My.RAM.Serialize()

A Time Of Transition...

2011-03-04T09:02:00.000-08:00

My time at KPMG has come to an end... As I reflect back on these past 3+ years, I've certainly learned more here than I ever have in my career. I attribute a lot of my success to one person.

I certainly owe a huge debt of gratitude to Greg. Through him, I was allowed to use the latest technologies, think outside of the box, and work on highly critical projects with a huge sense of responsibility.

Thanks, Greg. You've certainly been the best manager I've ever had (pretty sad huh :P), but not only that, you've also been a great mentor and friend. I really could not have gotten luckier when I landed the job at KPMG and became a part of your team. Thanks again.

VB + C# Adventures (Final Part)

2010-12-15T08:56:00.001-08:00

Now that I’ve been using C# continuously for my current project, I can honestly say that I can switch between VB.NET and C# easily. As I’ve said before, I learned .NET in C# a long time ago and personal projects are done in C#, but most of my production experience has been using VB.NET.

Do I regret having to use VB.NET? Not at all, because it’s all about the framework, not the syntax. I like being able to use both languages and achieve the same outcome. Of course I can’t say that I know C# inside and out, but I can’t say the same about VB.NET either. I also feel a sense of pride being able to do more than one language and not complain about it. I still find it funny when my developer friends say something like “Oh I hate VB.NET.” or “I can program in C# about 3x faster than VB.NET.”

So which language do I prefer? I have always preferred C# over VB.NET, but I’ve never complained and never will, if I have to use VB.NET for a project. Sometimes there’s no choice in what language you have to use and knowing both is a useful skill to have. Maybe one day if we need to develop some kind of math intensive library, F# will be thrown my way :)

Closing a WPF Window Through Your ViewModel

2010-12-10T10:05:00.001-08:00

I ran into the issue of properly closing a Window (View) from my ViewModel a while ago. How does one do this without breaking MVVM or adding too much complexity? Since I’m developing my current project using Prism and my IUnityContainers are injected into my ViewModels, why not just inject this.Close() also?

/**** Window (View) ****/

...

public Window(IUnityContainer unityContainer)

   InitializeComponent();

   this.DataContext = new ViewModel(unityContainer, this.Close);

/**** End Window (View) ****/

/**** ViewModel ****/

public class ViewModel

   public ViewModel(IUnityContainer unityContainwer, Action closeAction)

...

      CloseCommand = new DelegateCommand(closeAction);

   public DelegateCommand CloseCommand

      get;

      private set;

/**** End ViewModel ****/

Does this break MVVM at all? Is testability decreased because I injected the this.Close() method into my ViewModel? I would argue not since I’ve used the Action delegate. This seems to be the easiest/simplest way to do what I (and many others) want. Now there may be some purists out there that don’t want any user entered code in the code-behind, but as you might have guessed, I’m no purist.

WPF, MVVM and TextBoxes

2010-12-08T09:57:00.001-08:00

Overall, I like WPF and MVVM. That’s not to say that I think MVVM is a perfect design pattern. I find myself breaking the purity of MVVM sometimes because I think there’s a lot of compromise needed to do what I want to without adding complexity.

Anyway, one of the biggest gripes about MVVM and TextBoxes is that the data for bound TextBoxes is updated when the TextBox control loses focus. But that makes sense, right? Well, what if you’ve updated a TextBox and hit a MenuItem to save your data. Guess what? The TextBox doesn’t lose focus and your save takes the stale TextBox data. Needless to say this is VERY frustrating…

One solution would be to move the focus off of the TextBox like so:

((System.Windows.UIElement)System.Windows.Input.Keyboard.FocusedElement).MoveFocus(new System.Windows.Input.TraversalRequest(System.Windows.Input.FocusNavigationDirection.Next));

You can call that before you actually execute your save command, but even that seems like a bit too much effort to do what should logically be done anyway… I’ve done the above in some of my projects, but there has to be some other way to do what I want…

Instead of using the vanilla Menu control, I turned to Infragistics’ xamMenu. I was hoping that their menu would take into account something like the issue I was having with my TextBox data. I was right… sort of. It turns out that if I use their xamMenu like so:

<ig:xamMenu>
    <ig:xamMenuItem Header="Save">
          <ig:XamMenuItem.InputBindings>
              <MouseBinding MouseAction="LeftClick" Command="{Binding SaveCommand}"/>
          </ig:XamMenuItem.InputBindings>
    </ig:xamMenuItem>
</ig:xamMenu>

The above doesn’t do what I want either… After some experimenting, I found that if I use the vanilla MenuItem elements instead of Infragistics’ XamMenuItem elements, my TextBox data updates and saves. It seems weird to me that using a combination of the Infragistics xamMenu and the vanilla MenuItem causes the data to update correctly, yet using all Infragistics’ elements doesn’t.

<shrug> In the end I ended up using vanilla Button elements in the xamMenu because using the vanilla MenuItem elements caused spacing issues:

<ig:xamMenu>    
    <Button Command="{Binding SaveCommand}" Background="Transparent" BorderBrush="Transparent">
        <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
            <Image Stretch="None" Source="{StaticResource Image}"/>
            <TextBlock Background="Transparent" Margin="4,0,0,0" Text="Save"/>
        </StackPanel>
    </Button>
</ig:xamMenu>

VS2010 IDE vs Stand Alone Execution Weirdness (Mouse Wheel)

2010-10-20T12:32:00.001-07:00

So I’m doing some ActiveX Interop with my WPF application. As most people know, it’s more of a two step process with WPF since you have to host the ActiveX control inside of a WindowsFormsHost object before you can introduce it into a WPF Control or Window.

Anyway, I was testing my component in the IDE and it seemed to be working fine. Next, I ran the application by itself because it’s faster than through the IDE and I found that my mouse wheel was not working. What gives? Why would it work properly in the IDE, but not by itself?

I got frustrated and posted a question on the MSDN forums about it. Since my ActiveX component has license restrictions, I couldn’t provide a proper sample application. I then got the suggestion to host the Interop component in a Winforms application as a test. My Winforms sample project works as it should inside and outside of the IDE.

I then tried to just start a simple WPF application with the Interop control and the same behavior occurs as in my main project: Mouse Wheel works in the IDE, but not stand alone. At this point it seems like it’s a WPF/ActiveX Interop issue.

Another suggestion I got was to use Spy++ to see my component was responding to the Mouse Wheel messages. I opened up Spy++, but before I did anything I noticed that my application was now handling the Mouse Wheel messages. Now here’s what’s confusing me, as soon as I closed Spy++, my application stopped handling Mouse Wheel messages again. Why does the simple fact of having Spy++ open make my ActiveX component work correctly??? I didn’t event start logging the component!

According to Spy++, my component was indeed handling Mouse Wheel messages as indicated by the log and also because the component was scrolling as it should… I’m waiting for a response to my forum post, hopefully someone can tell me what’s going on.

VB + C# Adventures (Part 5)

2010-10-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

I Miss This

VB definitely makes certain things easier than C#. This may go back to the whole VB making me lazy thing, but I miss being able to do this and not having to worry about a null reference exception:

...

Dim i As Integer = Len(Trim(SomeString))

...

Note that if the code above were to changed to SomeString.Trim.Length, a null reference exception could occur in either language.

Conversion methods are available in the System.Convert namespace, but in VB you can do the old CBool(SomeObject), CInt(SomeObject), etc. I’m not saying that using the System.Convert methods are bad or anything, just that I need to get used to certain things.

Style

I’ll be blunt, I hate sloppy code. I try to be consistent in my style and cleanliness regardless of the language I’m programming in. I think that C# definitely has more possibilities as far as clean styles go. For example:

...
if (someCondition)
    DoThis();
...
if (someCondition){
    DoThis();
}
...
if (someCondition)
{
    DoThis();
}
...

I find all three of the above styles readable. However, given the syntactic flexibility of C#, messiness is just as easy:

...
if (someCondition) DoThis(); if(someOtherCondition) {DoThis();AlsoDoThis();}
int i = 0;

I’ve always hated code that sat on one line, even way back in college when I was learning C/C++. Sure it can be more succinct, but I find it harder to read.

My Prism Journey (Part 3)

2010-09-30T08:43:00.001-07:00

It’s Me, Not You

WPF’s bare controls are decent, but not always as robust as people need or want. I initially setup my Shell using the basic Grid component on a Window. Of course I was and still am in the learning phase, but as my project becomes more “real”, I realize that I should probably start using the components that’ll actually be needed once my project hits our production environment.

Since I’ll be using floating panes, I turned to Infragistics. We use their controls in many of our WinForms applications so it seemed logical to use them for my Prism project. I figured this would be easy since Prism can inject views into any control that hosts an ItemControl or ContentControl.

There was a bit of a learning curve to get Infragistics’ Dock Manager to work the way I wanted. Although I was easily able to place ConentControls in the various dock regions, for some reason I couldn’t get the Dock Manager to fill its parent container. This behavior wasn’t expected because the WinForms equivalent did fill in the area as expected. I also followed the Getting Started sample from scratch in a new project and the control didn’t fill…

I did some searching and it looked like others were having the same issue. The post I found was dated 2009 with no answer so I figured that this issue wasn’t resolved. I was pretty irate that the expected behavior wasn’t implemented over a year later. I even went so far as to gripe to the boss about it and asked if I could look at other companies’ components.

