Unusual Microsoft Download of the Day: "Cancelling a project (without cancelling your career)"

Microsoft Downloads - Cancelling a project (without cancelling your career)

Discusses best practices for recognizing when a project should be cancelled and the benefits of doing so.

Version: 1
Date published: 4/25/2013

Language: English

Cancelling a project without cancelling your career.docx, 29 KB

This white paper is written by Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software and describes best practices for recognizing when a project should be cancelled and the benefits of doing so.

This caught my eye as its just not something I usually see in the Microsoft Downloads RSS feed...

Doc Thumbnail Snap;

Snip from Page 1;

Cancelling a project (without cancelling your career)

By: Chris Vandersluis

As project managers, we’re hard-wired not to quit. People who quit something easily don’t find the role of project manager to be at all attractive. Project managers are, by nature, optimistic. We are the results-oriented, challenge-motivated, never-say-die, make-it-happen, see-the-glass-half-full sort of people. After all, when the project is in its infancy, where there is nothing at all to show for it but a good idea, the project manager carries the vision of the completed project with them. She is the evangelist for the project's completion.

Even now, aren’t you reading this very article and thinking, “I hope he’s going to tell me how to save that project that I really don’t want to cancel”?

You wouldn’t be alone.

As a culture, project managers are natural cheerleaders. I don’t know about you, but when I watched the movie The Perfect Storm, when the ship was going straight up the wall of water, I was silently cheering, “C’mon. You’re gonna make it.” Surprised? (Spoiler alert: The boat didn’t make it, and I knew that before the movie started. It didn’t stop me from cheering).

Sometimes, it’s just time to stop

...

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Enterprise Library 6 and Unity 3 are out today... (Semantic Logging and Transient Fault Handling Application Block added, other Blocks updated)

ALM and Beyond - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6 and Unity 3 Released

Microsoft Enterprise Library is a popular collection of reusable software components (called application blocks) designed to address common cross-cutting concerns of enterprise application developers (such as logging, validation, data access, exception handling, and more). Enterprise Library is provided as source code, test cases, and documentation that can be used "as is" or extended, and encapsulates the Microsoft recommended and proven practices for .NET application development.

Unity is one of the Enterprise Library application blocks which provides a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection, as well as support for instance and type interception. It facilitates building loosely coupled applications (including Windows Store apps).

...

What’s in the Box?

• New Blocks
  • Semantic Logging Application Block [video]
  • Transient Fault Handling Application Block (this application block was previously a part of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure; in this release it has been generalized and updated to the latest technologies).
  • Updated Application Blocks – 6 blocks from previous versions have been updated:
    • Data Access Application Block
    • Exception Handling Application Block
    • Logging Application Block
    • Policy Injection Application Block
    • Validation Application Block
    • Unity Application Block/DI Container (v3.0)
• New Programmatic Configuration – Streamlining programmatic configuration of all blocks and improving ease of learning and ease of experimentation.
• Configuration Console – largely unchanged from the previous release.
• Reference Implementation – To versions of the same application: one using Enterprise Library 5 and one using Enterprise Library 6 to illustrate the changes and to help users migrate.
• Guides – The “Developer’s Guide to Enterprise Library” is designed to introduce users to the library and explain how to use it through short, practical code examples. The new “Dependency Injection with Unity” guide introduces users to the Dependency Injection pattern, describes the problems it can solve, and shows how to use the Unity container in their own applications.

..."

InfoQ - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6.0 Adds Semantic Logging

...

Enterprise Library 6.0 comes 3 years after EL 5.0 with a new application block, Semantic Logging, providing consistent format and structure of logging messages based on strongly typed events. Log messages can be saved simultaneously to multiple  destinations including flat file, console window, database or Windows Azure storage. An example of generating a log message for a UI error in an application, taken from the Developer Guide (PDF), looks like this:

..."

Grigori Melnik: Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond - Just released - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6

Five month ago we formulated our vision for the new version of Enterprise Library. Now we are delivering on it. I’m excited to announce the latest release of Microsoft Enterprise Library: version 6.

What is Enterprise Library?

Enterprise Library is made up of application blocks, each aimed at managing specific crosscutting concerns. Crosscutting concerns are those tasks that you need to accomplish in several places in your application. When trying to manage crosscutting concerns there is often the risk that you/different team members will implement slightly different solutions for each task at each location in your application, or that you will just forget them altogether. Writing entries to a system log file or Windows Azure table storage, dealing with transient error conditions and validating user input are typical crosscutting concerns. While there are several approaches to managing them, the Enterprise Library application blocks make it a whole lot easier by providing generic and configurable functionality that you can centralize and manage.

