I'm relatively new to Team Foundation Server, and I'm discovering a lot of community projects than are very useful for me a for my team when developing using TFS.

One of the things I read about was the Checking Policies. In one of the last events we had in the Madrid .Net User Group, Luis Fraile (MVP Team System), talked us about VSTS extensibility, but I don't have enough experince with this environment to create my own policies.

One thing I consider very important is that all code that are in the repository are commented out and browsing CodePlex I found CCCP ( TFS Code Comment Checking Policy). It's a tiny application that installs smoothly and that allow the TFS Admin to add a policy that checks if the code is commented when a TFS User is checking-in some changes to the repository. It works for C# and VB and allow the administrator to select what items are going to be checked: class, methods, properties or by accessor: public, private or protected.

I'm still testing it but it's a very good approach to ensure that all code of the repository has comments.

Overview.

The first post of this category will cover how to embed a Windows Media Player control in HTML documents.

Sometimes we need or we want to have media contents in our HTML documents. This kind of contents can be in a secondary plain in our HTML documents, for example we can have an mp3/wma file playing in the background to give the user a pleasant experience when he/she is browsing our Web Site. In other situations the media content can be the main content of our Web Site, for example if our Web Site is an Online Radio Station or an Online Video Store platform our Web Site lacks of sense without media content.

Embedding Windows Media Player control in HTML documents.

In order to view or listen the media contents the client must have installed Windows Media Player ActiveX control. To add media contents to our Web Site we need to create an OBJECT tag in our HTML code. It's recommended to place this tag inside the BODY tag, placing it into HEAD tag may result in unexpected behavior.

To get this work we need set up some attributes, parameters and properties in the OBJECT tag. This tag have a large list of attributes, parameters and properties but now I'll only focus on the more important ones.

OBJECT attributes

* To get more info about PARAMS click here. (MSDN page)

Code sample

View Sample

Conclusion

As you can see adding static media content to our Web Sites it’s quite easy. In the next post I’ll explain how to create a custom interface for managing the media content.

Hope this helps!

Windows Media #1

I've worked in a Windows Media project some time ago, about Sept. 2005, and it was a very pleasure experience. I love to work with this environment  because it merges two of my passions, Coding and Audio/Video. I've decided to create a new category in my blog that will gather all Windows Media related stuff.

When I was working with this environment it was frustrating to have problems. When I searched in Google a solution to my problems it returned zero results. Because that this category will start from the basics and maybe the first posts won't be interesting if you have some knowledge about this matter, but the main idea is to create any useful application in the future merging all the posts contents

I hope I can help you if you're interested in Windows Media environment.