Taking me a little by suprise, the official RTM version of the .NET Framework 2.0 is now available. The really good news is that the official version is v2.0.50727 which is exactly the same version of the framework that shipped with Beta 3 of Visual Studio Team System. That makes my VSTSPlugins project a little easier to keep track of. Hopefully the "Beta 3 Refresh" of VSTS only involves server side changes - in which case the CruiseControl plugin should be good for a while and I can start proper work on getting Nant upgraded to .NET 2.0.
October 2005 Archives
This week Siemens have demonstrated a cheap paper thin display using OLED technology. Sounds very promising, they are talking about displays being manufactured using print style processes making displays cheap enough to appear in magazines. See The Guardian or Physorg for more information.
Well, looks like I made a good prediction. According to the New Scientist, MSN and Yahoo are linking their IM products together and opening up their VOIP solutions to SIP. What's that saying about thy enemy's ememy? Be interesting to see how this works out in practise but looks like Google are meeting the objectives of Google Talk, without having to release a finished version! Will also be interesting to see how Skype react. I wonder if we'll ever see a unified IM system? I hope so.
Just posted a reply to the VSTS Forums, but this is such a common question that I thought I'd post the response here in a place that Google is more likely to stumble across it. The problem is when somebody leaves a file checked out from Team Foundation Source Control (formally known as Hatterras).
If you want to do anything advanced with Team Foundation Source Control, then you will need to get friendly with the command line. This used to be called h.exe but is now tf.exe.
The command line reference can be found at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/cc31bk2e(en-us,vs.80).aspx. Fire up a Visual Studio Command Prompt and away you go. Once you get your head around it, the command line tool is really powerful.
To unlock a file, first you need to make a note of the full path to the problem files. Sadly, I don't think there is anywhere that you can copy this into the clipboard from in the Visual Studio UI (if anyone finds a place then let me know!!). Then you need to pull up the detailed information on that file:-
tf status $/MyProject/MyPath/MyFile.cs /server:my_server /format:detailed
You'll get something like:-
$/MyProject/MyPath/MyFile.cs;C20290
User : MY_DOMAIN\my_user
Date : Thursday, October 12, 2005 11:25:00 PM
Lock : checkout
Change : edit
Workspace : WorkSpaceName
Local item : [WorkSpaceName] D:\projects\MyProject\MyPath\MyFile.cs
File type : Windows-1252
There is an unlock command - if this works it will be cool as it would mean that the developer wouldn't loose their changes. I heard that this didn't work properly for Beta 2 - should be fixed now, the syntax is below:-
tf lock $/MyProject/MyPath/MyFile.cs /lock:none /workspacename:WorkSpaceName /server:my_server
There is also an Undo command. It would get rid of any pending changes that the developer had made and they will lose any work they were doing. The syntax for Undo is:-
tf undo /workspacename:WorkSpaceName;dev_username /server:my_server $/MyProject/MyPath/MyFile.cs
We had a developer leave our company with some files still checked out when we were running on Beta 2. To find out which workspaces the developer had we used:-
tf workspaces /owner:dev_username /computer:* /server:my_server
Then we deleted them. Deleting the workspace also removes the lock on the files. The command to delete a workspace is:-
tf workspace /delete /server:your_tf_server workspacename;workspaceowner
I read somewhere that an graphical admin tool will be available as a download post release for Team Foundation Server. If not, I think I've found myself a new project...
Finally got round to packaging up and releasing a CC.NET plugin for VSTS compiled against VSTS Beta 3. Great thanks to Troy Gould who did all the changes to the source files from the Beta 2 version. Now all I need to post some instuctions to give people a clue as to how to install it...
This years DARPA Grand Challenge has seen a winner. Stanley, the modified VW Toureg from Stanford University, completed the 131 mile off-road course with a 19 mph average speed. Stanford University News has an excellent article, I'm sure there are more articles to follow.
As you've probably discovered by now, Google has launched Google Reader - a web based RSS reader with all the fancy AJAX lovliness you'd expect.
So far, I'm a little dissapointed. The site looks nice, and the keyboard shortcuts work well - but I had loads of problems importing my subscription list - also the performance is a little slow. I tend to read my feeds in categories, and there are some categories that I care more about reading every artcile whereas others that are very high volume and I just scan the headlines.
Basically, Google Reader is interesting but Bloglines has my RSS traffic still. I expect Google Reader will start working better as time goes on, at first I didn't like gmail that much...
A new version of Snippy is out. For those of you not familiar - you'll be sorry to hear that Snippy is not a replacement to Clippy in Office 12, nor is it a helpful marsupial that will rescue Timmy from down the well. Snippy is a handy little tool to help you edit code snippets in VS 2005.
After using Live Templates in IntelliJ and then with Resharper in VS 2003, I was very surprised that you had to go out into Notepad when you wanted to edit code snippets in VS 2005. I kept thinking that this was because the software was in beta. As the beta's kept coming the feature was still missing. There are some "code-snippet project" features now, but it is a bit heavyweight to fire up a whole project just to edit one XML file. I couldn't believe a whole episode of DotNetRocks was devoted to the topic when it remained so un-user friendly.
Anyway, go download Snippy - it'll make your code snippet life a happier and more rewarding one. Hopefully it'll be in the next version of VS inside the box...
Over the weekend, I put up a website for my VSTSPlugins project - a home for open source VSTS Plugins. So far I've put up a CruiseControl.NET source control plugin. I have a nAnt plugin in the pipeline but I need to convert them to VSTS Beta 3 as the API's have changed names a lot between betas (to get rid of codenames etc).
This was also the first time I've played with Wordpress. I've got to admit that I'm very impressed. I think I'll be switching this site over from MoveableType if I can be bothered re-implementing my templates.