After my grumbling session, I took a step back. Infragistics has been in the controls game a long time (remember Sheridan and VB pre .NET?), they couldn’t have let something like this slip. I did some more searching and I found that all I needed was a single property: LayoutMode=”FillContainer”

Open hand facing upwards and forcefully place forehead into hand…

Views, ViewModels, And Events

Not all applications have simple UIs. I have a registered library that handles some of my Region management based on certain requirements. This manager will inject a View+ViewModel into a Region, nothing complicated here. In my ViewModel I subscribe to certain events, which again is nothing complicated.

I noticed something odd when I retrieved data through my application. Every time I retrieved data, the time it took to display multiplied. At first, I thought it was because my View wasn’t being properly removed from my Region. Nope, the ActiveView count is 0 as it should be. I then placed break points in my data layer and found the culprit.

The expected behavior is that if I request data, a new data layer is instantiated, and my data is returned. However, every time I requested data, a data layer was instantiated, and the data was returned, but the previously instantiated data layer never got destroyed and was also retrieving data!

This immediately made me look at the fact that I subscribed to a retrieval event, but never unsubscribed from it. Prism’s event system must have still had a reference to the CallBack and was still calling it. This explained the multiplicative time increase. I ended up having to make sure that my Region manager library unsubscribes from any events when removing Views from my Regions.

VB + C# Adventures (Part 4)

2010-09-23T11:57:00.001-07:00

Event Handlers

Adding and removing event handlers in VB is pretty straightforward. I think the syntax, although wordy, lends itself to readability better than its C# counterpart. In VB for example:

...
AddHandler o.SomeEvent, AddressOf Handler
...
RemoveHandler o.SomeEvent, AddressOf Handler

In C#, you’d have to do the following:

...
o.SomeEvent += new EventHandler(Handler);
...
o.SomeEvent -= new EventHandler(Handler);

Now the thing that struck me as “funny” was the need to create a new EventHandler delegate (or whatever event handler delegate you created) to remove it in the C# syntax…

Method Parameters Passed By Reference

Since I’m using methods that pass parameters as reference, you have to use the ref identifier before those parameters in C#. At first this bugged me because I was so used to not having to do it in VB. But is it necessarily better not having to identify a reference parameter? I got to thinking about this and I now think it’s good to have to denote it.

Why do I think so now? The intent of a parameter passed by reference is to change the parameter itself (of course this has different implications for value types versus reference types). This can lead to confusion if you don’t know that the variable that you’re passing in can change. Requiring the ref identifier alleviates this confusion in my opinion.

My Prism Journey (Part 2)

2010-09-21T12:06:00.001-07:00

Have you registered some types in your bootstrapper like I have? Through Prism’s Dependency Injection, I’ve been passing the EventAggregator around to my objects as a parameter. I’ve also passed in some other registered types, but then I got to thinking…why not just resolve it through the UnityContainer? Instead of injecting all the registered types I need, I can just pass in a single IUnityContainer and resolve all of the types I need. Pretty slick!

VB + C# Adventures (Part 3)

2010-09-20T15:16:00.001-07:00

I ran into a little hiccup today, which I found amusing. Parentheses use is very important in C#, whereas in VB you can be lazy about them (think method calls). In my C# project, I was trying to do an object.ToString.ToUpper, but for some reason Intellisense couldn’t didn’t find ToUpper. Well, given that ToString is a method call, you need to call it as such: object.ToString().ToUpper(). Has VB made me a lazy developer? :)

Optional parameters… I personally never liked them, but they’re pretty ubiquitous in VB land. It wasn’t until .NET 4 that C# got this language feature. VB will let you have optional value and reference parameters, whereas C# won’t let you have optional reference/out parameters. I’m currently using a data access layer written in VB that has a few methods with optional parameters for my C# project and I saw this first hand through Intellisense. No brackets were present around the optional reference parameters through C#…

My Prism Journey (Part 1)

2010-09-17T13:51:00.001-07:00

I’m not going to describe what Prism is because you can just do a search :) I’m going to post my experiences in trying to leverage the Prism libraries to create a modular application. The tutorials that come with the library are very helpful so people should definitely read the chm file for help. I’m also trying to be as MVVM as possible so hopefully I don’t completely mangle my application.

One of the components that I’m adding to my application requires COM Interop… yay. I did the obligatory aximp call on my ActiveX component, but for some reason I got a file not found exception whenever I tried to access the component at runtime. Adding the references created by aximp didn’t seem to work.

I had to actually create a new WinForms control library, add the component to my toolbox, drag the component to the control, and then I was able to access the component at runtime. No worries, I just copied the interop dlls and placed them in a folder so that those can be used instead of the aximp generated ones.

To include interop ActiveX components in your WPF application, you need to host the ActiveX component in a WinForms control. No problem, add WindowsFormsIntegration so you can use the WindowsFormHost control in your WPF app/control. You can then add the component to the WindowsFormHost.Child and it will display. Pretty straight forward…

After getting the above sorted out, I got my interop control to display in the specified region in my shell. However, it was displaying incorrectly… I set the ActiveX.Dock = Fill, but it wasn’t filling the region. I sat there for a good hour or so trying to figure this one out… No matter what I did, it just wouldn’t fill the damn region.

I then decided to create a little test program to see where the issue could possibly be. I added a WindowsFormHost and a reference to the ActiveX component. It filled fine! Ok, maybe it’s because the region in my application is wrapped with a Tabcontrol. I wrapped the WindowsFormHost with the TabControl and it still filled correctly. Wait, to add a region to your shell, you need to specify what the region is hosted in, which is either an ItemsControl or ContentControl.

It turns out that I used ItemsControls to host my regions (because the tutorial used those as well). I then tried switching my region hosts to ContentControls and now my ActiveX component fills as it should… Sheesh.

VB + C# Adventures (Part 2)

2010-09-16T13:41:00.001-07:00

We’re using Visual Studio 2010 so all of my gripes, comparisons, etc will be based on that.

The biggest thing I noticed right off the bat is in the IDE. C# Intellisense is kind of clunky compared to its VB counterpart. I found this kind of weird…

C# Syntax

I’m finding myself using parentheses where I should be using brackets, but it’s rare.

I miss the With construct that’s in VB.

I sometimes declare my variable name before the type.

Semi-colons…don’t forget those!

Curly-braces galore!

I find the syntax to be a bit more cryptic.

VB Syntax

More verbose, but I find it easier to read (this is just personal preference I guess).

Gotta love direct access to My.Settings and My.Resources.

No need to break after every case in Select (Switch) statements.

Delegate parameters need an AddressOf identifier when passing into a method, whereas C# you just pass in the method.

VB + C# Adventures (Part 1)

2010-09-16T13:15:00.001-07:00

I’ll be starting a new series documenting my experiences with using VB and C# simultaneously. This isn’t meant to be a comparison between the languages, but rather just a non-technical (as can be anyway) dump of the things that are going through my head as I use both languages. I’m sure this has been done before, but this ought to be fun anyway.

Some personal background…

Back when I was in college, I learned C++ as my first language. Of course there was some minor SPARC assembly (like I really remember any of that…) and later Java as required by whichever classes I was taking. I had extremely light exposure to VB6 in my senior year in one of my design classes. We did UML diagrams and we tied it into a VB skeleton with absolutely no requirement to write any code. I literally wrote zero lines of VB code in that class.

My first professional job was at a mortgage company and the environment was VB6. It didn’t take long for me to get adjusted, but I found VB6 a little odd as it went against most of the guiding principles I learned in college as to how to write a program. Anyway, I’m not going to jump onto the “bash VB” train because that train is full…

Since VB6 was on my resume, my proceeding jobs were also related to me using VB6. I didn’t mind it, but at the same time I wasn’t really learning anything new… I guess you can say that I started getting bored.

Fast forward to my current job. When I first started here, I had zero professional experience with .NET. I’ve always wanted to get into it, but opportunities seemed slim for me given that I had no professional experience in .NET (catch 22…, but it’s worse for game developers). I did do some studying on my own in C#, but I wasn’t about to lie and say that I had real-world .NET experience. I was very fortunate to come across a job listing for my current position and also for the fact that Greg gave me a shot.

Jumping from VB6 to VB.NET wasn’t difficult. I guess it was because I had retained some of the objected-oriented knowledge from college and the syntax between the two wasn’t too different. I was (and still am) excited to learn something new for a change. So far, doing things in C# isn’t too difficult for me. I had some prior experience with C-style syntax already and I know the .NET framework from doing things in VB.NET already.

I feel that a good carpenter can build a great house with any brand of tools you give them. The same holds true in the case of a good .NET developer (or any developer for that matter). A good or bad developer will be a good or bad developer regardless of what language they are using. This is why I really don’t understand the C# snobbery I see a lot of. Both languages have their pros and cons, but in the end it’s the result that matters.

