Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Windows 8... what's the point?

So I'm one of the few .5 million that downloaded win8.

"I get what Microsoft is up to, after getting pounded the last 6 years for not having a touch capable operating system to run on phones & tablets, they are finally trying to show they can remain relevant in the consumer space".

So I braved the technology preview, installed it to a VHD, suffered tears and blood, found some problems with the object located between the screen and the chair, but I finally succeeded. And as promised, the experience windows 8 delivers is definitely up a level from its predecessors.

However, as I let it all sink in and head to sleep in my comfy bed, I get this overwhelming feeling that says. So what was the point?.....

Let me explain myself, though I get all that Microsoft is doing to stay relevant, neither the new Metro UI nor the base operating system deliver anything that has not already been done before. And for all their bells and whistles, I feel it is all extra baggage.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Google got it right, all we need today both in the corporate and the consumer space, is a web browser.

Goognight.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Enterprise Deployment Scenarios with VS2010

Figured I'd share this information and suggest that if you are working in an enterprise environment and are doing deployments for asp.net the old fashion way. You start following Vishal and comment on his blog as he will be putting some good info out on how to do Enterprise Deployments with VS2010.

http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2011/07/documenting-key-end-to-end-deployment.html

Monday, February 28, 2011

The Social Enterprise

I'm sure that at one point or another Microsoft and will do what they do best, copy catch up with facebook and bring some of that social goodness to the enterprise through their Sharepoint Collaboration Platform. In the mean-time how about taking a look at some of these abuzzing platforms that are bringing the Social Enterprise to a Corporation near you now.

yammer.com
Chatter
Jive
Cubetree (SuccessFactors)
theFlowr

Thursday, February 24, 2011

New Opportunities

It's been a bit hectic as of late. A lot going on in both my personal and professional life. But, it can be summarized as follows.

New Apartment + New Car + New Job = New Opportunities

As things settle down I'm sure I will ramp up once again on posting. For now, I'm back to finding the right paint for my closet interior...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

TFS Excel Reports Date Filtering Resolved

Back in September of last year I blogged about an issue I was facing with the task burndown excel report and workbooks that ship with TFS. http://thebasilet.blogspot.com/2010/09/tfs-2010-task-burndown-excel-report-not.html

Brian Harry & Aaron Bjork from Microsoft were very helpful in lending their help to troubleshoot this issue. However, until last week we were ready to give up hope. That is until I stumbled upon the solution thanks, to some comments Aaron made.

Here's the deal, the excel filtering issue I was observing from TFS is actually a bug in Sql Server 2008R2 Analysis Services and is described here
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982850/


It can be resolved by applying one of the Cumulative Updates on Sqlserver2008r2.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981356

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

TFS 2010 Team Build & ClickOnce Deployment

***Update***
Here is the template, if you'd rather just use it.



************

If you've searched and searched for an out of the box solution to deploying Click Once applications using Team Build 2010 you are in for some disappointment. There isn't one.

However, here are 5 easy steps to get this working. There are multiple ways to achieving a workable solution, have in mind that this solution worked for me, but might ultimately not help you. YMMV

The default build template works something like this.


It downloads the source code from the TFS server into a local agent workspace. It then executes a build using msbuild.

The solution I came up with introduces an extra step between download and compile to introduce configuration management (Production config file vs Test config file, etc). I also hijacked the compile sources step and induced msbuild to publish the click once app. So it will look something like this. The following blog post will come in really handy http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/04/20/Customize-Team-Build-2010-e28093-Part-1-Introduction.aspx


Pre-requisites

Install a codesign certificate under the local profile of you build service account.

Step 1 New Template

Create a copy of the default build template. I called mine ClickOnceDeploymentTemplate.xaml.
The default build template is checked into your source control repository under
$[Team Project]\BuildProcessTemplates\DefaultTemplate.xaml
After you've created a new template don't forget to check it in. Let us verify that it works by using it in one of our own build definitions. Step 2 Add some parameters

I followed Part 2 of the blog post series linked above and added a couple of new parameters to support what I had in mind.

PublishDir : This is the unc path to the location where you want to publish the app
PublishUrl: This is the url the .application file will use for the install/update fields
SourceConfigFile: Version control path of app.config file you want to replace for deployment
DeployConfigFile: UNC path to the app.config file you will use for deployment
ManifestCertificateThumbprint: This is the sha1 hashcode of the codesign certificate that is locally installed under build service account profile.

You can verify the parameters by refreshing the build definition you saved.


Note: If you want, you can add some meta data to your parameters so that they display better in the build definition dialog box by opening the metadata parameter

Step 3 lets find the config file we want to replace

Locate the "Get Workspace"activity. This activity is responsible for downloading the source code from the version control repository. It is located under:
Process > Sequence > Run On Agent > Initialize Workspace

a)
We need to add a variable named LocalConfigFile. This variable will hold the file path to the local app config file on the build server.
b) We will also add a ConvertWorkspaceItem activity. This new activity will convert our version control path to the config file specified in our SourceConfigFile argument to a local workspace path held by the LocalConfigFile variable.

Step 4 lets replace it

We will need to add an invoke process activity to replace the app config file from our DeployConfigFile argument. To the location pointed by our LocalConfigFile variable.

Step 5 Publish

We will hijack the compile step of the template to tell msbuild to publish and sign the click once app. To do this we must first locate the "Run MSBuild for Project" MSBuild activity. It is the last activity before the tests are run. The path is too long to even try and write out. We will edit the CommandLineArguments property of this activity. We will replace its contents with the following:

String.Format("/p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true {0} /Target:Publish /property:PublishDir={1} /property:PublishUrl={2} /property:InstallUrl={2} /property:SignManifests=true /property:ManifestCertificateThumbprint={3}", MSBuildArguments, PublishDir, PublishUrl, ManifestCertificateThumbprint)



What we are essensially doing is telling msbuild to go ahead and publish the app to the specified publish directory and sign it with the selected certificate. Save this template and you are done.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

TFS 2010 Excel Report Dashboards Error: "Unexpected callback response! 400 Bad Request

Recently while migrating some Team Portals to a new Sharepoint Server, I started receiving the following error when accessing the excel report dashboards:

"Unexpected callback response! 400 Bad Request
Bad Request - Request too long"


There is a blog post by Grant Holiday http://blogs.msdn.com/b/granth/archive/2010/08/13/sharepoint-2010-error-http-error-400-the-size-of-the-request-headers-is-too-long.aspx that describes the error.

The original cause for the error is linked from his blog and it is somewhat of a mind stretch to understand. But from a practical point, the error was occurring due to a difference in setup between our old sharepoint server and the new one. The old server was using NTLM and the new one had been configured for kerberos.