Effective Thoughts

You've been there: big long error message within a pop-up...need to copy/paste it into a search dialog...blast, can't copy! The fine folks on the Visual Studio team have changed all that. Thank you! (It's the little things in life...)

Announcing the first meeting of the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Managment Group (COALMG) . First, check this post to discover more about Application Lifecycle Managment (ALM). To accommodate the schedule of our speaker, we've moved our meeting this month to Tuesday April 29th from 5:30-7:30pm at the Polaris Microsoft office. (Normally, we meet every other month on the 1st Thursday, opposite the MOCSDUG.org user group.) Our web site is www.COALMG.org . Look forward to seeing you there! Writing Maintainable and Robust Applications with Visual Studio Team System Meeting Date & Time: 4/29/2008 5:30PM Session Description: Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is an extensible, life-cycle tools platform that helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern, service-oriented solutions. Visual Studio Team System is designed so every role in the development team has an integrated, seamless experience with the tools they are most comfortable with. Code Analysis, Code ...

I'm asked this frequently. What is ALM? First off, the acronym stands for Application Lifecycle Management. Here's the WikiPedia write-up on ALM but essentially, it's the process and tools your team uses to construct software. Kind of like SDLC but a whole lot more. The best explanation of ALM (I think) comes from Eric Sink who asks and answers " What is ALM? Traceability. " Yes, it's long but worth the read. We hope to answer this and lots of other questions about software development with the new group we formed called the Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group (COALMG) . Check it out. We hope to see you there!

Thanks for attending my presentation. Resources I referenced: .Net 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit Download Overview of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview (unrelated) Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group: COALMG Update 4/22/2008 : Props to Dan Hounshell for finding this CODODN video . I'm in there 2-3 times. Nice!

In advance of my presentation, I'm posting the slides and sample projects on SkyDrive . Hope you enjoyed the presentation and please post questions and/or comments here. Thanks for attending.

Quick off-topic post about allergy relief... I've been plagued by allergies since childhood: trees, cats, dogs, ragweed, you name it. I've been on every drug on the list. I can remember being sick every Easter and every birthday (end of September) for...well ever. A few years ago, I consulted an allergist who ran me through a series of tests, determined my exact allergies, and gave me some solid guidance. Following my allergist's advice, I've not been 100% allergy/cold-free but I've noticed a significant improvement. His recommendations: Exam from an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) doctor. I have a slightly deviated septum and some nasal dollops but otherwise, nothing horrid. He checked my jaw, my hearing...all kinds of stuff. Fortunately, nothing major is/was wrong. He did recommend I wear a mouth guard at night to prevent teeth grinding (which may cause eustachian tube clogging). Take a daily Loratadine (generic Claritin). Daily Fluticasone steroid nasal spray (gener...

I have a client migrating to TFS 2008 who was leveraging an old version: 2008 Beta 2. We had difficulty getting the RTM software bits so I ended up extending the license for 30-days. ( previous post ) Well, it expired yesterday. Arg. We finally got the RTM bits and I'm upgrading now. My steps: Follow the uninstall steps to the letter. Get rid of all that old stuff! Backup your existing TFS databases. Kick off the TFS 2008 installation and follow instructions Restart Install everything else you need: Build, Proxy, Explorer, etc. Oddly, the installation utility must be re-executed and these services installed individually. Execute the TFS Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) found within the TFS 2008 Power Tools. (Good how to here on BPA from Richard Hundhausen .) Resolve issues discovered with the BPA tool. My experience (pretty darn good): The databases were updated automatically. I received a "Processor type and speed do not meet recommendations." warning but pushed on...th...

Just a quick post of a PowerShell script I leveraged to clear out a directory of files older than 7 days. Props to Jeffery Hicks . powershell.exe -command "Get-ChildItem 'C:\Temp\' -recurse | where {$_.LastWriteTime -le (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)} | remove-item -recurse" Tack on a -whatif to the end of the script to see what would be affected without actually executing the action. Very powerful. PowerShell. Solid PowerShell cheat sheet here . 

The Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services will ship gold with the .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 . Now when that will release is anyone's guess...what's the over/under? [I missed this but props to Michael Collier for catching it.]

Come see my " What's New in ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions " talk at 11:40AM. Here's the entire schedule . Hope to see you there!

Preparing for my upcoming " What's New with ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions " presentation at the Central Ohio Day of .Net , I ran into a roadblock with my simple Silverlight demo. I have a Silverlight application calling an ASP.Net Web Service (traditional ASMX). The Silverlight application is hosted on an ASPX page served up in an ASP.Net Web Application. I kept receiving a mix of the following two errors: An exception of type 'System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException' occurred in System.ServiceModel.dll but was not handled in user code Additional information: [CrossDomainError] --------------------------------------------------------------- An exception of type 'System.ServiceModel.ProtocolException' occurred in System.ServiceModel.dll but was not handled in user code Additional information: [UnexpectedHttpResponseCode] Arguments:Not Found Essentially, this is saying, "hey this control/page you're browsing on safesite.c...

Yesterday, while migrating a source repository from StarTeam to TFS, I received the following error: "TF30042: The database is full. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator." Excuse you? Sure enough, my 100+ GB drive was full on the server. But I'd only migrated around 1000 items. Surely SQL wasn't consuming 100MB per file. Turns out (yes, there was a lot of crud on the drive but...) the majority of the space, almost 40GB was being consumed by the Windows Sharepoint Services WSS Content data and log SQL Server files. Huh? I still need to investigate and understand why this portal, which is 100% unused, grew so large. Regardless, here's what I did to resolve: Since this is not yet a production database, I flipped the SQL recovery option from Full to Simple for WSS Content and several other databases. Detail here and here . Executed the maintenance plan for all the databases to get backups and clear out some of these files. That didn't help much. The...