Visual Studio 2010, When “Save All” Doesn’t Mean “Save All”

2010-08-17T08:14:00.001-07:00

I found a minor bug related to the Save All functionality while updating our build definitions. A new project was added to our TFS and this needed to be cloaked for all of our existing build definitions. No problem, just add the path, set it to cloaked, and copy the line so you can easily paste it in your next build definition without having to pick the path.

I did this for five of our definitions and I decided to go back to the first one for some reason to double check. Why didn’t the path get saved? I hit Save All and didn’t get a prompt when I closed the build definitions, so what gives? Okay, maybe it was a glitch or something so I did it again, this time I tried using the regular Save instead of Save All. This time my build definitions were updated.

It seems like there’s a bug with Save All and updating build definitions. I submitted the issue to Microsoft, but they want a video… I’m always wary about submitting anything work related to the public domain so I had to decline. Hopefully the issue gets resolved, but in the meantime if anybody else is having the same issue, just hit Save instead.

The Reappearing Breakpoint (VS2010)

2010-08-09T13:26:00.001-07:00

Today I somehow made VS2010 crash in the middle of debugging. After I reopened my project, I noticed that a breakpoint that I had deleted previously kept on showing up. Needless to say this was quite confusing since I removed it. No problem, I’ll just remove it again…

Whenever I ran my application in debug mode, the breakpoint would magically reappear! I thought maybe it was a glitch, so I just closed and reopened my project. F5 and why is it reappearing when I just deleted it? Okay, I’ll just shut down VS and reopen it… F5, OMG why won’t you go away?!

Debug->Delete All Breakpoints fixed it… life’s a glitch.

VS2008 to VS2010 Upgrade Notes

2010-06-09T13:22:00.001-07:00

UPDATE 6/23/2010:

The issue with one of our setup project builds has been successfully resolved with a workaround that I thought didn’t work at first. It turns out our Microsoft contact couldn’t reproduce the issue. It was the end of the day so I decided to shelve this issue until this morning. I tried running the setup project from my XP machine with the workaround and it worked. More importantly, I ran it on our build machine and it worked! The thing that threw me off was that it failed on my Windows 7 development machine, which is where I initially tested the issue. I suspect it might have to do with the fact that the interop assemblies were actually built on my old XP development environment and that something isn’t jiving now when I use the same assemblies to build on my Windows 7 machine. In any case, copying the interop dlls to the same path as the vdproj file works like a charm.

Using the latest and greatest development environment is always fun. However, upgrading from a previous version isn’t always easy. When we converted our dev environment from VS2005 to VS2008, there were a number of headaches to get everything working properly. So far, upgrading to VS2010 from VS2008 is proving no different. Since we’re still on TFS2008, we used this workaround to build VS2010 solutions on our Build machines.

So after our build machines had VS2010 installed and the above MSBuildPath workaround was applied, I ran my first build. It was a ClickOnce build and it actually ran without any issues. The application compiled and everything got copied over to our drop location…Cool! So then I tried running our MSI build for the same project. I was expecting it to build fine since the ClickOnce build is a little bit more complex, but the MSI build failed. After thoroughly checking all settings in the Setup project, I couldn’t figure out why it was failing. The only reason in the BuildLog.txt was EXEC : error : Unable to update the dependencies of the project. Could the message be a bit more vague, please?

After searching the web, it seemed others were having the same problem. The workarounds suggested on that page didn’t work for us. So instead of waiting around, we decided to open up a support ticket, which our contact at Microsoft is currently looking into. I had a feeling that Interop assemblies in our project might be causing the problem, but it wasn’t until today that my suspicion was gaining ground. We have a few projects that have MSI builds, so I went ahead and converted and built those out. What do you know? The MSI builds that don’t have Interop assemblies build fine on our build machine. We’re still waiting for a real solution to this problem, until then, we’re building the MSI package locally for that one project.

Another one of our builds has unit tests. I ran this project’s build without the unit tests first and it completed. I then ran the build with the unit tests and 99.9% of the unit tests failed, but not all of them, which was weird to me. These unit tests passed completely when we were using VS2008, so maybe the MSTest reference needed to be updated or something. I searched MSDN and found this post about the same exact issue we were having. I tried the solutions suggested, but they didn’t work. There were some other odd issues with the build with the unit tests, so I just decided to delete the workspace associated with that build. After I did this, the unit tests passed and everything looked good.

I hope when we upgrade our TFS2008 to TFS2010, that there aren’t going to be more issues. I have my fingers crossed…

Running an Interactive Application Through a Windows Service

2010-04-05T09:08:00.001-07:00

Have a need to run an interactive application through a Windows Service? I do and I did a LOT of searching on the Internet and the answer I found was that it can’t be done anymore ever since Windows Vista was released.

A lot of people on MSDN asked this question, but couldn’t seem to get it to work either. I just assumed that it couldn’t be done since nobody else couldn’t get it to work either.

Luckily, I asked this question myself on one of the MSDN forums and a MSFT moderator was able to point me to this blog: http://asprosys.blogspot.com/2009/03/allow-service-to-interact-with-desktop.html

Thankfully, Stephen Martin was able to get the problem solved and even has some sample code to show you that it does work as it should. It’s in C#, but you can always translate it to VB if you need to. I personally used a converter found here: http://dotnetspider.com/codeconvert/Default.aspx. The converter isn’t perfect, but it only had a few things that needed to be fixed.

One issue I had though was with running a .cmd file (I imagine the same issue would happen for .com/.bat files also). For some reason, running the CreateProcessAsUser would show the command window then disappear. My .cmd file was a long file name with spaces so I thought maybe that had something to do with it. I included double quotes around my command string like this: cmd.exe /c “C:\This Is a Long Path\command.cmd” The .cmd file would not run.

Scratching my head, I put the above string in the Windows Run and tried to run it. It wouldn’t run here either… I then tried putting the .cmd file in the root of my C:\ and tried running it like this: cmd.exe /c “C:\command.cmd” This ran fine. I figured that since both CreateProcessAsUser and Windows Run were having the same issue, it was a good thing.

After much playing around with the string and a lot of frustration, I tried the following: cmd.exe /c “”C:\This Is a Long Path\command.cmd” This worked… I’m not too sure why the double quotes are needed twice before the long file name though… This also works with the .cmd file that was in the root of my C:\ like this: cmd.exe /c “”C:\command.cmd”

WinForms/WPF Interop ElementHost Not Drawing The WPF Control!

2010-03-11T11:19:00.001-08:00

<Edit>

It turns out it wasn’t externalizing the WPF control that solved the issue, but rather changing my build configuration to Release instead of Debug. When I added the externalized assembly, I set the configuration to Release. I’m not sure exactly why a debug build would cause this behavior…

</Edit>

<Edit 2>

It seems to work properly on Windows XP regardless of the build configuration. Might be a Windows 7 thing…

</Edit 2>

I’ve been doing a lot of WPF work lately and a lot of it has been with WinForms interoperating with WPF. Today I noticed some odd behavior when I tried to add a WPF control to a WinForms ElementHost object…

Usually I put the WPF control in a separate assembly, but today I thought I didn’t need to since it was just a very simple control. Immediately I saw that the WPF control wouldn’t draw itself properly for some reason. It would only draw itself sometimes, but if i clicked on the WPF control and somehow hit a Button or ComboBox, the control would show up.

I then decided to try and put the simple control in its own assembly and that solved the problem… It looks like there’s some issues with including a WPF control in a WinForms project directly, in my case anyway. I’m using Visual Studio 2008 on Win7 x86 and if anybody else has this type of issue, try doing what I did to resolve the issue.

Visual Studio IDE Tab Spacing

2009-12-09T15:24:00.001-08:00

Don’t you hate it when you get some source code and the tab spacing is different than yours? I know I do. You could go line by line and press backspace, which is not the smartest way to do it (I was guilty of this).

Here’s the much simpler way to get the tabs aligned:

TFS folders and the evil “&”

2009-11-18T09:48:00.001-08:00

So I tried to make a folder within TFS called “R&D” and it let me. No surprises…yet. After moving a project into this folder, I ran the project to make sure all paths/references were still intact. The project ran fine so things seemed okay.

