Blog Archives

VS2010 SP1 Beta released

Posted on 2010/12/10
by

Today the beta off service pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010 is released. Scott Hanselman has a very nice blogpost about it

The mayor updates within this service pack are the following:

  • VS 2010 SP1 Beta
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2
  • Razor Tooling
  • SQL Compact Edition 4 Beta
  • Entity Framework 4 Code First (CTP5)

Some other features which I personaly really like are:

  • Unittests will support .Net 3.5
  • Intellitrace for X64 and Sharepoint projects

For now it’s still a beta version, the final version is expected to be shipped around March/April 2011.

You can read the whole article on Scott Hanselmans blog.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioExplosionVS2010SP1BETAReleasedAndContext.aspx

Leave a Reply ?

Windows phone 7 directions button missing

Posted on 2010/12/02
by

When playing around in Windows Phone 7 I noticed that the Bing Maps functionality has a very nice and fast way to calculate a route from the point where you are by pressing the Directions button. (Your current location is determined by the A-GPS sensor in your WP7 device.) When calculating the route you have the choice to calculate a route driven by a car, or for walking.  Also finding a location on the map works easy by pressing the Find button and type a location or just speak to your phone to find it :) . When selecting details of the calculated route it smoothly zooms to the selected location. Very nice done.

“Current location on Bing Maps”

Normally I don’t use navigation a lot, but on my last vacation I was kind of lost the way back to my vacation home. I thought no problem at all, get my WP7 phone, start Bing Maps and voila find the route back home. WRONG…… Bing Maps was starting up and my current location was found within seconds, but there was no way to calculate a route or find a location on the map. The directions button was just disappeared. And when I tried to find a location, it only searches the internet and not the map. After a few tries Idecided to pickup my hardcopy map and navigate my way back on the ‘old school’ way. At that moment I was thinking that I did something wrong or that the internet connection wasn’t stable enough to calculate the route.

“Details of the calculated route on Bing Maps”

Back home I gave it another few tries, but without luck. Than I start thinking what settings do I have changed since I got my device. After a while I found out that I have changed the region settings from English to Netherlands. I have reverted this change, restarted my device and yes…….my directions button is back again.

I took the following steps to get my Directions and Find  functionality back on the Bing Maps:

1. Go to Settings

2. Open Region & Language

3. Change Browser & search language to English (United States)

4. Click on the link on top of the screen to accept the changes and restart your device.

I think that this functionality is only available in the languages in which WP7 is official launched. I will update this settings back to Netherlands when WP7 is officially launched in the Netherlands.

[ 14 Replies ]

First impression on the HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7

Posted on 2010/11/15
by

Today I received my HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7 from my employer Avanade Netherlands. In this small post i will cover my first impression about this phone and the new mobile OS.

First of all: I’am not a very experienced smartphone user, have only used smartphones with Windows Mobile OS. So I will compare this phone against the experience I have with the previous versions.

After unboxing the phone, and installing the SIM card into it, I turned on the phone and it started a very clean and simple wizard which updated some settings like the region etc. Within five minutes I was able to read my email, surf the web and download apps from the marketplace. Easy as what!

Capacitive screen

When working through the wizard I already noted that the capacitive screen is working very smooth. It responds directly to finger gestures and moves in a nice speed.  This works really nice compared to the ‘old’ HTC Touch pro I was used to.

Tiles

The tiles on the home screen look very nice and clear to me. Customization is very easy, so it your phone will become soon your personal device. HTC has decided to no change very much to the home screen. They’ve added an HTC hub which is mostly doing something with the wheater and looks like the ‘old’ WM 6.5 screen. Not really interesting in my oponion. At least I expected more of it.

Clean fonts

When reading websites on the internet and working with some apps, I noticed that there are very clean fonts used in WP7. Reading from the screen is like an angel is touching your eyes :) . I’am getting a little bit to enthousiastic.

Onscreen keyboard

The onscreen keyboard is working very quick through it’s autocomplete functionality that even includes some dutch words. (Not all) I have choosen my previous phone with a hardware keyboard because I was not expecting that the onscreen keyboard will be handy enough. With this phone I was also worried a bit about this issue, but for now this onscreen keyboard works like a charm.

Bad things

Most people will ask: Haven’t you noticed anything bad in your first impression? Well, I don’t want to call it bad things but I think there are things missing. For example there is not very much information about your device status. (At least i haven’t found it) battery and memory status. Also the settings which you can change are minimal. It means you are not able to screw up the phone, but I like to change settings.

Overall I have a good feeling about the first impression and think that Ms has done a great job when building this OS. This definitly can be an Iphone killer if they have added the copy/paste functionality and tethering support.

Later on I will come up with pictures and probably a movie.

