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.