Here are some links to get you started learning and developing on the Azure platform.

Azure Services Platform

Azure SDK downloads

Azure training Kit

PDC recorded sessions

Azure sample application (IssueTracker)

MSDN Azure blog

Ed K.

Well, I have hit my one year mark of not using tobacco products!! Its been extremely hard but well worth the sacrifice. I will not lie to anyone thinking about quitting....I still have cravings but they are not as bad and they do not last as long. The main thing that got me through the first 6 months was "hard candy" by the truck loads (weight gain was present) and family support. After 6 months I was able to manage cravings with exercise and avoiding stressful situations.

Ed K.

From those of you that use the Workgroup edition of Team Foundation Server you might have notice that you cannot use the Build Notification Power Tool since you cannot authenticate to TFS.

Here is what I have done to work around the noted limitation:

"RunAs" to the rescue:

C:\Windows\System32>runas.exe /user:ROSCOE\jbm /netonly "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools\BuildNotification.exe"

To automate, create yourself a little batch file for startup. Here is a VBS script to automate the entry of the password for RunAs:

dim WshShell,FSO

set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
set WshEnv = WshShell.Environment("Process")

set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

WshShell.Run("C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /user:ROSCOE\jbm /netonly" & " {YourInstallPath}\BuildNotification.exe")

Wscript.Sleep 300 ' Wait for window to open

WshShell.AppActivate("C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe")
WshShell.SendKeys "{YourUserPassword}"
WshShell.SendKeys VBCRLF

set WshShell=Nothing
set WshEnv=Nothing
set FSO=Nothing

wscript.quit

[UPDATE]
You can "Connect As" from the GUI; Unfortunately, you will have to do this each time you restart.

Ed K.

I’ve been in the middle of a lot lately and completely forgot to mention Tulsa TechFest 2008!  This will be my third year speaking and interestingly I have the only Team System talk this year.  If you’re around the area be sure to come by to learn more about automating your build & packaging process using Team System.  I’m going to do my Team Build talk that I did earlier this year at the Dallas VSTS User Group but we won’t go into as much depth since we only have 1.5 hours.  Looks like another great year with almost.  Infragistics has been a proud & regular sponsor of this event and I’m honored to have been invited again!

[Update]

Wanted to be sure I posted my slides and then also made the link to the awesome build lifecycle poster done by our friends in South Africa.  Thanks for keeping me honest!

Ed B.

I didn't get to read my RSS feeds yet today but I got a hint to go read them and I discovered that Chuck wrote a nice blog post about volunteer work and me.  I guess the cat's out of the bag now :)  Thanks Chuck for the kudos - I really appreciate it.  I'm looking forward to making a really good use of that time.

There are so many people in the development community that spend countless hours of their volunteer time.  Especially in the VSTS community.  People are working volunteering time:

• developing and supporting open-source projects & tools,
• speaking at events and conferences (this takes a considerable amount of time to prepare for,)
• leading local user groups,
• writing blog posts, technical articles, & books,
• answering community questions in the MSDN Forums,
• giving feedback, enhancement requests, & reporting problems of Microsoft products to improve them, and
• all of the other ways people volunteer time that I can't even begin to think of.

I personally know several people (and more) who really focus on trying to make the entire development community better off with these time & knowledge contributions.  (Infragistics as a company has been really supportive in all of our efforts to help the community.) I hope you get as much out of it as I do from learning from everyone.  Microsoft has done a great job in recognizing those individuals by creating the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award.  I'm honored to have been awarded this award earlier this year.

I've really not been able to blog as much as I have liked to or participating in the MSDN Forums answering people's questions.  I have focused the volunteer time that I have had in other areas.  I had a really great time at the MVP Summit earlier this year and came back with so many different ideas.  I really love the VSTS MVP & Champs group - truly a great group of professionals!  This brings me to my idea for this year.

I feel like I haven't had time this year to really provide anything meaningful to the community.  So, I want to dedicate a work week and do something meaningful for the VSTS community.  There are plenty of places that we could all use help so I think that would be something meaningful and useful.  I'm planning on doing this time locally in Redmond so that if I need background information on a project, I can get it quickly.  I need to meet with some people about Infragistics stuff and really take some vacation time in that area (since it is so beautiful) so I think it's beneficial to be local during that week.

What should I work on?

Chuck mentioned a few ideas that we have so far but the one I personally love is being able to release the gigantic amount of work that Microsoft has done with their internal process templates & reports.  Have you seen them?  They are awesome!  Reports are so tricky to do and take a good chunk of time to be done correctly.  The Microsoft internal reports need to be scrubbed for external consumption which is my initial idea for volunteer work.

Or should I work on a productivity tool?

Don't let me taint your opinions though.  What do you want/need that would be valuable for VSTS?  Go to Chuck's blog post and give us suggestions about what you would like to see me work on.  No car washing or details though :) unless it's for a good charity organization then I'll consider it.

Ed B.

So, I came across something pretty interesting when I was making a work item query today that I've wondered for a while.  I can't believe I just came across it today.

OK - Just for some background on what I was trying to do:  I wanted to get a team query made that returned all of the bugs for my team.  The only problem is that our department supports all of our products for mainly builds & installers (among other things) and it causes the Area Paths that we look at to be pretty much all over our TFS server.  Usually you would just want all the bugs for a particular product and you can use the UNDER operator for the Area Path field.  I need to use multiple condition clauses using the UNDER operator.  I knew that the Work Item Query Language (WIQL) had a way for putting parenthesis around the conditionals in the WHERE clause.  (The WIQL syntax is very similar to T-SQL if you haven't ever seen it before.)  For example, here's part of a sample WIQL query that I was going after....