It wasn’t until I tried opening a form up in Designer view that I got a weird error:

How is it that the project can build and run fine, but I’m seeing this? XML? I don’t have anything related to XML in the form code, so what gives? After doing some searching on the internet, it seems that the “&” character anywhere in the path causes this issue. Since my project was in the “R&D” folder, I was having this issue. I renamed the folder and the problem went away…

WPF Data Binding – ComboBox Items List

2009-10-29T10:27:00.001-07:00

As I learn WPF I’m running into quite a few roadblocks, but I’m enjoying the fact that it’s a challenge and something new. One of the things I’m trying to get used to is Data Binding to the WPF UI. I’m also trying to learn WPF the MVVM way. There are a lot of examples on how to do this on the web so I’ll just get to what got me stuck for a bit on ComboBox items binding. Here’s some of my UI XAML and my code behind:

<DockPanel Margin="0" Height="42" Name="TopDockPanel" Width="auto" DockPanel.Dock="Top" LastChildFill="true">
    <Grid  Height="auto" Name="Grid1" Width="266" DockPanel.Dock="Left">
        <Label Margin="7,7,0,9"  HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="71">Combo1:</Label>
        <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ComboList1}"  Margin="84,9,22,13" SelectionChanged="Combo1_SelectionChanged" />
    </Grid>
    <Grid Height="auto" Name="Grid2" Width="281">

        <Label HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="6,7,0,9" Width="89">Combo2:</Label>
        <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ComboList2}" Margin="101,9,20,13" IsEditable="False" />
    </Grid>
    <Grid Height="auto" Name="Grid3" Width="auto" />
</DockPanel>

Class SomeClass
  Private _SomeClassVM As SomeClassViewModel = Nothing

  Sub New()

    ' This call is required by the Windows Form Designer.
    InitializeComponent()
    ' Add any initialization after the InitializeComponent() call.
    _SomeClassVM = New SomeClassViewModel
    Me.DataContext = _SomeClassVM
  End Sub
  Private Sub Combo1_SelectionChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Controls.SelectionChangedEventArgs)
    _SomeClassVM.Combo1Changed(sender)

  End Sub
End Class

Nothing complicated, a simple MVVMish implementation (ish because there’s event handler code in the code behind file, I’ll be refactoring this as I go on). My View Model implements the INotifyPropertyChanged Interface so that the UI can be notified of any property changes and update any data bindings as needed. My View Model also exposes a couple of Public Properties: ComboList1 and ComboList2 which are List (Of String) objects:

Public Class SomeClassViewModel
  Implements INotifyPropertyChanged

  Private _ComboList1 As List(Of String) 
  Private _ComboList2 As List(Of String) 
  Public ReadOnly Property ComboList1() As List(Of String) 
    Get
      Return _ComboList1
    End Get
  End Property

  Public ReadOnly Property ComboList2() As List(Of String) 
    Get
      Return _ComboList2
    End Get
  End Property

  Sub New()
    _ComboList1 = New List(Of String) 

    For Each item As String In ItemsList 'this is just a list of strings from anywhere
      _ComboList1.Add(item)
    Next

    OnPropertyChanged("SQLServerList")

    _ComboList2 = New List(Of String)

  End Sub

  Public Sub Combo1Changed(ByVal sender As System.Object)
    _ComboList2.Clear()

    For Each item As String In SomeOtherList 'this is just list of string from another place
      _ComboList2.Add(sqlDatabase)
    Next

    OnPropertyChanged("ComboList2")
  End Sub

  Public Event PropertyChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs) Implements System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged

  Private Sub OnPropertyChanged(ByVal propertyName As String)
    RaiseEvent PropertyChanged(Me, New PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName))
  End Sub
End Class

Now, I thought that clearing and adding items to my ComboList2 object would suffice in propagating change notifications up to the UI…WRONG. It seems there’s more to it than just clearing/adding to the list and raising the PropertyChanged event. This implementation only notified the UI that ComboList2 changed once at the first time I changed ComboBox1’s selected item instead of each time. What gives?

After some fiddling I found that I couldn’t use the current _ComboList2 object reference. I had to actually set the _ComboList2 object to a new List for the UI to update:

Public Sub Combo1Changed(ByVal sender As System.Object)
    Dim NewList As New List(Of String)

    For Each item As String In SomeOtherList 'this is just list of string from another place
      NewList.Add(item)
    Next

    _ComboList2 = NewList
    OnPropertyChanged("ComboList2")
  End Sub

There’s a more elegant way to solve the issue I had, which is to use an ObservableCollection instead of List (Of String) objects:

Public Class SomeClassModel

  Private _ComboList1 As ObservableCollection(Of String) = Nothing
  Private _ComboList2 As ObservableCollection(Of String) = Nothing

  Public ReadOnly Property ComboList1() As ObservableCollection(Of String)
    Get
      Return _ComboList1
    End Get
  End Property

  Public ReadOnly Property ComboList2() As ObservableCollection(Of String)
    Get
      Return _ComboList2
    End Get
  End Property

  Sub New()
    _ComboList1 = New ObservableCollection(Of String)

    For Each item As String In ItemsList 'this is just a list of strings from anywhere
      _ComboList1.Add(item)
    Next

    _ComboList2 = New ObservableCollection(Of String)

  End Sub

  Public Sub Combo1Changed(ByVal sender As System.Object)
    _ComboList2.Clear

    For Each item As String In SomeOtherList 'this is just list of string from another place
      _ComboList2.Add(item)
    Next
  
  End Sub
End Class

You’ll notice a couple of things. The first being that the View Model no longer needs INotifyPropertyChanged. This is because ObservableCollection implements INotifyPropertyChanged (and INotifyCollectionChanged). You’ll also notice that I was able to just clear/add to _ComboList2 without having to raise any events. The UI updated as expected and I suspect it’s because when clearing or adding items to the ObservableCollection, properties such as count raise the PropertyChanged event properly.

Error in last post. Think of it as a what not to do :)

2009-10-13T15:09:00.001-07:00

It turns out that pointing to a file with an Interface inside of it doesn’t work as intended (oops! :/). Although you can implement the Interface, problems arise when you try to cast it since they’re interfaces in different namespaces… It looks like you will have to point all libraries that need the interface to a single project that has the Interface you need.

Sharing an Interface (What not to do)

2009-10-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had a class library that uses an Interface? How about two or more libraries that need to use the same Interface? For instance, ClassLibrary1 and ClassLibrary2 need to implement ISomeInterface below:

Instead of copying ISomeInterface.vb to both ClassLibrary projects or adding a project reference, you can add a link to ISomeInterface.vb and have access to ISomeInterface:

Now you’ll notice that ISomeInterface.vb is part of ClassLibrary1 as a linked file:

Now we can implement ISomeInterface in ClassLibrary1:

The benefit of adding the Interface file as a link is that you can maintain the Interface in one location. You don’t have to worry about having to copy new versions if you decide to change your contract.

The Best Things In Life Are Free

2009-08-10T10:12:00.001-07:00

This post by Greg inspired me to post to my blog about some of the free software utilities and applications that I use at home. Although some of the things I list may not be the absolute best, it really is hard to beat free. Plus a lot of times the term “best” is used subjectively and this includes software.

7-Zip is a compression utility used for packing and unpacking various file formats. Think of it as an open source WinZip. Below is the main feature list from the 7-Zip website:

High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
Supported formats:
- Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
- Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.
For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
Self-extracting capability for 7z format
Integration with Windows Shell
Powerful File Manager
Powerful command line version
Plugin for FAR Manager
Localizations for 74 languages

---------

Every Windows user needs and anti-virus application. The one I use is Avast because it seems to be the least intrusive. I haven’t had a single problem since I began using Avast over a year ago. Here are some of the features:

Anti-spyware built-in
Web Shield
Anti-rootkit built-in
Automatic updates
Strong self-protection
Virus Chest
Antivirus kernel
System integration
Simple User Interface
Integrated Virus Cleaner
Resident protection
Support for 64-bit Windows
P2P and IM Shields
Internationalization
Network Shield

---------

Ever have issues with your OS or feel that your registry has become a bit dirty? CCleaner may help you find the issues. I use it regularly to clean out unnecessary temporary and log files. I also use it to check for any registry issues:

“CCleaner is a freeware PC optimization tool. It combines a system cleaner that removes unused and temporary files from your system and also a fully featured registry cleaner! CCleaner allows Windows to run faster, more efficiently and gives you more hard disk space. The best part is that it's Small, Fast and Free!”

---------

CDBurnerXP is one of the best disc burning applications I’ve ever used, free or otherwise. It handles everything I throw at it without any issues:

burn all kinds of discs
audio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks
burn and create ISO files
data verification after burning process
create bootable discs
multi-language interface
bin/nrg → ISO converter, simple cover printing and much more!
Operating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/Windows 7

---------

Hate scratched audio CDs? I know I do. I use CDex to rip from the original disc so that I don’t have to worry about scratching up the original:

Direct recording of multiple tracks
Read / store album information from/to the cdplayer.ini file
Read / store album information from/to a local and/or remote CD Database (CDDB)
Support CD-Text (if your CD-drive supports it)
Advanced jitter correction (based on the cd-paranoia ripping library)
Indicates track progress and jitter control
Normalization of audio signal
Supports many CD-Drive from many manufacters
Conversion of external WAV files
Support for M3U and PLS play list files
Best of all, it's free (GPL license, source code available)
Serveral languages are supported

---------

Into news feeds? Then you should be using FeedDemon. It will sync to your Google Reader account:

Newspaper Format: When you select a channel, FeedDemon's tabbed browser displays the channel's news items in a newspaper for easy reading. You can display a newspaper of news items for an entire folder or view one feed at a time.
News Bins: Store news items in a central location and provide a handy way to collect items from different channels. If you find an interesting item that you might want to read again, just store it in a news bin for future reference.
Shared Experience: See what news is popular with other NewsGator users and find out who is linking to the news you’re reading.
Video: Watch embedded video right within the newspaper view.
Panic Button: Ever gone on vacation and gotten a little behind on your reading? The Panic Button solves this and many other problems by quickly marking all older items read.
Watches: Look for keywords in news items as they're downloaded. After you create a watch, it examines every incoming news item whenever any channel is updated.
News Comes To You: Subscribe to feeds from all over the web or choose some of the dozens of default feeds.
Search: Search outside of FeedDemon's subscriptions by selecting a feed search engine, then enter your keyword, and FeedDemon will subscribe to a dynamic channel containing the search results for that keyword.
Podcasts: Powerful podcasting tools enable you to download audio files and automatically copy them to your iPod or other media player. The bundled FeedStation utility enables you to schedule your downloads so they happen overnight while you're asleep. When you wake up, you'll find new audio waiting on your media player of choice.