Enterprise Library application blocks are standalone. They work well together, but you only have to get the ones that you need. They are also customizable and extensible, so you can extend them to provide what you need in your specific contexts. You can choose to use it as a seedwork and grow your own library, which you can later reuse and sell. We ship under MS-PL, so this is allowed.

What are the main themes for this release?

• Simplifying the library all around
• Embracing semantic logging
• Increasing resiliency to errors
• Enhancing Unity type registration
• Supporting Windows Store apps (Unity, Topaz)
• Streamlining programmatic configuration of all blocks
• Integrating with other technologies (ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API)
• Improving ease of learning, ease of experimentation (fast start), and ease of use

...

..."

Somasegar's blog - Enterprise Library 6.0

...

While this 6.0 release is filled with great things to talk about, I want to highlight three in particular:

• .NET 4.5 saw the introduction of the EventSource class, which dramatically simplifies the task of doing ETW tracing in managed applications (ETW, or Event Tracing for Windows, is a fast and scalable logging mechanism built into the Windows operating system).  Enterprise Library 6.0 includes the new Semantic Logging Application Block, which enables you to have the simplicity and power of EventSource while still utilizing log formats and storage facilities you’re familiar with.  With this block, you can easily direct your log messages to a variety of destinations, such as rolling flat files, SQL Server databases, or Windows Azure table storage, while still maintaining the structured nature that ETW and EventSource provide.  This structure makes it much easier to later aggregate, query, and process the information you've captured.
• LOB apps are more and more likely to be running in distributed environments, where intermittent error conditions are not uncommon.  The updated Transient Fault Handling Application Block, which helps to provide resilience against such conditions, has been updated with new detection strategies and with support for the new asynchronous programming features of C# 5 and Visual Basic 11, enabling increased scalability.  It’s also now available as a portable library for use with .NET 4.5, Windows Store apps, and Windows Phone apps.
• Previous releases of Enterprise Library have included Unity, a lightweight and extensible dependency injection container that facilitates building loosely coupled applications.  With this release, it’s seen several important enhancements, including support for Windows Store apps.

As has been the case with Enterprise Library in the past, you can easily add to your projects just the blocks you need by using the NuGet package manager in Visual Studio:

...

You can check out the Enterprise Library at http://entlib.codeplex.com.

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6

Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable application blocks designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. This release includes: Data Access Block, Exception Handling Block, Logging Block, Policy Injection Block, Semantic Logging Block, Transient Fault Handling Block, Validation Block, and Unity.

Quick details

Version: 6.0
Date published: 4/25/2013

Language: English

EnterpriseLibrary6-binaries.exe, 1.0 MB

EnterpriseLibrary6-source.exe, 7.5 MB

Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ConfigConsoleV6.vsix, 726 KB

SemanticLogging-service.exe, 1.0 MB

Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable application blocks addressing common cross-cutting concerns. This release includes: Data Access Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, Policy Injection Application Block, Semantic Logging Application Block, Transient Fault Handling Application Block, Validation Application Block, and Unity Application Block.
This major release of Enterprise Library contains many compelling new features and updates that will make developers and IT professionals more productive. Two new application blocks are:

• Semantic Logging Application Block
• Transient Fault Handling Application Block (this application block was previously a part of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure; in this release it has been generalized and updated to the latest technologies)

Other major new features include:

• New programmatic configuration that doesn’t require a container
• AsynchronousTraceListenerWrapper for the Logging Application Block, which enables existing listeners to write messages asynchronously
• JSON formatter for the Logging Application Block.

New Unity Application Block includes many improvements:

• Registration by convention
• Support for NetCore (Windows Store apps)
• Resolving objects of type Lazy<T>
• The Unity assembly is now Security Transparent
• Support for ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API

The detailed list of all changes is included in the Release Notes.

...

All application blocks are also available as NuGet packages.

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Unity 3

Unity is a dependency injection container. It is full-featured, with support for instance and type interception and custom extensions. Unity 3 also supports Windows Store apps.

Quick details

Version: 3.0
Date published: 4/25/2013

Language: English

Unity3-binaries-only.exe, 401 KB

Unity3-binaries-symbols-source.exe, 1.6 MB

This major release of Unity includes the following new features:

• Registration by convention.
• Support for NetCore (Windows Store apps).
• Resolving objects of type Lazy<T> by Unity.
• The Unity assembly is now Security Transparent.
• Support for ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API.

