April 2005 - Posts
As you all know, Team Foundation Server (TFS) Beta 2 is also available with VS.NET 2005 Beta2. However, you cant install TFS Beta2 until SQL Server April CTP is released. Rob Caron has mentioned about this in his blog .
Good news about beta2 is, you can install data tier and application tier of TFS in one machine. You can download the installation guide for TFS beta2 from here. Rob, mentioned in his blog that this installation guide supersedes the installation guide that comes along with beta2 dvd/cd.
Update: SQL Server April CTP is also released. Now you can install TFS with SQL Server April CTP...
If you are a MSDN Subscriber, you can download it from here. However, before installing beta2, you need to uninstall all pre-beta products of VS.NET 2005. It needs to be removed in certain sequence, for more details refer this link.
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/uninstall/
If you dont follow this uninstalling instructions, you might get into lots of problems in installing beta2.
If you are not a MSDN subscriber, then either you can order for beta2 or you can download express versions of VS.NET 2005
Go-live license for VS.NET 2005 is available for beta2, if you planning to deploy beta2 products in production environment, then sign up for go-live,
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/
Note: Go-live license is not available for TFS Foundation server.
For more details about beta2 release, refer these links
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2005/04/17/409073.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/bgold/archive/2005/04/17/409045.aspx
Sad part for me is, I have installed pre-release beta2 in my machine last week only... i have to uninstall it and install beta2 again... I will post about my experience in installing beta2 soon..
I have blogged about "AppSettings can Reference an External Config File" previously. Today i read about another use of having external config file,
Short story:
External config file setting will override the main config file settings. If the external config file is missing, ASP.NET runtime won’t raise any error, it will silently pick up the values from main config file. Therefore, override development or testing specific appsettings in external config file but dont deploy the external config file in production server. So that in production server, appsettings value will be picked from main config file, but in development or testing machine it will pick it from external config file.
Long story:
In team development scenario, you might come across a situation where you might require to store connection string or web service url in config file (appsettings element). However, during development and testing you might require changing these settings to match your development and testing server settings. Instead of changing this settings whenever you deploy it in production server, you can have user specific config file in your system where you can override these settings and specify this user config file in main web.config file.
During development, in each developer machine they can change the setting in user config file depending upon their requirement without touching the main config file. However, dont check in that config file, so that in the production server you won’t have this config file. If you dont have the config file in production server, it will pick up the appsettings value from main config file. However, in development machine it will pick it up from external config file. More details about this in,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/tdlg_ch3.asp
Visual Studio Team System tool set automates the process guidance and collection of metrics across a software life cycle thus eliminating the need for process enforcement and getting rid of manual tasks associated with a process.By default VSTS comes with two process template,
If this process doesnt suit your organization, you can customize this process template or create your own process template according to VSTS standards. To know more about how to customize Process Template, check out this Team foundation blogs
VSTS doesnt come up any GUI to customize process template, but Osellus is coming up with a tool "IRIS Process Author" to visualize the Process template editing. If you are planning to customize the process template for your organization need, then you need to look out for this tool.....
My MVP Award for ASP/ASP.NET is renewed for one more year. I got a mail from Microsoft on April 1st. This came as birthday gift for me. I am really happy to receive the MVP award again. Thanks to Microsoft for recognizing my work again...
I am going to attend the Asia MVP Regional Summit in Singapore this April end. It will be a great opportunity to meet and interact with all our fellow MVPs in ASIA. Also Singapore is a nice place to visit especially for shopping... I am planning to buy a smartphone, Camcorder, SD Card... and the list goes on....
I am planning to buy o2 Xphone2. If you have any suggestions/recommendation to buy smartphone or PDA, pass it on....