---------

Is Photoshop a bit too expensive for you? Try Paint.NET. I use it for editing images, creating icons, and a myriad of other minor image tasks. A true power user can do much more than I can with it:

Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. In order to handle multiple images easily, Paint.NET uses a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast.
Layers
Usually only found on expensive or complicated professional software, layers form the basis for a rich image composition experience. You may think of them as a stack of transparency slides that, when viewed together at the same time, form one image.
Active Online Community
Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and ever-expanding community. Be sure to check out the constantly growing list of tutorials and plugins!
Frequently Updated
Updates usually come about every 4 to 8 weeks, and contain new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Upgrading to the latest version is very simple, requiring only two clicks of the mouse.
Special Effects
Many special effects are included for enhancing and perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.
Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.
Powerful Tools
Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves. The Gradient tool, new for 3.0, has been cited as an innovative improvement over similar tools provided by other software. The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.
Unlimited History
Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you've undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.
Free!
Paint.NET doesn't cost a dime.

---------

Do you chat with friends that use different IM networks? Trillian is a great application that supports various IM networks. MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and IRC are supported.

---------

How am I writing this blog post? Windows Live Writer of course. Greg turned me on to this application and it makes blog posting must simpler:

“Writer makes it easy to share your photos and videos on almost any blog service—Windows Live, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and many more.”

WPF Canvas Coordinate System

2009-05-08T16:05:00.001-07:00

I noticed that the Canvas class doesn’t use the Cartesian coordinate system for mapping points. For instance, here’s a list of points: 0, 0; 15, 5; 25, 18. Here’s how these points look when drawn to a Canvas:

The above image is fine if that’s what you want to do with the points, but that isn’t the result I wanted. I had to add a ScaleTransform to the Canvas for it to look the way I wanted. This can be done in XAML:

<Canvas Name="MainCanvas" Background="AliceBlue" Width="400" Height="200" >
    <Canvas.RenderTransform>
        <ScaleTransform CenterX="200" CenterY="100" ScaleX="1" ScaleY="-1" />
    </Canvas.RenderTransform>
</Canvas>

or programmatically (VB.NET here):

Dim YScale As New ScaleTransform

YScale.ScaleX = 1
YScale.ScaleY = -1
YScale.CenterX = MainCanvas.Width / 2
YScale.CenterY = MainCanvas.Height / 2

MainCanvas.RenderTransform = YScale

You’ll notice the CenterX and CenterY properties are set to the middle of the Canvas. You can think of this as your pivot point when flipping the Canvas (The CenterX isn’t really needed here since we’re just flipping on the Y axis).The end result is what I was expecting:

Visual Studio Unit Testing – System.TypeLoadException

2009-04-27T15:40:00.001-07:00

So I was trying to write unit tests today and I ran into quite a weird issue. My test failed on a simple constructor test. When I looked at the error message I noticed something odd:

The referenced assembly version in the picture is x.x.x.91, but the current version it should be is a later version. What gives? I tried creating a new unit test project because I thought maybe our unit test project got messed up somehow, but the same error message kept on happening. Another frustrating issue was that when I ran the unit test in debug mode, it passed correctly.

After some searching on the web I ran into this page, which led me to check the project’s code coverage instrumentation section. Sure enough, the project was pointing to an assembly that no longer existed. The red one was the non-existent assembly, the green one is the correct one.

My guess as to why this happened was because initially, the solution was setup to build against Any CPU and this was changed to x86 somewhere along the way. The LocalTestRun.testrunconfig probably never got updated. After pointing to the correct assembly, the test passes and no odd version issues exist.

Incidentally, I asked Greg if his laptop ran into some slowness lately because my hard drive would thrash and adding unit tests literally took me longer than 5 minutes via right-click. Correcting the instrumented assembly corrected this issue as well. One would think that Visual Studio would let the user know that something was up :)

MS Tech Ed 2009

2009-04-21T09:08:00.001-07:00

I’ll be attending Tech Ed this year, which is the first conference of this kind for me. So here’s my badge:

You can get your badges for Tech Ed here. Greg will also be there, so stop by his booth to say hi and take a picture with him or something.

Excel and CSV files

2009-03-24T12:19:00.001-07:00

Have you ever tried to open a comma delimited .csv file in MS Excel and gotten these dialogs?

There might actually be nothing wrong with your file. If the first item happens to be ID (case sensitive), you will get this dialog in Excel (I’ve had this happen to me in 2003 and 2007). If you don’t want this dialog to keep coming up, you’ll have to rename the first item or just change the casing of ID to id, Id, or iD.

Visual Studio Unit Testing – Reducing Redundant Tests

2008-12-09T10:51:00.001-08:00

When I first started unit testing, I tested as many methods as I could. These included public and private ones. A bit of searching on the web about public versus private method testing will yield mixed results. I personally test both since I aim for at least 70% code coverage. Visual Studio creates Accessor classes for private methods and properties for you so testing private methods is easy.

I used to write at least one test per method (some require more than one to test conditional code paths), but this can get redundant. The steps I take to reduce redundancy today are as follows. First, I turn on code coverage. This will give a visual indicator of what has been covered in my classes.

When I run my tests, code that has been covered is in blue and the code that hasn’t been covered is in red.

I test my constructors first, then public methods, and finally private methods. Doing it in this order gives me a better idea of what private methods need to be tested. Most of the time public methods will call private methods so writing a single test will cover those methods as well. I collapse whatever has been covered each time I create and run a test. Doing my tests this way has greatly reduced the number of redundant tests written and has kept the same amount of code coverage.

ADO.NET Asynchronous Transactions

2008-09-04T09:52:00.001-07:00

Searching on the web and on the MSDN forums for Asynchronous Transactions didn’t give me what I was looking for. I knew a bit about both, so I decided trying to combine the two to get the result I wanted. This was the general outline of what I came up with.

Public Sub DoLongSQLOperation()
    Dim ConnectionStringBuilder As New SqlClient.SqlConnectionStringBuilder

    ConnectionStringBuilder.IntegratedSecurity = True
    ConnectionStringBuilder.DataSource = "SQLSERVER"
    ConnectionStringBuilder.InitialCatalog = "DATABASE"
    ConnectionStringBuilder.AsynchronousProcessing = True

    Dim MySQLConnection As New SqlConnection(ConnectionStringBuilder.ToString)
    MySQLConnection.Open()

    Dim LongSQLCommand As New SqlCommand("sp_LongOperation", MySQLConnection)

    Dim MySQLTrans As SqlTransaction = MySQLConnection.BeginTransaction

    LongSQLCommand.Transaction = MySQLTrans
    LongSQLCommand.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure

    Dim Callback As New AsyncCallback(AddressOf CallbackMethod)

    Dim Result As IAsyncResult = LongSQLCommand.BeginExecuteNonQuery(Callback, LongSQLCommand)

    While Not Result.IsCompleted
      'do something if needed
    End While

  End Sub

  Private Sub CallbackMethod(ByVal result As IAsyncResult)
    Dim LongSQLCommand As SqlCommand

    LongSQLCommand = DirectCast(result.AsyncState, SqlCommand)
    LongSQLCommand.EndExecuteNonQuery(result)

    Dim MyTransaction As SqlTransaction = LongSQLCommand.Transaction

    Try
      MyTransaction.Commit()
    Catch ex As Exception
      'Try to rollback on a commit exception
      Try
        MyTransaction.Rollback()
      Catch exRollback As Exception
        'Rollback failed
      End Try
    End Try

    'Dispose of your objects
    MyTransaction.Dispose()
    LongSQLCommand.Dispose()
    LongSQLCommand.Connection.Dispose()

  End Sub

I used the Asynchronous Callback method of doing what I needed. CallbackMethod gets called when the asynchronous operation completes. Within my callback method is where I commit my transaction and dispose of any data resources. I’ve kept the error handling to a minimum in my example for brevity, but you’ll definitely want to add them where they’re needed.

Visual Studio and Data Driven Unit Tests

2008-07-24T11:16:00.001-07:00

Unit testing can be tedious when you have a battery of data to test against. If you’re just testing against a small number of different data, then using Data Driven Unit Tests might be a bit overkill. However, Data Driven Unit Tests gives you is a single location of data that can be used throughout your unit testing project. Instead of modifying the data you typed in your unit test code, you can just modify it in your data file. I used this MSDN entry as a starting point.

