancer in Visual Studio Team System

It's been a theme for me over the past couple of weeks where people have mentioned that they can't afford the time to do modeling. If you've done a lot of UML modeling, you know what I'm talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way. Now just to ward Read More...

Copy & Paste Support in VSTS Class Designer/Whitehorse

You may have noticed that the refactoring menu's that you see in the code editor are also available in the Class Designer. Furthermore, you can also copy & paste things from one class to another. So if you copy a property from one class to another, not Read More...

New Course! Architecting Applications with Visual Studio Team System (Bootcamp)

On March 17th in Toronto, I'll be teaching our first delivery of this new course. It's a one day hands on, instructor led - whirlwind bootcamp style course that gives you a lap around Visual Studio Team System - specifically with a Solution Architect's Read More...

DevTeach June 18-22, Montreal and a $50.00 Rebate Code!

DevTeach is a really nice conference. I went to it for the first time last year and it's a very intimate and interactive conference. While smaller than your TechEd's and PDC's, it manages to attract a very good set of speakers....Kevin McNeish, Brian Read More...

Search

Syndication

Barry Gervin