Recently in Dotnet Category

I'm excited to say that today I started a new job as the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. The .NET Foundation is an independent non-profit organization set up to foster open development, innovation and collaboration around the Microsoft .NET development framework. It's been going a year now and I've been involved with the team from the beginning, but it's fabulously exciting to be an active part of it now. Also quite scary - the team is fantastic with some of the smartest people on the planet, so my job initially is to figure out how to keep out their way as they do awesome stuff while figuring out what I can do to help unblock more openness and innovation by ensuring that the wider community is always involved along the way.

I'll still be an employee of Microsoft but my job is now to focus 100% of my time on the .NET Foundation helping co-ordinate lots of the day-to-day operations of the non-profit organization but also set the strategy and tone for the future. If folks have ideas then please head over to the .NET Foundation Forums and post your suggestions. You can always reach out to me on Twitter(@martinwoodward) or my new work email address (martin@dotnetfoundation.org).

It's an incredibly exciting time to join the team as they are doing some amazing stuff. .NET as a platform is going through rapid innovation at the moment. But more importantly the project teams are working in the open and are focused heavily on responding to pull requests that come in and taking the platform forward with wider community participation which I see as a very good sign.

The .NET Community has always been a passionate one, and a place in which I have found many of my friends. But it is a friendly one as well. I was always the "Mac guy" or the "Eclipse guy" when it came to .NET User Group meetings yet I never felt an outsider - everyone has always been very welcoming and just keen to learn more from one and other. The MVP and RD communities around .NET contain so many passionate, dedicated and smart people.

It's a fantastic time to be involved in .NET. We're at an inflection point in the platforms history and all signs are that things are heading to some very good places indeed.

Now I just need to not mess up and do what I can to help make sure the .NET Community continues to be a great place to be. Drop me a line if you have any ideas, suggestions or feedback as to what I can do to help.

This weekend I thought I would get round to a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – a new website for the Radio TFS podcast that I do with Mickey and Paul.  I haven’t had the chance to play with WebMatrix before so thought that I would give it a try when building the new Radio TFS site.  I’m also behind in my learning's around ASP.NET MVC, WebDeploy and IIS 7 so it’s going to be a good weekend! 

One thing that I wanted to do was make sure that all the old episode links redirect to the new locations.  To do this I’m building a HttpHandler that listens for all the requests ending in *.aspx (which is what the episode links did) and then look up that link in the database to redirect them to the new link.  However it took me a while to figure out how to create a HttpHandler in Webmatrix.  As with everything – once you know the answer it is easy but as it took me a while to figure out I’m documenting it here in case others try searching for the answer with the same keywords I was using.

The first step is to create your HttpHandler class.  In the App_Code directory in your WebMatrix site create a new C# file (mine is called LegacyUrlHandler.cs).  A very simple HttpHandler is below.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;

namespace RadioTFS
{
    public class LegacyURLHttpHandler : IHttpHandler
    {
        public bool IsReusable
        {
            // The same instance of this class can be re-used so we return true.
            get {
                return true;
            }
        }

        public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
        {
            HttpResponse response = context.Response;
            response.Write("<html><body><h1>Hello World!</h1></body></html>");
        }
    }
}

You then have to register this HttpHandler in the web.config.  Assuming this is being deployed to IIS7 you register it as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        .....
        <handlers>
            <add name="LegacyUrlHandler" verb="*"
                path="*.aspx"
                type="RadioTFS.LegacyURLHttpHandler"
                resourceType="Unspecified" />
        </handlers> 
    </system.webServer>
    ....
</configuration>

Hope that helps you.  I’ll probably be blogging again over the weekend as I discover more – and I’ll definitely let you know when the new site is live.

The clever folks over at CodePlex have recently released the code to the sites excellent wiki.  As you would expect from CodePlex team, the code is available as a project on CodePlex at http://wikiplex.codeplex.com.  Even better news is that the code has been released under the permissive MS-PL open source license.

Anyone fancy getting it integrated with Sharepoint?

Last week at TechEd 2009 North America, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Keller to discuss Teamprise past, present and future. If you have Silverlight installed you can watch the interview or you can download the video from the TechEd site.

If bunnies are just a little bit too cute and fluffy for you, then you might be interested in a little side project that reader Terry Humphries just got in touch with me about.  You see Terry had no love for robotic rabbits in the build process – but an electric guitar was something that he and the other developers in his team would pay attention to. So he hooked up a vintage 1990’s Warlock Electric guitar made by B.C.Rich to TFS and let that rock their world.  I thought this was a cool project so asked permission to share his email with you all. If you want to get in touch with Terry, drop me a line and I’ll send your details on to him.

From: Terry Humphries

My name is Terry Humphries and I work for EnGraph Software. I’ve been a developer for over 25 years the last three months at EnGraph. I came here to join a development team that was scaling up from a couple of developers to over 14 folks. Part of my job has been and continues to be leading EnGraph’s push into using Team System. I spend part of my time wearing a developer hat and part wearing the TFS admin, Build Sensei hat.

Having always been a strong believer in nightly builds and making sure everyone is aware of the status of the build, I’m always looking for ways to get the other developers invested in the status of the build.

Having seen Brain aka the Build Bunny and the Lava Lamp build indicator I decided it was time to create something unique for EnGraph to use.

