09 Mar 2006

AutoWaitCursor Class

Utilities
If you've ever had to deal with turning the "wait" cursor on and off within your Windows Forms application then you've undoubtedly wished there was a better way.The typical approach is to set the Cursor property for the current form to Cursors.WaitCursor at the beginning of a long-running process and then resetting it back to Cursors.DefaultCursor when the process has finished. You might even set the default cursor within a Finally block in case an exception is raised so as to prevent leaving the cursor in a "wait" state.I've noticed that no matter how diligent you are, you almost always…
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28 Feb 2006

WSCF – Schema-Based Contract-First Web Services

Add-ins & Extensions, Visual Studio
thinktecture has released Version 0.6 of their hugely popular Visual Studio Add-In for developing web services using a contract first approach. The new version has been updated to work with Visual Studio 2005 & .Net 2.0. This version also offers a command line interface to the code generation tool. Here are some highlights:Full support for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0Generation of partial classesSupport for Nullable typesSupport for SOAP 1.2 bindingPascal case conversion is now optionalImproved support for generating code from SSL-hosted WSDLs The parameter ?wsdl can be configured to return the modeled WSDLOption for generating different styles of…
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25 Feb 2006

MSBuild and Team Build Presentation

TFS
I had the opportunity to present MSBuild and Team Build to the Omaha .Net Users Group last night. We had a pretty good turn out of 73 attendees. I spent about an hour and 15 minutes going over MSBuild and Team Build and how they can drastically ease the burdon of the build process.Here is a link to the PowerPoint slide presentation if anyone is interested.
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24 Feb 2006

Configuring E-mail within Team Foundation Server

TFS
We just recently updated to the RC1 release of Team Foundation Server and I had to reconfigure the e-mail settings on the server. I had to do this the first time as well when we installed the Beta 3 Refresh version.I didn't take part in the actual installation process so I don't know if the install asks for the SMTP server and Reply To address and the person installing it for us just didn't enter it, or if it's just not part of the setup.In any case, if you ever need to go back and change the e-mail (SMTP) server…
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21 Feb 2006

Seventeen Minutes with Bill

General News
Just came across a cool interview with Bill Gates on the Channel 9 site last night. It gives a nice insight as to what Bill does on a day-to-day basis. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=163166
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10 Feb 2006

Test Driven Development (TDD)

Testing
Today we finished a 3-day crash course in TDD. We will start applying TDD techniques on our project starting next week. It should prove to be an interesting experience being that we have several schools of thought on our development team.I'm excited to give TDD a try so we'll see how it goes.
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10 Feb 2006

Goin’ to Tech-Ed 2006

Conferences
I just registered for Tech-Ed 2006 in Bostan, MA. It should be a great time if it's anything like last year's Tech-Ed in Orlando.I've never been to the northeastern part of the U.S. so I'm looking forward to a little sight seeing while I'm there - as well as learning a lot about the latest Microsoft development technologies.
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