Effective Thoughts

Folks typically aren't clicking on Google Ad links when traveling to my blog. That's ok. It's not a revenue experiment. As a result, there's not much (if any) revenue generated on Effective Thoughts. My other blog, generates a bit more...but not much more. Regardless, I convinced my blog partner to participate in the Blogger Holiday Charity Challenge and donate our entire ad revenue for 2008 to charity . Here's a snippet of the post I wrote for my other blog, The Freestyle Entrepreneur (TFE): ...As an alternative, TFE will donate 100% of its ad revenue for 2008 to the V Foundation for cancer research. Folks aren’t able to focus on business-let alone their lives and families-if they’re fighting cancer. This nasty character affects people of all ages, socioeconomic statuses, and geographies. It’s past time we knock cancer down for the count. The V Foundation is a 4-star rated charity on Charity Navigator and uses very little of its funds for administrative costs.

Buck Hodges just announced the release of TFS Branching Guidance II.

On Tuesday of this week, I traveled down to campus with Jeff Blankenburg and delivered a TFS 2008 overview to the fine folks at OSU Student Life . Some follow-ups: TFS Branching Guidance SCM primers Microsoft-related training and seminar schedule(s) CONDG , COALMG , ColArc , MOSDUG Microsoft Learning Microsoft Learning Manager Microsoft Events CodeMash MSDN Developer Conference (Detroit) MSDN Academic Alliance How are unit tests tied to source assets and work items in TFS? Unit test projects should load up within the same solution file as the library (or web site) they're testing. Test class files should also posses the same Work Item relationships as feature assets (class libraries). Finally, within the build operation, the Team Build wizard automatically detects test metadata files(.vsmdi) enabling one to execute these test lists. Further, one can automatically execute any unit test harness assemblies according to a file mask (e.g. *Test.dll or Test*.dll).

Update : Cardinal Solutions will be sponsoring this event with food and drinks. Due to New Years Day and CodeMash , we rescheduled the next COALMG meeting to Tuesday Jan. 6th from 6PM to 8PM. Randy Pagels will be presenting on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 .

Thanks for everyone who came out to our State and Local Government (SLG) deep dive on TFS 2008 today. Alexei and I enjoyed the great conversations that ensued. A few follow-ups from the meeting: We're following up with the federal folks on SLG customers using Project Server coupled with TFS. TFS to TFS Migration Utility TFS Project Server 2007 Connector Conchango Scrum TFS process template eScrum for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Look Team System Web Access (TSWA) Work Item Web Access (WIWA) PDC Online Videos highlighting Visual Studio / TFS 2010 (Rosario) CodeMash Conference January 7-9 in Sandusky MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) January 22 in Detroit Gated Check -ins utility for TFS 2008: Buddy Build Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group ( COALMG ) Looking forward to hosting a full SDLC in a Box on February 4-5 at the Microsoft MPR at Polaris!

This issue plagued me for several hours today so I'm posting my resolution. Executing Code Analysis from within Visual Studio Team System - Team Suite kept reporting: "Invalid settings passed to CodeAnalysis task. See output window for details." MSBuild is unable to locate the correct binaries to perform Code Analysis on managed binaries. Make sure that either Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition or Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite is installed with the Code Analysis feature. If MSBuild is being run from within the "Visual Studio Command Prompt", specify the path to your analysis binaries by setting the FXCOPDIR environment variable. At first, after a search, I thought it was an Environment Variable issue regarding the path to FxCopCmd.exe. Very helpful post here . However, after adding the Environment Variable FxCopDir, I was closer but still getting an error. Finally, I took the FxCopCmd.exe command line string into a command window

You may have noticed it takes a while for Team Foundation Server (TFS) reports to reflect changes you've made to work items or builds. Let me guess...about an hour, right? Out of the box, TFS is set to refresh the data warehouse from its transactional store every 60 minutes. How do I change the frequency of the data warehouse refresh? Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service on your TFS application tier server within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the ChangeSetting option Enter RunIntervalSeconds for the settingId and the desired number of seconds for newValue (300 for 5 minutes...5*60) Select Invoke How do I force a data warehouse refresh? Two methods here: either via the above web service or using SQL Server Management Studio. Via the web service: Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the Run option Click Invo

Coming out of my post on locking down merges , Tim Wingfield provided the following intriguing inquiry (paraphrased): First, most of our clients don't delve into what our dev practices are, what source control we use, how we use it, or any of the specifics below feature/deliverable level. Am I being sheltered from a bigger problem out there? Secondly, how can we as developers alleviate that issue? Source control, like the language something is written in, really shouldn't matter beyond that of a maintenance issue. A competent dev team is going to make use of all tools available. Removing merging from that list is like telling us to develop in Notepad! These are great questions. First off, if your team is developing a product or a deliverable but not source, I feel the process and tools your team is using shouldn't be of much concern to the client. We should be leveraging 100% of our best practices and the optimal tools to deliver high quality software in th