As part of my automated build and test process, I wanted to be able to confirm that my third party components were the proper version and, more importantly, that they were fully licensed.  For some components, I can create a new instance of the control or component and test its IsLicensed property.  For others, the assembly itself is ...

How do you like to set up your source control for a project?  My personal preference is sort of a work in progress, and I do not have a great deal of experience with branching and versioning, so my design doesn’t take this into account, but I would like to hear what approaches work well for others.  Here is a very simple ...

I only mentioned the Made In Express Contest a few minutes ago and now I see there is a contest for Microsoft Atlas, their new AJAX / Web 2.0 framework. You have a chance to win an XBOX 360 premium and Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones! What is it? This contest is all about creating awesome Mash-up applications using “Atlas” technology. Nothing ...

ASP.NET now supports something called Web Deployment Projects, which are an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 that is currently still in beta.  You can download the installer from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/ I recently took them for a spin with a site of mine.  The key benefit I was after was the ...

Every now and then some high profile personality, perhaps one who once had close ties to Microsoft, about how .NET is really a total failure.  How it's clear that it isn't going anywhere.  That, as proof of these assertions, Microsoft cannot even manage to use it for its own products, so why should we?  Personally I think these ...

Using Visual Studio 2005, I set up a new solution the other day with a bunch of projects.  The folder structure looks something like this: /Solution/Solution/Project1/Solution/Project2/Solution/Project3 However, one of the projects was originally in another folder under My Documents/Other Projects/Project4 let's say.  I don't recall if ...

I'd like to get continuous integration (CI) working for my TFS server here at the office as my next step.  A little googling led to Khushboo's post on doing just this with the RC bits that I'm using at the moment.  The instructions were pretty simple to follow and with minimal headache (aside from the need to install VS on the build box ...

If you need to delete a Team System Project you need to do it through a command line utility that is installed with Team Explorer.  In my case, I created a test project but wanted to also test project deletion.  There is no way to delete a project from Team System except through the command line tool, TFSDeleteProject.exe.  This ...

As I wrote yesterday, I've just gone through my first real install of VSTS Team Foundation Server.  For the most part it went without a hitch.  A big part of that was due to the excellent documentation, which really must be followed step by step.  Even trying to do so, I ran into a couple of minor hitches, but I was able to get back ...

I noticed that my Visual Studio Team Suite install on my dev machine was down to less than 60 days for its trial.  I'd completely forgotten that I'd installed it as a trial back in October or whatever when it was not quite RTM'd, so I threw in my MSDN Visual Studio Team Suite DVD and went into the Repair option, where it prompted me for a key ...