Category Archives: .NET

Using Team Foundation Server for non-.NET Projects?

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My company is beginning to evaluate the new Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 software, and one of our big questions right now is whether TFS is a suitable product for handling project management needs for non .NET projects. My company has a mix of in-house developed applications, and 3rd party vendor applications that have been brought in. Therefore, having a platform-agnostic process tool is something that would be very handy (besides Microsoft Project, that is…).

From what I’ve read so far, TFS and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) are intended to integrate well for .NET development projects. But what about projects surrounding a non-.NET project (for example, a vendor product)? There are still “work items” that need to be tracked, reports to be created, etc.; but perhaps only a subset (if any) of this work may require some type of .NET development.

Besides Visual Studio, I’ve seen that Work Items can be tracked with either Team Web Access or the Team Exploror application. I haven’t had a chance to test these out yet, but I’m curious whether managing a non-.NET project using just these tools is very… well, natural.

Perhaps TFS is not meant to be used as a platform-agnostic process tool (that wouldn’t be too much of a stretch!). Perhaps there are other process tools out there that work well with both Visual Studio and other IT-related projects.

I guess I’ll need to do some more digging…

DevConnections – In Vegas, Baby!

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(Ok, so to preface this post, I don’t just attend conferences. It’s just that my company was gracious enough to send me to two conferences almost back to back and there’s always something cool to talk about when attending conferences.)

Well, the first day of DevConnections 2007 is almost over… and, in my opinion, it’s been a little underwhelming. Sure, there’s been swag up the wazoo, and the news that I’d be getting a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 just for attending didn’t hurt one bit… but the sessions so far have just not had a lot of substance or spectacle.

I take that back. The sessions I’ve been to have not had much substance or spectacle. But I’ve been almost exclusively listening to stuff over Visual Studio Team System 2008, and it has been mostly a recycling of the same material through each of the sessions, passed on to different speakers. Somebody should have just copy-and-pasted the session abstract information from one of the four sessions so that I could have realized this earlier and better spent my time (and my company’s money) attending sessions on other topics. Instead, the speakers probably gave the abstracts to some sales and marketing guys who made them sound super-intriguing (and unique) only to rope you into the session to hear the speakers yell “Gotcha!”

I will say the keynote over Visual Studio 2008 by Scott Guthrie was pretty cool. While a majority of the slides were over the same material he covered at the HDC last month, he did have some other Microsoft Product Managers come out and give some pretty nice demos. I especially enjoyed the one showing how you could use a Visual Studio add-in to create a plug-in for World of WarCraft to determine whether or not taking on an opponent in the game would result in their death or your own… Even though I don’t play the game myself, I thought the demo itself was frickin’ sweet!

Well, the first day is over, and I’m headed out to enjoy some Las Vegas nightlife (nothing too crazy). Let’s hope that Day 2 has a little more to offer.

Heartland Developer Conference – Day 2

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Day 2 of the HDC is over and I’m back in Des Moines after two days worth of cramming my brain with a load of technical info. It was a whirlwind of material, and I’m sure half of it has already fallen out of my head; I’m just glad I took a lot of notes.

Day Two started out pretty good. Scott Guthrie graced us with his presence today with a boatload of information over the latest technologies coming out of Microsoft. His keynote this morning was over Silverlight and he did a good job with demos showing the differences between versions 1.0 and 1.1. He then spent about 2.5 hours in the afternoon covering the new features in Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”, and… I mean…. wow!…. It makes me want to dump the VS 2005 IDE by the curb – it is that tastey.

Otherwise, I sat in on one other good presentation from an IT leader at Farm Credit Services of America and her company’s leap to agility (specifically Scrum) two years ago and what they learned along the way. It seemed like very 101-level material from an agile aspect, but it offered a great testimony from a good-sized company who had successfully made the transition from a Waterfall to Agile software methodology.

Now, it is time to rest and recover…

Heartland Developers Conference – Day 1

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The first day of the HDC is over, and it started out awesome! I got in Wednesday afternoon and was invited out to dinner with a few really talented individuals. I had a great chat with Mike Benkovich over his recent MSDN Events in Des Moines, my interest in Microsoft’s Team System, and the recent Bears vs. Vikings game.

The first day of sessions did not disappoint. Ron Jacobs started off with a great keynote over using TDD jointly with the MVP pattern to make both testable and loosely-coupled solutions. I then sat in on sessions over practical TDD usage; an overview of Visual Studio Team System; an introduction to the movement that is ALT.NET; and some practical tips on effectively refactoring database schemas.

I will admit I’m impress with how much more focus is being put on agile development and TDD in particular this year. I think almost every session I attended today had some mention or discussion on writing unit tests for your code. Last year, there was only one session over TDD and it was extremely 101-type material. I’m glad to see more presenters mentioning TDD and agility in their talks.

Oh, how times are a-changin’.

Changing of the Mock Tool

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I’ve just recently started using NMock2 on a new class library that I am building, which makes use of several external resources (e.g. mail server, FTP, etc.). So, in writing my unit tests, it made sense to use some type of mock object so that I was not dependent on these external resources during testing.

However, because my assembly is strongly-named, I discovered that I can’t use the NMock2 library because a strongly-named assembly can only reference other strongly-named assemblies – and for some reason, NMock2 is not strongly-named. There have been a couple requests, but they all seem to have fallen on deaf ears – or nobody is at the wheel steering this project anymore.

So I am left looking for other options. I thought I’d give Rhino Mocks a try after hearing about it from Tim. It looks promising…