SELECT [System.Id], (Other Fields) FROM WorkItems WHERE [System.WorkItemType] = 'Bug'  AND  [System.State] <> 'Closed'  AND  ([System.AreaPath] UNDER 'NetAdvantage\.NET\Installers'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'NetAdvantage\.NET\ASP.NET\Builds'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'NetAdvantage\.NET\WinForms\Builds'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'NetAdvantage\WPF\Builds'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'NetAdvantage\WPF\Installers'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'TestAdvantage\QTP\WinForms\Builds'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'TestAdvantage\QTP\WinForms\Installers'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'TestAdvantage\RFT\WinForms\Builds'  OR  [System.AreaPath] UNDER 'TestAdvantage\RFT\WinForms\Installers')

My problem was - how do I put parenthesis in the query using the Work Item Query Editor? (UI in Visual Studio)

However, I remember reading Brian's post yesterday about the new Alerts Editor (which by the way is totally awesome and immediately adds value to the product without waiting for the next major release) and thought, I wonder how they did that in the UI with the alerts XPath queries because I know you can't get very good alerts without the ability to group the XPath query conditionals.  Let me steal an image from Brian's post with a little editing showing off a grouping of condition clauses:

I thought to myself, hmmmm... that grid looks pretty similar to WIQ Editor grid that exists today in Team Explorer 2008 and started searching everywhere for the "group" tool button (since there is not a toolbar above the grid.)  I found it.  It's in the context menu whenever you select multiple rows.  Seriously, I can't believe I haven't ever seen it before.  I guess I don't usually write very complex work item queries :)

Have fun writing some useful queries for yourself and your team now!

Ed B.

Speaking of Team System, I found out last week that I have been officially inducted into the Team System MVP group.  Earlier this year, I was awarded as an MVP in the Client Application Development competency.  Don't get me wrong, I still love WPF & Silverlight development and will continue to be involved in that community in the future.  I'm even working on finishing up the technical editing of a Silverlight 2 book right this minute. Or actually I'm procrastinating writing blog posts :)

Being part of the Team System MVP group, I'm really joining one of the most awesome groups ever.  I spent all of my time earlier this year at the MVP Summit at all of the Team System sessions and they truly are one of the best product teams at Microsoft.  They truly value our feedback and the Team System MVPs really love and care for the product just as much and want to see it grow by leaps and bounds.  And when I say love and care for the product, you don't even understand! :) This is definitely a good fit and I'm honored to officially join the group.  So when do I get to learn the "secret handshake?"

Ed B.

Fellow Team System MVP Mike Azocar has announced an awesome new contest to stir up the Team System tools ecoystem.  There are some really cool prizes so far including a free license for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 w/ MSDN Premium subscription and there are more donated prizes coming...  Get the full details at his blog post:  Want to be famous- Enter the Coolest Team System Gadget Contest!

Have you created a useful gadget for Team System? Do you have one in mind? I am looking for the coolest community built tool for VSTS. It can be something for TFS, for Visual Studio, or something that is stand alone. The winner will receive a one year subscription to MSDN with Team Suite!

To enter, submit a screen cast (up to 3 minutes long) which tells everyone why your gadget is the coolest and the source code. All submissions will be released to the public as free source to use and enjoy (with you getting all the credit of course). Videos will also be made available to the public to help make you famous! This should be something new (i.e. not on Codeplex or previously released) and not something repackaged. Submissions accepted up until August 31st 2008. Winner will be announced September 15th 2008.

Judges will be Mike Azocar, Martin Woodward, and I so this is going to be a lot of fun!

Ed B.

I'll be speaking on July 1, 2008 at the Dallas Visual Studio Team System User Group. Starts at 6 PM.  This is going to be a really exciting session for me personally and I love that we have a big block of time to get into some really fun Team Build details.  I think we are meeting at the Notion Solutions office in Irving for the July meeting but I'll double-check and update if there is a change.

Here are a few topics that I'll make sure we talk about:

• New Features for Team Build 2008
• Fun Stuff around Builds at Infragistics
• Build Notification Power Tool
• Building Java applications using Team Build & TeamPrise - (This blows people's minds away)
• Building Installers using Wix
• New Changes in TFS 2008 Service Pack 1 for Team Build
• If time, Extensibility with the Team Build API

Be sure to sign up on the user group website to get updates and the RSVP link whenever it gets sent out.

Ed B.

Our team has been kept extremely busy lately with our new responsibilities.  What does the Release Engineering team do exactly?  Along with creating builds and installers for ALL of our products, we now have responsibility of Team Foundation Server Operations, and the entire development lifecycle of internal productivity tools that we call the "Internal Tools Suite."  So to sum it up, if it has to do with automation or the release process, it's us :)  We need some help (so I can get around to doing some blog posts again haha.)

Here's the positions we have open for the department:

• Software Engineer in Release II, Princeton, New Jersey
• Software Engineer in Release I, Sofia, Bulgaria

Come join our team! It's been extremely exciting lately with what we're doing internally at Infragistics.  Contact me if you're interested:  ed AT infragistics DOT com

Ed B.