The method we’ll be testing is shown below.

Public Function SomeMethod(ByVal data As String) As Integer
   Return data.Length
End Function

You create the unit test for SomeMethod as usual. Now what about our data file? I’ll use an XML data file that just holds a few strings named test.xml.

<Samples>
    <Sample0>My Sample</Sample0>
    <Sample1>This is another sample</Sample1>
</Samples>

Now you have your simple data file. To hook it into your unit test project, open up the Test List Editor in Visual Studio. Find the test that you want to use test.xml with and click on that test.

In the Properties, find the Data Connection String entry and press the ellipses button. This will bring up the New Test Data Source Wizard.

Select XML File and press Next to bring up the next screen. Press the ellipses button and find test.xml. This should fill in Table and Preview data for you.

Pressing Next will bring you to the final page of the wizard. Highlight the table and press Finish.

You’ll see a dialog after the previous step. Press Yes and Visual Studio will add test.xml to your unit test project.

If you look at your Data Connection String property, it should now point to test.xml within your unit test project. The next step is using the data in your unit test. Here’s a simple example of how to use your data.

<DataSource("Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.DataSource.XML", "|DataDirectory|\test.xml", "Samples", DataAccessMethod.Sequential)> _
<DeploymentItem("TestProject1\test.xml")> _
<TestMethod()> _
Public Sub SomeMethodTest()
  Dim target As Form1 = New Form1
  Dim data As String = String.Empty

  Assert.IsTrue(target.SomeMethod(TestContext.DataRow("Sample0")) = TestContext.DataRow("Sample0").ToString.Length)
End Sub

The attributes for SomeMethodTest get automatically added when you add test.xml to your Data Connection String property. The main point here is that TestContext.DataRow() is used to access your data.

One issue that I’ve run into was that I wanted to move my data into a sub folder called Data within my unit test project. This will work, but the path to test.xml is a hard path. Why does this matter? I’m part of a team and having a hard path breaks the unit test since not all of our workspace paths are the same. If you look at the Data Connection String property, you’ll notice that |DataDirectory| is at the beginning before the xml file location. This transfers fine over different workspaces, however you’ll have to leave the data file where it gets inserted into the project by default.

TeamBuild and WiX

2008-07-16T08:51:00.001-07:00

Have you ever run into this error using TeamBuild to build a WiX setup project?

light.exe : error LGHT0217: An unexpected external UI message was received: The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.

Done building project "Setup.wixproj" -- FAILED.

It seems this problem is rampant on Vista build machines. The solution usually had something to do with the vbscript engine, but I’ve tried all of those solutions and we were still failing WiX builds. Besides, we’re using XP for our build machines.

I decided to login to our build machine using our build service account and manually build the WiX project through the IDE. The project compiled fine so I kicked off another build. That didn’t fix anything. I then decided to compile the project using devenv.exe from the command line. That compiled fine, but I noticed an ICE## warning. At first I didn’t think anything of it because after this second step, our builds started to work.

Greg, being the manager that he is, told me to repeat the steps on our other build machine to see if that was indeed the fix to our problem. I was hopeful, but it didn’t seem to work on the other machine. Then he said to reboot the original build machine and repeat the steps. Again, I was hopeful, but it looked like the steps I took before wasn’t the solution.

Later on in the day I tried to login to our build machine again using our service account to repeat the steps from before. Firing a build didn’t work again, but this time that ICE## warning really caught my eye. I remembered that the WiX project property page had some settings for ICE validation:

Although the ICE## message being returned by the build process was a warning, it was causing our build to fail. Checking Supress ICE validation was the key and we now have an automated build for our WiX setup project.

My Thoughts On Scrum (Part 1)

2008-07-11T10:41:00.001-07:00

If you’ve been following Greg's Blog, you’d know that our team (and our whole development group for that matter) is now using the Scrum methodology for software development. I think it’s natural for anyone to get excited or somewhat nervous when a change in day to day operations gets implemented.

Some people thrive on a dynamic lifestyle while others can’t handle change very well. For a software developer, the only things that are certain are death, taxes, and change. Being thrown into something new shouldn’t make your world flip upside-down.

Before Scrum, our team didn’t have a distinctly defined system. It was definitely iterative and agile, but there were no hard release dates and no administrative tasks associated with our development. Our team is very customer focused, so transitioning to Scrum didn’t really change our mentality on what we delivered, just how we delivered it.

The hardest part for me when we transitioned to Scrum was the administrative tasks. Updating statuses, work hours, and general commenting on work items was new to me (and I’m still learning to get used to it). However, I do understand the importance of these tasks since our sprint burndown chart gives us a great visual representation of our status.

I was assigned to my own project before Scrum and I felt solely responsible for it. Now that we’re Scrumming and there are four of us are working on the same project, I feel a deeper sense of camaraderie. There’s less sense of I and more of us.

I think our first sprint is going very well and I’m very happy about what we’re going to give to our customers at the end of this sprint. As we become more experienced with Scrum, I’ll share some more of my thoughts.

TeamBuild ClickOnce – Auto Incrementing Your Version Information

2008-06-19T16:41:00.001-07:00

Using AssemblyInfoTask within your TFSBuild.proj file, you can set your builds to automatically increment your AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion. You can also keep your application’s Publish Version in sync, which is useful if you’re publishing your application via ClickOnce.

The Publish Version is important because that’s what ClickOnce looks at to see if there’s a new version available when the user runs the application. Updating the AssemblyVersion or AssemblyFileVersion doesn’t tell ClickOnce that there’s a new version of your application to download.

There are a ton of blog posts like this one that tell you how to check in/out files from your TFS so I won’t repeat those steps. The actual version updates happen inside the <AssemblyInfo> task:

<Project>
    <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\AssemblyInfoTask\Microsoft.VersionNumber.Targets" />
    ...
    <Target Name="AfterGet">
        <Message Text="In After Get"/>

        <CreateItem Include="$(SolutionRoot)\My Project\AssemblyInfo.vb">
            <Output ItemName="AssemblyInfoFiles" TaskParameter="Include"/>
        </CreateItem>

        <Exec WorkingDirectory="$(SolutionRoot)\My Project\"
            Command="$(TF) checkout AssemblyInfo.vb" />

        <AssemblyInfo AssemblyInfoFiles="@(AssemblyInfoFiles)"
            AssemblyRevisionType="AutoIncrement"
            AssemblyRevisionFormat="0"
            AssemblyFileRevisionType="AutoIncrement"
            AssemblyFileRevisionFormat="0">

          <Output ItemName="MaxAssemblyVersion" TaskParameter="MaxAssemblyVersion" />
        </AssemblyInfo>
      </Target>
    ...
</Project>

For our project, we only want to update a specific AssemblyInfo.vb as opposed to recursively checking out all AssemblyInfo files to modify. We used the <CreateItem> task to store the AssemblyInfo files into an array. In our case it’s just one file (That’s why the <Exec> task looks a bit different than most examples out there on the web).

Inside the <AssemblyInfo> task is pretty self-explanitory. Setting the type and format of the Revision (you can do this to your Major, Minor, and Build as well) to AutoIncrement is what does the trick. You don’t have to have an <Output> element, but I wanted to keep our Publish Version and Assembly Version in sync.

We can use the variable @(MaxAssemblyVersion), which stems from the ItemName attribute, to hold our new Assembly Version. I’ve previously posted about modifying the vbproj file to update the Publish Version so I won’t go into the details, but finding and replacing the needed element isn’t difficult. Lastly you’ll want to check in your new AssemblyInfo file so that the next build increments your versions.

TeamBuild ClickOnce – Publishing To Different Locations

2008-06-03T10:11:00.001-07:00

Our team's goal with TeamBuild is to keep things as automated as possible. We currently have two separate publishing locations for production and beta releases. Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to put the publishing location manually each time we put out a build?

What I found interesting inside my project's vbproj file (which is just XML) was that the information I needed was located within the <PublishUrl> element:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" ToolsVersion="3.5">
  <PropertyGroup>
    ...
    <PublishUrl>http://somelocation/</PublishUrl>
    ...
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

Great, we can now have two different build definitions for production and beta releases without having to manually enter the publishing location. All we need to do is write the location in the vbproj file before we compile. The problem is that TFS has the vbproj file (and I’m pretty sure all other files within your project) as read-only during a build.

