March 2006 Entries

Introducing...

Dominic Andrew Lozano He was born on March 28th, 2006 @ 10:06 AM.  He weighed in at 5.6 lbs and 19 inches.  He’s quite the little guy, but his Mom and I are very proud of him and anxious to take him home.  If you want to see more pictures of him, check out Flickr.

posted @ Wednesday, March 29, 2006 7:28 AM | Feedback (614)

MSF Agile Process Guidance

For those who care about MSF (not, it’s not Spiral + Waterfall anymore!), you can download the MSF Agile Process Guidelines and see how Team Foundation Server helps you to align your development process to MSF Agile or a Scrum process.

posted @ Monday, March 27, 2006 8:17 PM | Feedback (611)

Scrum for TS v1.0 Released

For those of you out there that are Scrum fans, check out the Scrum for Team System download from Conchango.  It’s free and from the looks of it, pretty cool.

posted @ Monday, March 27, 2006 7:17 PM | Feedback (611)

"Do My Slides Suck" Test

Scott Hanselman has posted this great link to Stop your presentation before it kills again!.  This link contains a great test that you can use to check if your PowerPoint is ready to kill…Looking at the list, I know that all of my previous presentations have certainly created a body count. Looks like I have work to do …

posted @ Sunday, March 26, 2006 6:03 PM | Feedback (611)

400 Differences for...

Visual Studio 2005. Pretty interesting (and somewhat funny) marketing for VS 2005. Check it out.

posted @ Sunday, March 26, 2006 5:55 PM | Feedback (611)

Where are you from?

I've noticed that I have on average 30+ readers for my feeds. Just a simple question, where are you guys from? If you could use the comments section to list your name and location, that would be great!

posted @ Saturday, March 25, 2006 11:08 PM | Feedback (611)

Activator.CreateInstance

Ok, some of you might now this but this one is just for the record:  // Do this if you"re assembly// is located in your private bin path// and you wish to get your type dynamicallystring asmName = "PrivateAssembly";string typeName = "PrivateAssembly.MyType";object obj = Activator.CreateInstance(asmName, typeName).Unwrap();   // Do this if your assembly is in your// private bin path or in the GAC and// you wish to get your type dynamically.string name = "GlobalAssembly";string typeName = "GlobalAssembly.GlobalType";System.Reflection.AssemblyName asmName = new System.Reflection.AssemblyName(name);System.Reflection.Assembly asm = System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(asmName);object obj = asm.CreateInstance(typeName);   This code makes all the difference when loading assemblies dynamically.

posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 9:38 PM | Feedback (615)

Nice Software Factories Write Up

Found this really good write up on Software Factories (SF).  If you have the November 2005 CTP Release for Visual Studio 2005, you can build the sample in the article.  This is pretty good implementation of a SF.

posted @ Tuesday, March 21, 2006 8:59 PM | Feedback (611)

Are you SPOILed?

Ok, that was a stupid title.  But hey, I’m not a comedian. Just finished looking through the Stored Procedure Object Interface Layer (SPOIL) write up on MSDN’s Solution Architecture Center.  SPOIL allows you to declaratively link a method with the same signature as the stored procedure (except using BCL types) together.  For example,  take this stored procedure sample: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[SendLog_Update] (@BatchId uniqueidentifier,@PartnerId nvarchar(50),@Mailbox nvarchar(50),@RootName nvarchar(100),@Directory nvarchar(100),@StartPackaging datetime,@TotalBytes bigint, @SendBytes bigint) … To something like this in code: [SqlCommandMethod(CommandType.StoredProcedure, "SendLog_Update")]public int SendLog_Update(    Guid BatchId,    [SqlParameter(50)] string PartnerId,    [SqlParameter(50)] string Mailbox,    [SqlParameter(100)] string RootName,    [SqlParameter(100)] string Directory,    DateTime StartPackaging,    long TotalBytes,    long SendBytes){ ... } Kinda different, huh?  Check it out and let me know what you guys think!

posted @ Tuesday, March 21, 2006 8:50 PM | Feedback (611)

