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.

I know that I've stayed off for a long time, and probably I'll stay some time more. I've a lot things to do and the blogsphere isn't one of my principal purposes. Reading that you'll think "And.. Why is he posting now???" My reply to this question is that Resharper 2.0 is now out.. I've just read it at jetbrain's web and I got excited..

For those who didn't know what Resharper is, it's a Visual Studio Addin that increases  your productivity by adding a lot of features to Visual Studio. Error Highlighting and Quick-Fixes, Advanced Coding Assistance, Numerous Refeactorings, Navigation And Search, Unit Testing, ASP.Net Editing, NAnt and MS Build Scripts Editing...

I'm going to test Resharper 2.0 VS2003 version and I'll write here my  opinion in few days.

Remember: Resharper Homepage

How many of you writes SQL Queries against SQL Server every day at work?
How many of you doesn't remember exactly the type, length, or even the name of a column when writing T-SQL queries?
How many of you haven't ever said 'Why intellisense isn't implemented in SQL Query Analyzer'?

While I was reading some outdated posts in my RSS Bandit I found a tool that answers all the questions before. It's called SqlAssist and it seems that it will be one of my 'must to have' tools for working every day. Usually I use to use Visual Studio for all my development tasks and I love shortcut keys and intellisense. I think it reduces the amount of time I spend coding every day. Because that the starting questions of this post are in my mind when I'm working with database issues, coding stored procedures, triggers or just a simple query.

I don't like to write anything about things I haven't tested myself, so I downladed SqlAssist and I tried it. First of all, I haven't metioned that SqlAssist it's a Visual Studio 2003/2005 Add-in that has capabilities such: Run scripts in multiple databases, Insert T-SQL Templates, T-SQL Intellisense, Format T-SQL queries and a bunch of other cool features that I haven't used and I hope to discover early.

One of the coolest features of this product is Intellisense, at least for me. As I said before, sometimes I can't remember the types or names of the columns and I'm sure that this feature will make me save a lot of time. Imagine that you're writing just a simple query, you type "SELECT * FROM" and Viola! you press Ctrl+J (I haven't reassigned Ctrl+Space to ListMembers feature yet, so I'm using Ctrl+J) and it displays a list with all members, tables, views, stored procedures, all that you need to write a query.


1.- Sql Assist intellisense.


If you write a table's name and hit the dot key it works like Visual Studio, all members that belongs to the table will appear showing info of the member too, I mean, if you write Employees.Something, "Something" is showed with his properties such as data column type, length, allow nulls, etc..


2.- Sql Assist intellisense show columns with their names and properties.


You also can execute queries pressing F5 and get the results in the SQL Output window. And you can insert T-SQL code using the Insert Template feature.


3.- Sql Assist formated query, SQL Output of executed query and insert template dialog. 

Sql Assist also includes inline help for stored procedures, system functions and user functions.


4.- Inline help.


As you can see it's a cool Add-in for Visual Studio. I highly recommend you to install it if you work querying SQL Server databases and development with Visual Studio. This way it's all in the same environment and you won't speend time switching from one window to another.



Related links:
Round Polygons Web site (Makers of SqlAssist)
Sql Assist download for Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005
Sql Assist documentation

I installed almost all betas that Microsoft publish of Visual Studio 2005 and when I installed the final version some of the IDE settings were broken such as  "keyborad settings".

Using "Import and Export settings" from the Tools menu we can reset the IDE settings of our environment. As I said before I installed all the previous versions and I think they leave some corrupt or unrecognizable settings that the final version can read. Becuase that when I try to reset the settings of my environment this message was thrown :

Your settings were reset, but there were some errors.

Error 1:  Reset was interrupted by the user.

In my case means that the keyboard settings weren't reseted and they still empty. I searched for an answer to my problem and finally I find it in the MSDN Forums. The solution that works for me was to delete the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\<* user *>\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0

I hope it helps!

I’ve retaken the C# to Flash addin and compiler, NeoSwiff, and although this compiler stills in beta I’ve learned few things that can help you if you are looking for information about this issue. 

1.- The UI.

This addin doesn’t provide an UI designer as Visual Studio that has for their WinForms applications. I don’t remember where I read a tip for creating the NeoSwiiff applications UI. The tip consists in creating all the UI with the WinForms UI designer, because that we may have a WinForms project into our NeoSwiff solution.

Just copy all the declarations and definitions of all controls that the designer has created in the codebehind of your form and paste it into the .ccs NeoSwiff file. The way that NeoSwiif uses for rendering the controls is the same that WinForms and this is because this works and it will help us a lot. 