My first thought was that I just needed to checkout the vbproj file, do my modification, then just check it in. This worked fine, but was all that really necessary? I thought of using attrib.exe to remove the read-only attribute from the file, but I didn’t know if it’d work because of the TFS source control files. I got confirmation from a post that attrib.exe would do the job so that’s what I ended up doing in my TFSBuild.proj:

<Project ...>
    ...
    <Target Name ="BeforeCompile">
        <Message Text="In Before Compile"/>

        <Message Text="Making vbproj file writable"/>
        <Exec Command="attrib -R &quot;$(SolutionRoot)\project.vbproj&quot;"/>
        ...
    </Target>
    ...
</Project>

Now we just have to modify the <PublishUrl> element with our publishing location. If you’ve read my previous posts you know that we use the SDC Tasks Library for XML manipulation. So the first stab I took at placing our publishing locations into the vbproj file was using the <XmlFile.SetValue> task. The problem here is that the default namespace in the vbproj file isn’t prefixed so getting the XPath I needed didn’t work. The solution was to use the <File.RegEx> task:

<Project ...>
    ...
    <Target Name ="BeforeCompile">
       <Message Text="In Before Compile"/>

       <Message Text="Making vbproj file writable"/>
       <Exec Command="attrib -R &quot;$(SolutionRoot)\project.vbproj&quot;"/>

       <Message Text="Replacing PublishUrl"/>
       <File.RegEx
         Path="$(SolutionRoot)\project.vbproj"
         RegularExpression="&lt;PublishUrl&gt;(.*?)&lt;/PublishUrl&gt;"
         NewValue="&lt;PublishUrl&gt;http://YourSpecifiedLocation/&lt;/PublishUrl&gt;"
       />
    </Target>
    ...
</Project>

When the project compiles, it’ll use the updated vbproj’s information so the manifests will have the correct publishing information when built. Using this method, you can still manually publish your ClickOnce without messing up your build definitions and also have various build definitions to specify different publishing locations.

One thing to note is that the Publish Version in the IDE is the <ApplicationVersion> element in your vbproj file. If you modify this in your IDE then this will also affect your builds. I found that keeping your Assembly Version and Publish Version in sync the best way to do things. This way nobody gets confused as to which version you might be talking about. Also, ClickOnce checks your Publish Version when doing automatic updates so keep that in mind.

TeamBuild ClickOnce – Versioning

2008-05-19T16:55:00.001-07:00

It seems many people have had issues getting the version number correctly within their tfsbuild.proj files to use in their ClickOnce html files. The solutions I've seen were very complicated, but this may be because the examples I've seen were in TFS 2005 or they were using different tasks.

My coworker added the SDC tasks to our build server because there is functionality for XML and file manipulation. From his starting point I went on to look further into two specific tasks: Xml.GetValue and File.RegEx.

My boss directed me to where I can find the version number that I needed, which resides in the application manifest file. The trickiest part of the Xml.GetValue task to me was understanding XPath. The biggest point that I missed was that I needed to define the namespace within the application manifest to get to the element.

If you look inside the application manifest of your program (not the program.exe.manifest, but program.application as I'm dealing with publishing), you'll find something similar to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <asmv1:assembly 
        xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" 
        manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3" 
        xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" 
        xmlns:co.v1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v1" 
        xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" 
        xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:xrml="urn:mpeg:mpeg21:2003:01-REL-R-NS" 
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  
    <assemblyIdentity name="program.application" version="1.0" 
        publicKeyToken="abcdedf892929" language="neutral" processorArchitecture="x86" 
        xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" />
...
</asmv1>

I thought I could just use an XPath like this /asmv1:assembly/assemblyIdentity/@version to get the value that I wanted. Nope, my build threw errors saying that the namespace asmv1 was not defined. Then I defined the asmv1 namespace, but I wasn't getting a value returned. You'll notice in the snippet above that assemblyIdentity adds its own namespace, but it's same as asmv1 defined above. In the end it was because I didn't prefix the asmv1 namespace before assemblyIdentity as well.

I manually published my project to get the publish.htm file. I then made it a part of my project so that I could copy it to my published application's directory and modify the version number. I edited the html file and put a #VERSION# tag so that the File.RegEx task could find it and replace it with the $(ResultsItem) variable. We get $(ResultsItem) from the ItemName attribute of the Output element within the Xml.GetValue task element. The following is the snippet of my tfsbuild.proj file that does the versioning of the publish.htm file:

<Project>
...
    <Target Name="AfterCompile">
        <Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionRoot)\SupportFiles\publish.htm" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" />
    </Target>

    <Target Name="AfterDropBuild">
        <Message Text="Extracting version from Application manifest..."/>

        <Xml.GetValue
            NameSpaces="asmv1=urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"
            Path="$(DropLocation)\$(BuildNumber)\x86\Release\program.application"
            XPath="/asmv1:assembly/asmv1:assemblyIdentity/@version">
      
            <Output TaskParameter="Results" ItemName="ResultsItem"/>
        </Xml.GetValue>

        <Message Text="Updating publish.htm to version @(ResultsItem)"/>
    
        <File.RegEx
            Path="$(DropLocation)\$(BuildNumber)\x86\Release\publish.htm"
            RegularExpression="#VERSION#"
            NewValue="@(ResultsItem)" />
    </Target>
...
</Project>

TeamBuild ClickOnce – Automation

2008-05-16T10:42:00.001-07:00

I've had a ton of issues trying to get ClickOnce to work with MS Team Build starting from TFS 2005; we're now using TFS 2008. Getting a bootstrap package to work with TeamBuild took some work, but I was able to do it with success early on.

In our 2005 environment, I had to place the signing certificate that I was using onto our build server and place it in the certificate store in order for any of my builds to work. Without the stored certificate my builds would not complete. Fine, my bootstrap packages work, but my ClickOnce builds didn't. I didn't feel too bad because a ton of people out there have had issues with ClickOnce and Team Build.

Fast forward to our 2008 environment. I had some minor issues with my bootstrap package as I posted about when I started my blog, but nothing compared to the ClickOnce issues I've had. I decided to create a new build for my project in VS 2008 and start fresh. I still got the same result: my build would hang and return no warnings.

My coworker got ClickOnce automation working on his project and I happy someone finally got it to work. I really couldn't find any difference in our processes as far as the build automation went. My project has a lot more dependencies, but that didn't seem to be the cause of my problems.

Every time I published my application manually, the certificate asked for a password. This was the same password that I used to store the certificate on our build server. My coworker's publishing didn't require him to enter one. So then I thought to myself, maybe a password dialog is just sitting there waiting for input.

The reason I came to this conclusion was that I did some testing and looked at the output directory of where my files were being published. Everything was being created and copied except my ".application" file. That triggered the thought that my certificate wasn't signing the application manifest because of a certificate password window just sitting there waiting for input. The build process can't handle window pop ups.

My solution was to just create a new signing certificate with no password and this time I didn't place it in our build server's certificate store. After adding the certificate to my project I ran my ClickOnce build and it worked...FINALLY!

MS Team Build Bug

2008-05-15T14:29:00.001-07:00

Today while scouring the MSDN forums I found something interesting. If you choose "Any CPU" as your platform in your "TFSBuild.proj" file, solution files will build correctly:

...
<ItemGroup>

    <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../project.sln">
        <Targets>Publish</Targets>
        <Properties></Properties>
    </SolutionToBuild>

</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
 
 <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|Any CPU">
     <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild>
     <PlatformToBuild>Any CPU</PlatformToBuild>
 </ConfigurationToBuild>

</ItemGroup>
...

The problem is that I tried to publish a solution and for some reason it didn't work. Actually, the reason was that I had references in my solution to non-publishable projects. So it made sense then to just publish the project within the solution. When I replaced the solution file with my VB Project file in the "SolutionToBuild" element, I got errors saying that the location of my executable couldn't be found. I followed the suggestions on MSDN and changed my platform to x86. After making the change I was able to build both solution and project files:

...
<ItemGroup>

    <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../project.vbproj">
        <Targets>Publish</Targets>
        <Properties></Properties>
    </SolutionToBuild>

</ItemGroup>

<ItemGroup>
 
 <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|x86">
     <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild>
     <PlatformToBuild>x86</PlatformToBuild>
 </ConfigurationToBuild>

</ItemGroup>
...

Visual Studio Bootstrapping (Part 3)

2008-05-13T16:14:00.001-07:00

My project has various prerequisites for it to run and the install location is set to download from the vendor's web site. Unfortunately, the option to specify the location of the prerequisites affects all of them and you can't choose per prerequisite:

In BMG you can set the download URL of your prerequisite file by setting the "HomeSite URL" property:

I intentionally left mine blank as I wasn't sure if the download location would change frequently or not. When I built my project, I got a build warning:

Putting a "HomeSite URL" will exclude your prerequisite file from your setup package. Instead your bootstrapper will depend on the URL to download the prerequisite. If you put an invalid location, you'll get an error:

As I mentioned before, I wasn't sure how often the links get updated and this was why I chose to include my prerequisite with my setup package.

If you're using a build server like our team is, make sure to copy your prerequisite package to your build server. The default location for Visual Studio 2008's packages is "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages" Be sure to update your "tfsbuild.proj" file to take into account any copying of your prerequisite as well.

Overall, BMG is a great tool with some quirks and bugs. Even with the issues I ran into, I'll still be using this utility to create any prerequisite packages that I might need.

Visual Studio Bootstrapping (Part 2)

2008-05-13T15:27:00.001-07:00

Setting up system checks for prerequisites in BMG is pretty straight forward. The only option I chose was the MSI Product Check:

You can either get your product code from the msi file that you're including or from your computer's installed applications. They should return the same product code either way. The "Property for Result" is just a variable name that you'll use to check against on the "Install Conditions" tab.