Blog Update: Talkr Feed

I’ve added Talkr to my blog to provide a podcast version of my text posts.  Really, it’s pretty sweet.  If you want to check out my “text-based” podcasts, you can subscribe here.

posted @ Monday, March 20, 2006 10:01 PM | Feedback (611)

Visual Studio Team System Server (VSTS) Released

Those of you with an MSDN subscription can now download the workgroup edition of VSTS!  And if you’re wondering, yes it runs on a P3 900 Mhz with 512 RAM.  ;-)

posted @ Monday, March 20, 2006 9:54 PM | Feedback (615)

Atlas "Mash-it-up" Contest

If you want to have a chance on winning an XBOX 360 and Windows Mobile smarphones, then “Mash-it-up”!  Be creative with the new Atlas bits and see if you have what it takes to win!!

posted @ Monday, March 20, 2006 9:43 PM | Feedback (612)

Atlas March CTP Released

That’s right, go get your copy of the Atlas March CTP release.  Not only that, check out the re-vamped Atlas Portal where you can find great tutorials and examples on the framework.  And for those of you playing with WCF and Atlas, check out this section of the documentation.  WCF + Atlas = I_NEED_MORE_TIME_TO_PLAY_AROUND_WITH_STUFF … Pretty awesome!

posted @ Monday, March 20, 2006 9:37 PM | Feedback (697)

Not in the MIX?

Well, our District Community Champion (DCC) and our region’s self-proclaimed .NET Sex Symbol, Jeff Brand is!  That’s right, he’s at MIX06 in Las Vegas.  He’s been kind enough to do a session-by-session recap on his blog. If you want to live vicariously through him, check out his posts!

posted @ Monday, March 20, 2006 9:28 PM | Feedback (612)

COM Interop Issues with Side-by-Side .NET Framework Versions

For those of you out there using COM interop with your current applications to either call a .NET component from unmanaged code through COM Callable Wrappers (CCW) or call an unmanaged component from .NET code through Runtime Callable Wrappers (RCW) and are running side-by-side versions of the .NET  Framework (v1.1.4322 and v2.0.50727), listen up. There seems to be a problem with COM interop (in particular CCW) when having side-by-side versions of .NET Framework installed on your machine (thanks to Eran Sandler for pointing this out).  I was informed today at work that an unmanaged (VB6) application that calls a .NET Windows Form (created...

posted @ Tuesday, March 14, 2006 10:39 PM | Feedback (614)

Consulting Thoughts

I’ve been pondering the ideas presented in this post for quite some time now.  It’s also nice to see MS had a similar post awhile back.  It has always been my belief that a consultant should always look out for the best interest of the client not themselves.  What are your thoughts on this?

posted @ Monday, March 13, 2006 9:29 PM | Feedback (612)

Integration for Applications

How many of you out there have to deal with integration within your applications?  By integration, I mean either logic or data.  When it comes to logic integration, your application calls a local/external service to perform logic that’s not part of the system.  For example, in your business process, you call an external web service to perform a computation with your data.  As for data integration, your application takes data that’s been processed and moves it to necessary data stores (database, files, etc.) that need it.  An example of data integration is the replication of data accross data stores or the...

posted @ Wednesday, March 8, 2006 10:43 PM | Feedback (612)

Unit Test Problems in VSTS

While working at a client, we started to experience problems with the VB.NET compiler when trying to debug unit tests in VS2005 Team Edition for Software Developers.  Every time we tried to debug an unit test, the VB.NET compiler would crash and would corrupt the instance of Studio.  While looking for an answer we bumped into this suggestion on TSS.NET. I tried the work around and the error went away!  So, if you experience the same problem, try it out. Another problem with running unit tests that interacted with ServicedComponents, was the unexpected termination of a test run.  If we ran 5...

posted @ Tuesday, March 7, 2006 10:26 PM | Feedback (611)

MCSD Certification

Today I finally took the 70–229 exam to finish my MCSD certification.  What can I say, it only took me a year++!

posted @ Monday, March 6, 2006 10:24 PM | Feedback (616)