.Net Jonesie - March, 2006

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		Peter G Jones New Zealand

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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Team Foundation Server Ships by Peter

It's been a long time coming but Team Foundation Server has finally shipped. I'd just like to say a big Thank You to the team at Microsoft for a job well done. Your stellar efforts have resulted in an outstanding product that can only get better. The amount of support from 3rd parties and the community is a great vote of confidence in the product and I'm sure we will be seeing some very interesting improvements and additions in the next version - which will ship next month, right? :}

Monday, March 20, 2006 8:49:38 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Comments [1] Team System |

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Team System Release Real Soon Now by Peter

I spent a couple of hours in Wellington and Auckland this week with Michael Leworthy - ex(?) TFS PM and Australian larrikin - and Jeremy Boyd - RD & Kiwi larrikin - doing a real-short presentation to the Architects Forum on my experience with Team System. Along the way Michael presented a few tid-bits of news and some nifty things you can do with TFS.

Launch of Team System is March 16 in the US. RTM will follow very shortly after this. Michael wouldn't give us a date - even off the record - but I'm guessing you can start looking for a download about the end of next week.
In April (I think) there will be a truck load of training material for TS released on the web site - 150 videos, labs, white papers etc.
In June, at TechEd US they will release the timeline for TS 2 and also the way that future version of the individual roles of Team Suite will be release. Currently all edition are released together but this may change. There's also some other big announcement scheduled at the same time but again, Michael could not be bribed or threatened into revealing the details of this.
They are looking at producing new roles such as an edition for DBA's and database designers.
Michael did a nifty demo of using Workflow Foundation to trigger some Team Build activities. It's quite trivial to hook into TFS events to fire off a workflow. I thought this was a great idea and can't wait to put this to use.
Michael also has a MSN style popup message that fired off when a TFS build event happened. The code for this will be posted shortly.

Fun times ahead!

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 4:02:35 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [0] Team System |

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Templates in SQL Management Studio by Peter

I just created a new stored proc using SQL Management Studio (can I call this SMS?) and discovered the cool new templates you get for free. The standard template for a new proc looks like this.

    1 -- ================================================
    2 -- Template generated from Template Explorer using:
    3 -- Create Procedure (New Menu).SQL
    4 --
    5 -- Use the Specify Values for Template Parameters 
    6 -- command (Ctrl-Shift-M) to fill in the parameter 
    7 -- values below.
    8 --
    9 -- This block of comments will not be included in
   10 -- the definition of the procedure.
   11 -- ================================================
   12 SET ANSI NULLS ON
   13 GO
   14 SET QUOTED IDENTIFIER ON
   15 GO
   16 -- =============================================
   17 -- Author:    <Author,,Name>
   18 -- Create date: <Create Date,,>
   19 -- Description:  <Description,,>
   20 -- =============================================
   21 CREATE PROCEDURE <Procedure Name, sysname, ProcedureName> 
   22   -- Add the parameters for the stored procedure here
   23   <@Param1, sysname, @p1> <Datatype For Param1, , int> = <Default Value For Param1, , 0>, 
   24   <@Param2, sysname, @p2> <Datatype For Param2, , int> = <Default Value For Param2, , 0>
   25 AS
   26 BEGIN
   27   -- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from
   28   -- interfering with SELECT statements.
   29   SET NOCOUNT ON;
   30 
   31     -- Insert statements for procedure here
   32   SELECT <@Param1, sysname, @p1>, <@Param2, sysname, @p2>
   33 END
   34 GO

Like the comment says, you can specify values for the placeholders by pressing Ctrl+Shift+M:

You can view and edit all the templates - and there's a lot of them - by using the Template Explorer from the View menu:

This is not as cool as CodeSmith, but it's free and easy and very cool. Remember, you can use Management Studio with SQL 2K, not just 2005.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006 10:16:37 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [0] General | SQL |

Friday, March 03, 2006

Migrating a Blog using Dmitryr's ASP.Net Rss by Peter

My old Jonsie.net domain is due to expire sometime soon so I thought it was about time I saved the 1 or 2 interesting posts I made there. The old site uses .Text so I could easily grab the posts from the SQL DB, but I thought it would be more fun to use RSS. I remember Scott Guthry posting recently about the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit so I downloaded it to have a play.

First thing I tried was to RTFM but for some reason this word doc keeps exploding and taking Word with it. A quick copy and paste to a new document fixed that (Word's document recovery was less than helpful!). The 'manual' is a little sparse, but it gives enough pointers to get your started.

There are several ways you can access the RSS feed. I wanted to create a simple WinForms or Console app to do this job so I tried using the Rssdl.exe tool to create a strongly typed channel feed. Unfortunately our Nazi firewall got in the way and the RssToolkit doesn't know anything about firewalls. After a bit of a search around the code I found the source of the problem in RssDownloadManager.DownloadChannelDom(). It was using WebClient to make the call to DownloadData but without first configuring the proxy. So, I changed this to:

    1             // download the feed
    2             WebClient wc = new WebClient();
    3             wc.Proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
    4             byte[] feed = wc.DownloadData(url);
 
This is adequate for this UI application but for a more robust solution you may need to modify this to allow a user name, password and proxy string to be passed in somehow.  
 
So, now I executed the Rssdl.exe too to create the class. This created jonsie.cs for me.  I then created a simple console app to dump the title of all the items on the blog:
 

    1 using System;
    2 using System.Collections.Generic;
    3 using System.Text;
    4 
    5 using RssToolkit;
    6 
    7 namespace JonsieExtract
    8 {
    9   class Program
   10   {
   11     static void Main(string[] args)
   12     {
   13       jonsieChannel jc = jonsieChannel.LoadChannel();    
   14 
   15       foreach (jonsieItem ji in jc.Items)
   16       {
   17         Console.WriteLine(ji.Title);
   18       }
   19       Console.ReadLine();
   20 
   21     }
   22   }
   23 }
 
Which produced this:
 
 
Cool!  Oh, crap.  I only get the last 15 posts.  I need all of them.  Oh yeah, this is a setting in .Text.  So I log to my old site and .. hang on, where's the admin options?
 
 
IE 7 has problems displaying the tabs.  Fortunatly I have a spare machine with IE6.  I set the Default number of posts on the home page/feed to 115 and click save.  And wait.  And wait. And wait.  Bum.  Looks like .Text is as useful as ever.  Oh well, part 2 another day.

Friday, March 03, 2006 3:36:01 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [0] General |