After looking at the help file (which was another painful and buggy experience), these were the return codes I was supposed to check against:

However, even with my prerequisite installed, my "setup.exe" kept wanting to install my prerequisite. I had to intentionally make my setup package fail so that I could snoop into the installation log. What I found was that the return code that I needed to check against wasn't in the help file, the value I was supposed to check against was "5":

After adding the above condition, my prerequisite checks worked correctly, but my installation failed due to an exit code issue. On the "Exit Codes" tab, I had to insert a success for exit code "0" in order for my setup package to determine that my prerequisite installed correctly:

Visual Studio Bootstrapping (Part 1)

2008-05-13T14:39:00.001-07:00

We added a new feature to my current project that required a third party application as a prerequisite. Hooking this into Visual Studio seemed pretty straight forward; just use a bootstrapping program to create the necessary bootstrap package for Visual Studio. You can also create your own manually.

I used Bootstrapper Manifest Generator to generate my bootstrap package. Although this application was quite buggy for me, in the end it got the job done. However, it wasn't as easy as it should have been to get the whole process going.

The current version of BMG for Visual Studio 2008 is still in beta, so that may account for the numerous bugs I encountered when running this application. I also had some issues figuring out how to get things to work the way I wanted. For instance, if you want a progress bar for your prerequisite's installation, you'll need to put in an installation time:

If you don't put a time (which is just a guess anyway), you'll end up with a screen like this:

The prerequisite will install, but you'll have no progress bar. Not a show stopper, but I found this to be unappealing. Also, if you overshoot your installation time, the progress bar will never reach the end before exiting this screen. If you undershoot it, the progress bar will go to the end and start over. I chose the latter.

Iterating Through "My.Resources"

2008-04-23T19:36:00.001-07:00

The "My" namespace in VB.NET is indispensable. Settings and resources among other things can be easily accessed by using it. You can place items such as files or images in "My.Resources" and access them in your code in a very simple manner:

Dim MyObject As Object 

MyObject = My.Resources.ObjectName

However, iterating through My.Resources is another issue. You might think you could do it this way:

For Each Object In My.Resources 
   'more code here 
Next

You can't. "My.Resources" is a namespace and not a collection that implements IEnumerable. So what do you do? You have to enumerate the objects in "My.Resources" if you want to iterate through them. I started out on the MSDN forums looking for a starting point and I came up with this implementation:

Public Function GetMyResourcesDictionary() As Dictionary(Of String, Object) 
  Dim ItemDictionary As New Dictionary(Of String, Object) 
  Dim ItemEnumerator As System.Collections.IDictionaryEnumerator 
  Dim ItemResourceSet As Resources.ResourceSet 
  Dim ResourceNameList As New List(Of String) 

  ItemResourceSet = My.Resources.ResourceManager.GetResourceSet(New System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en"), True, True) 

  'Get the enumerator for My.Resources 
  ItemEnumerator = ItemResourceSet.GetEnumerator 

  Do While ItemEnumerator.MoveNext 
    ResourceNameList.Add(ItemEnumerator.Key.ToString) 
  Loop 

  For Each resourceName As String In ResourceNameList 
    ItemDictionary.Add(resourceName, GetItem(resourceName)) 
  Next 

  ResourceNameList = Nothing 

  Return ItemDictionary 
End Function 

Public Function GetItem(ByVal resourceName As String) As Object 
  Return My.Resources.ResourceManager.GetObject(resourceName) 
End Function

The reason I did it this way was so that I could call GetMyResourcesDictionary once and I'd have a Dictionary object that I could iterate through.

Unit Testing (Part 2)

2008-04-15T12:58:00.001-07:00

Our team aims for at least 70% code coverage with our unit tests. I've read that quite a few people only test public methods as the private methods will eventually be reached this way. From my experience this isn't always the case.

We use Visual Studio 2008's built in unit testing framework. The nice thing about this framework is that it's integrated into the IDE and simply right-clicking on a method or class will bring up options to create unit tests. Along with this, accessor classes are created so that you have access to private fields and methods.

I test both public and private methods just to be exhaustive. Sometimes I run into conditional statements that I can't test fully without the class accessors. I've hit 80%+ code coverage on my current project, but I will be looking into white to test the UI in my project as well. This will certainly boost code coverage.

Order matters in unit tests. For example, I have classes that depend on other classes to work. The unit test stubs that get inserted by the IDE do not account for this, it merely gives you a very trivial skeleton. It is up to you to make sure that you have all of the dependent classes instantiated before testing the class that you actually want to test.

Unit Testing (Part 1)

2008-04-14T12:19:00.001-07:00

I've heard about unit testing before I started here at KPMG, but had zero experience with it. My software developer friends have experience with unit testing because most of them are part of huge development teams and deal with mission critical software. I understood the concept, but really didn't understand its value... until I added unit testing to my current project.

I'll be honest, I don't find writing unit tests fun. I'd much rather be developing new stuff or even fixing bugs, but I found numerous bugs that I wouldn't have found without unit tests. Users would most likely have found these bugs while using the application which would require tracking the issue, fixing the problem, testing the solution, and finally releasing a new version. This is a lot of time (and money) wasted.

Generic Lists and LINQ

2008-04-10T11:59:00.001-07:00

When LINQ was introduced I was pretty uninterested. I thought to myself, "what's the point?" Well, after using it I think it's an invaluable part of the .NET Framework.

Ever since our team was given the go to update our environment to VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, I've been including LINQ in my current project. Granted I'm only using LINQ to objects, but I see myself using LINQ to XML when I come to that point.

I use Generic Lists all over the place in my project. Today I ran across something I found interesting while I was doing something that required copying of a List. Copying List contents to another List without LINQ is pretty simple.

Dim CopyList As New List(Of Object)

CopyList.AddRange(OriginalList)

Now with LINQ, you can use the ToList extension method and you don't have to create a New CopyList up front.

Dim CopyList As List(Of Object)

CopyList = OriginalList.ToList

Also, from my testing (admittedly light and crude) the ToList extension method is faster at completing the copy.

MS Team Foundation Server / Team Build (Part 2)

2008-04-08T12:03:00.001-07:00

Creating a stand alone setup.exe/msi wasn't as easy for me as it should have been. Following Microsoft's suggestion of adding the .vdproj file to my "AfterCompile" target in my TFSBuild.proj file did not work; I got a compile error.

<Project>
...
<Target Name="AfterCompile"> 
    <Exec Command="&quot;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv&quot;&quot;$(SolutionRoot)\HelloWorldTest\HelloWorldTestInstaller\HelloWorldTestInstaller.vdproj /Build &quot;Debug|Any CPU&quot;"/> 
    <Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionRoot)\HelloWorldTest\HelloWorldTestInstaller\Debug\HelloWorldTestInstaller.msi" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" /> 
<Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionRoot)\HelloWorldTest\HelloWorldTestInstaller\Debug\setup.exe" 
DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" /> 
</Target> 
</Project>

What I ended up doing was replacing the .vdproj file with the entire .sln file. Then I copied the setup.exe and .msi files out to the specified drop directory.

<Project>
...
<Target Name="AfterCompile">
    <Exec Command="del &quot;$(OutDir)*&quot; /q" />
    <Exec Command="&quot;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv&quot; &quot;$(SolutionRoot)\Project.sln&quot; /Build &quot;Debug|Any CPU&quot;" />
    <Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionRoot)\ProjectSetup.msi" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" />
    <Copy SourceFiles="$(SolutionRoot)\setup.exe" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" />
</Target>
</Project>

MS Team Foundation Server / Team Build (Part 1)

2008-04-08T11:46:00.001-07:00

I've had to setup my current project at work so that it uses TFS's build automation. "F5 is not a compile solution" as I've been told by my boss. I completely agree with this because I've run into the whole "well it works on my machine" syndrome many times.

Having a dedicated server to compile my solution gives me a better grasp of how things would work on a machine that didn't have all of my development tools on it (aside from what's required by Team Build).

I also had the pleasure (more like pain) of upgrading my TFS 2005 build script to 2008 when we upgraded. This in itself is really simple to do, you just simply move it on over and TFS 2008 just runs the 2005 version in compatibility mode.

However, I didn't want to just run an older version so I just copied out the part that I wanted from the 2005 version, re-ran the wizard to build a 2008 version, and pasted the chunk of text. Much to my disappointment, the build script didn't work anymore.

I looked at my file over and over again. I and others on the MSDN forums found nothing wrong with it. Finally, it was suggested I just delete the TFSBuild.proj file on the build server so that TFS copies it to the build server again... it worked.

Lesson learned: be sure to check out the TFSBuild.proj file when making edits and don't modify in memory if that message box comes up. I spent a good part of a whole week trying to figure out why it wasn't working.

My first post...

2008-04-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

My boss suggested I share my software development experiences (aka trials and tribulations) from work. This blog will be my medium to do that. I will share things that I've learned and gone through to possibly ease someone else's pain.