We can also create the events of the form’s buttons clicking twice, like ever, and copy the declaration of the events too. Really we ever write this, the designers do this work for us. 

The rest of the application’s development should be as you use to do it, but in NeoSwiff we have less classes than in .Net Framework.
Testing the beta environment I’ve developed a tiny application that connects to a Web Service using System.Net.XmlRequest class, as the NeoSwiff guys teach me to do, and generates a request with a ISBN code and retrieve the book information via Web Service. 

The application is just a sample on how to use this great tool and how give better user-experience to the user.

I talked with the guys from NeoSwiff and I asked about the implementation of Web Services without System.Web.Service that isn't implemented in their framework. They tell that I can use System.Net.WebRequest or System.Net.XmlRequest for my purposes. I know that parse the XML from a request isn't the more elegant way to do that but at the moment is the only way.

I created my XmlRequest and the hadler that will handle the request state:

XmlRequest oReq= new XmlRequest();
oReq.StateChanged += new EventHandler(OnStateChanged);
   
bool bResult= oReq.Start("http://www.webservicex.net/isbn.asmx/GetISBNInformation?Code=" + tbISBN.Text);

Then when the request starts I check if the state is:

XmlRequestState.Success

And finally I parsed the Xml of the response. As I said before this isn't a complex example, only just request and parse the respone.

You can test ISBN Lookup App HERE and download the source code HERE

And now some links:
ISBN & EAN WebService
NeoSwiff Home page

Some time ago I read about a C# compiler that outputs a SWF movie writing C# code. This product is a Visual Studio Addin that uses this compiler and creates new prject types.This issue surprised me and I'm trying to do some SWF application whit this addin.

The addin that I'm talking about is called Neoswiff and it stills in beta.

I hope I can post soon here the code to show you how to work with this compiler.

Navegando por la MSDN he llegado hasta esta página donde explica como desinstalar versiones de Visual Studio 2005 anteriores para hacer una instalación limpia de la Beta 2.

Además nos ofrecen esta utilidad que nos facilitara el proceso.

Ayer vi que en la MSDN, en el apartado de Learning, hay una serie de tests para medir tu conocimiento sobre distintas materias. Estos tests son clavados (en estilo) a las certificaciones y aparte de tests sobre Windows XP, Windows 2003, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Seguridad, Visual Studio 2003 y otros temas, curiosamente hay de Visual Studio 2005  con dos tests y de SQL Server 2005 con tres tests.

· What's New in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005
· What's New in ASP.NET 2.0
· Introducing Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 for Database Administrators
· Introducing Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 for Database Developers
· Introducing Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 for Business Intelligence Developers

Yo hice el de ASP.NET 2.0 y saque un mediocre 60%, aunque teniendo en cuenta que aún no me he peleado en un proyecto real con esta tecnología no esta nada mal. Lo que me parecio bastante bien es que hacen "estudio" personalizado de que deberias reforzar según tu resultado del test y te indican que MOCs incluyen el temario que necesitas.

Usualmente no suelo programar en entornos Winforms y es por eso por lo que hago este post.

Imaginad que estáis depurando la aplicación que estáis desarrollando y Ooopss !!, una excepción !!, yo automáticamente, por inercia cierro la ventana que nos sale con el error pero como es un acto reflejo no he leido la excepción que habia saltado. Antes hubiera llegado hasta el mismo punto donde se produjo la excepción y hubiera prestado mas atención a la ventanita o hubiera puesto un Try Catch para capturar el error y ver que pasaba.

Gracias a un post de Shaykatc he descubierto $exception, que es una funcionalidad que añadieron en Visual Studio 2003. Lo único que hace $exception es capturar la excepción que ha saltado y guardarla en la ventana de debug Locals donde se puede averiguar todo lo que queramos de la excepción, el Message, la InnerException, el Source..

Espero que ha alguno al menos le evite tener que lanzar la aplicación de nuevo sin saber que pasó la ultima vez. ;-)

A la hora de programar siempre hay tareas que pueden llegar a ser muy pesadas, muchas veces se corta y se pega (mas de lo que se debería).

Pues bien hoy he descubierto un pequeño truquillo en Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 y parece que aplicable a todas las herramientas que usan el IDE de Office, ya que he probado con Word y también va, que puede servir de ayuda a la hora de hacer este tipo de cosas.

Todo consiste en mantener pulsada la tecla ALT mientras seleccionamos el texto que queramos y obtendremos el mismo resultado que cuando desde Windows queremos seleccionar varios archivos.



Espero que esto sirva de ayuda  alguien, ya no solo a la hora de programar sino a la de usar Word o alguna aplicación del paquete de Office.