I almost used a full size traffic light, but since all of the pcs here are named after guitar manufacturers, a Build Guitar seemed the way to go, and the search was on. It took me about three week to locate the used Warlock I used as the basis of the project. I didn’t want a run of the mill guitar, it need to be electric and it needed to have a unique look. When I got the Warlock it’s better years were behind it, the body was in bad shape. I had to end up stripping it, filling in a few dings and refinishing it with a purple undercoat and a bronze metallic pearlized overcoat.

I looked at several options for the switching mechanism for the LEDS. Basically, I wanted something that would provide the low dc power needed to drive the LEDS and a programmable interface for switching them on/off. I considered Ethernet based relays, Bluetooth based relays, Ethernet to parallel port converters, and USB controlled relays. Mostly because the other options were much more costly I settled on the USB controlled relay. I decided to mount this control circuit in its own box and use standard Ethernet cabling to get the power to the guitar from the relay. With this option the only things I had to mount in the guitar were the LEDs, the Ethernet jack, and wire connecting them.

Once I obtained everything I need I started build the controller. Wanting it to also be somewhat different I decided to mount the relay circuit old 3.5 diskette plastic case that was designed to hold 10 diskettes. After mounting the circuit board I added the ethernet jack and connected the power supply. Cut a few hole for the cables and bam the Build Guitar Controller was born.

Next, guitar time. I decided the best place to mount the LEDs was in one of the pickup coil frames, you see a Warlock comes with 2 Humbucker pickup coils each mounted in its own frame. I fashioned a piece of black plastic to fit the frame and drilled three holes for the LEDS. Then I wired the LEDS to the Ethernet jack I had placed in the jackplate.

Then I hooked everything up loaded the Phidgets drivers and using they’re control panel applet tested the wiring and after a few minutes I had everything working as planned.

The folks at Phidgets provide 2 way to interface with their devices, either directly or via a webservice, I used both. I couldn’t find a TFS event that fires when a build starts so I created a custom task that turned on the correct relay and hooked it into our build scripts via the BeforeEndToEndIteration target and then used Howard van Rooijen TFS Event Framework to react to the BuildCompletionEndpoint to set the red and green leds.

The basic code for manipulating the relays is only 9 lines:

InterfaceKit RelayPhidget = new InterfaceKit();

RelayPhidget.open("gibson", 5001);

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000); //wait for the server to connect

RelayPhidget.outputs[0] = false;     //Set build start off

RelayPhidget.outputs[1] = true;      //Set build success on

RelayPhidget.outputs[2] = false;     //Set the other off

RelayPhidget.outputs[3] = false;

RelayPhidget.close();

RelayPhidget = null;

I’m not sure what else I can tell you about it other that it’s a big hit with the other developers. As for more about EnGraph you can visit our web site at www.engraph.com

Hardware:

• Warlock Electric guitar made by B.C.Rich vintage 1990s
• 10MM diffused LEDS in Blue, green and red
• Phidget Interface Kit 0/0/4 available here
• 5VDC 350milliamp wallwort power supply
• Various bit of wire, tape glue paint, etc.

Software:

• Team Foundation Server Notification Event project template from Howard van Rooijen
• VS2008
• Phidgets Driver

Thanks for sharing this with me Terry, and for allowing me to post your email.  For anyone interested, I’ll be talking more about integrating with Team Foundation Build API’s during my session at Tech·Ed North America 2009 next week.

DTL307 Brian the Build Bunny: Extending Team Foundation Server Build

Fri 5/15 | 9:00 AM-10:15 AM | Room 404

This session digs deep into customization of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server Build system. Learn about the .NET API for Team Foundation Build and how to use it to create your own build status display or even have your team chastised about build failures by a robotic rabbit.

My friend and fellow Team System MVP, Neno Loje, has been on a blogging frenzy this year. Recently he has published a handy Visual Studio template if you do a lot of playing with Team Foundation Server API calls (as I do), or if you are trying to play with an TFS API example that you have found on the net but are having trouble finding the assemblies required to use it.

Go check out Neno’s post now if you are serious about TFS API development, and while you are at it be sure to subscribe to his blog.

After the highly successful Developer Developer Developer event in Galway last year, this time it is moving north to my neck of the woods – Belfast. For those not familiar with the DDD events they are run on a Saturday and everyone gets together in this great free event run for the community, by the community.  Session submissions are an open process – and session can be submitted by anyone and the sessions that are held are the ones with most community interest.

There are no Microsoft speakers present, just speakers from the .NET developer community – although I hear on the grapevine that our local Irish DPE’s will be hanging around the crowd to soak up the atmosphere and chat to people that want to the idea behind the get together is that we all get to share in our real world experiences and knowledge from working down at the code face.

Best of all the event is FREE, with all the speakers volunteering and facilities kindly provided by the sponsors.  Not only can you learn about some of the technologies that you would have to pay to go learn about at a TechEd or PDC - the DDD events are a really great way of meeting interested and interesting people locally and making some great contacts.

So – if you are around the area then I encourage you to join me on April 4th in Belfast.  If you fancy giving a talk then head over to the site quick and submit your talk idea now.  Alternatively, if there is a topic that you would love to see covered then suggest it on the site.

Find out more at: http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/