[ 1 Reply ]

Creating “Tree of Work Items” queries with VS2010

Posted on 2010/10/08
by

This week i found some handy feature, when i was trying to create a nice overview of workpackages and underlying tasks in TFS. It’s called “Tree of Work Items” and it gives the ability to do perform a query on workitems in TFS, and on the result of that query we can perform another query on all linked items of the above result.

For example you have some (general) tasks called: “Workpackage X – Develop feature Y” (where X and Y can be any number), and we have linked to that item all the subtask that are needed to develop feature Y. We can query for all general tasks that start with Workpackage, and query all below tasks that are not closed or resolved.

To create this query we have to take the following steps:

1. Click on “New Query” in Team Explorer


2. Select in the dropdownlist the type of query: “Tree of Work Items”

3. Fill in the parameters for both queries


4. Run the query.

The result will look like the below picture.

You will see that you can expand/collapse the top task.

Within the toolbar on top of the result you will see the expand / collapse all buttons which are pretty handy to quickly collapse or expand the whole list.


Also exporting the result to Excel gives you the ability to filter data easily and only show the top task or all tasks.

For me this is a very handy new feature of VS2010 to create a quick list of nested workitems.

Leave a Reply ?

Multibranch support using Visual Studio and local IIS web server

Posted on 2010/09/13
by

Multibranch support using Visual Studio and local IIS webserver

 

Do you know these projects where you as a developer have to work on multiple branches? And you have to switch to these branches during the day? Fix a bug here, add some new functionality in the other branch? I do….

What I found the most annoying where the projects that have besides a web project multiple web services inside the solution, and there all are using the local IIS web server to run on.

 

There is nothing wrong with running these web services on the local IIS, instead I prefer running them in IIS. What bothers me is that for every branch switching I’m getting an message stating:

The local IIS URL http://localhost/MultiBranchSupport/ specified for Web project MultiBranchSupport has not been configured. In order to open this project the virtual directory needs to be configured. Would you like to create the virtual directory now?

If I than say Yes, create a virtual directory for me, it gives an error message that the virtual directory already exists.

So how to fix this issue?

Well we could do some configuration changes to the web.config in every branch, so it points to a different location/virtual directory. That’s still too many manual changes, and would give on a merge action always trouble because the configuration files differ.

What I did was the following, create in IIS for every branch a new website. But before creating the new one, stop the existing one.  By stopping the existing website, you have the ability to create a new website at the same port, in my case port 80. Point these website to a different location on you harddrive, for example D:TempMainBranch or the root folder of your branch.  

Just before opening the solution of the new branch I stop the previous website and start the website for the branch I want to use. Than the solution isn’t even asking to create a new virtual directory. (Except for the first time.) In IIS Manager you will see the different websites, and the virtual directories you have for the different branches.

To make life even easier, I have created a few batch files which I can run to start the correct website and stop all other instances. To make this batch files, you have to use the iisweb command. This can be found in the Systemroot/System32 folder.

Run this command with administrator rights from the command prompt to give you an overview of the running websites in IIS:

iisweb /query

Site Name (Metabase Path) Status IP Port Host

Default Web Site (W3SVC/1) STOPPED ALL 90 N/A

MainBranch (W3SVC/1948497947) STARTED 127.0.0.1 80 N/A

DevBranch (W3SVC/1211348328) STOPPED 127.0.0.1 80 N/A

iisweb /stop MainBranch

iisweb /start DevBranch

Combining above commands into one batch file, will first stop the running MainBranch, and after that it will start the stopped DevBranch. Instead of using the name of the website after the stop/start command, you could also use the metabase path, to execute the command. The metabase path is also shown in the iisweb / query command, and looks like the following format W3SVC/1

In case you run this script twice, it will give an message that the websites are already stopped/running.

Probably there are even solutions where these batch files can somehow be linked to the solution, so that it will run before opening the projects within the solution, but I haven’t gone that far. If you have some other solution to support multiple branches on IIS, I would love to hear from you.

Leave a Reply ?

My first post

Posted on 2010/08/28
by

This will be my first post on my just installed WordPress Blog.

On this blog I will start writing about new technology, issues I’am facing and just fun stuff. Most of my blog posts will be related to Microsoft, especially .Net. Things that I’am currently working on are Asp.Net MCV2/3, VS2010, LINQ (to Entities)and code metrics. One of the new gadgets I’am working with is Windows Home Server  “VAIL” (from now on called WHS). I’am just experimenting a bit with the beta version which I have installed on my ‘old’ computer. Maybe I will blog about my experiences with WHS when it’s start being interesting.

Well my first post is a very short introduction to my plans with this blog, come back later to see more technical posts.

Leave a Reply ?