The detailed list of all changes is included in the Release Notes

...

Also available via NuGet.

Enough said?

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NuGet your Enterprise?

simple talk - Taking NuGet to the Enterprise

The NuGet package manager  is a great way for developers to install and update third-party tools. It solves a lot of the problems of dependency management and integration. Is it ready for the exacting requirements of  development in the enterprise?

...

• NuGet as That Tool
• A World Without NuGet
• NuGet… to the rescue?
• Dependency Management Overview
• Brief History of NuGet
• The Enterprise Development Challenge
• Enterprise Annoyances with NuGet
• Getting around Nuget annoyances
• Private NuGet Repository
• Preparing Packages for the Enterprise
• Alternative Client Tools
• Taking NuGet to the Enterprise

Beyond Dependency Management

Several tools – both open source and commercial – have repurposed NuGet components for uses other than dependency management. While these components will obviously share NuGet’s annoyances, the same techniques can be applied to mitigate these annoyances in the enterprise.

One such tool is Chocolatey. It’s described as “somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind,” and allows users to install programs like Notepad++, Git, and 7Zip with a single command at the Command Prompt. The Chocolatey client accomplishes this by downloading the corresponding .nupkg file from chocolatey.org and executing the install.ps1 contained within.

Obviously, most of NuGet’s dependency management annoyances aren’t applicable with Chocolatey, but Package Verification, Arbitrary PowerShell Script Execution, and Unexpected Licensing are equally – if not more – problematic. But they can all be mitigated with a private NuGet repository and careful package preparation.

Another tool that uses NuGet components is Red Gate’s Deployment Manager. Essentially, it retrieves application components (which have been packaged as NuGet packages) from a private NuGet repository and deploys those components to various servers. But in this case, since the packages come from known sources (i.e. built by the organization), used outside of the context of development, and are already housed in a private repository, none of NuGet’s annoyances have transferred.

All new tools brought in the enterprise need to be carefully adopted, but as these examples show, just because a tool uses NuGet components doesn’t mean that it inherits NuGet’s annoyances. And even if it does (as is the case with Chocolatey), it’s just as easy to mitigate.

At work we had a discussion about just this yesterday, about leveraging NuGet with a private repository, primarily for sharing in-house bin's. But also to re-purpose NuGet too as a "service" repository. I hadn't thought to use a private repository for storing of third-party stuff we've licensed. In hindsight that seems to make a good deal of sense... Interesting... 

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Infragistics Releases 13.1 with new set of Windows Metro/Modern/UI XAML/HTML controls (which is now in the box for NetAdvantage Ultimate & NetAdvantage .Net subscribers)

Infragistics Releases 13.1

The wait is over! This morning, Infragistics released NetAdvantage Ultimate 13.1 and our related 13.1 toolsets and products to the community. Ultimate 13.1 is the only design and development toolset on the market that lets you create both hybrid and native mobile applications, in addition to modern and touch-friendly apps for the desktop and web. The release includes updated versions of our WPF, Silverlight, iOS (NucliOS), ASP.NET, and HTML5/jQuery (Ignite UI) toolsets, as well as brand new to market Windows UI controls. Ultimate also features the new Indigo Studio design tool which lets you create rapid, interactive prototypes of your application UIs while maintaining your focus on your users, and whole lot more. 

Highlights in this release of Infragistics NetAdvantage platform include:

• New toolset NetAdvantage for Windows UI offering 20 XAML and HTML controls for native Windows 8 app development.
• ...

Brian Lagunas - Introducing NetAdvantage for Windows UI–Your Path to Windows 8

Your wait is over!  NetAdvantage for Windows UI is HERE!  Since the announcement of Windows 8 at the Microsoft //BUILD/ event in Anaheim, CA back in 2011, Infragistics has been watching the market trends, listening to customers, and working closely with Microsoft to create the best Windows 8 control toolset available.  No matter what your UI preference, we have leveraged our existing codebase to create a familiar and unified development experience for both XAML and HTML.

Whether you are a line of business developer writing internal applications, or a developer writing consumer based applications that will be published in the Windows Store; NetAdvantage for Windows UI provides the tools you need to create fast and fluid, rich, touch enabled, true Windows 8 experiences.  Now is the time to choose your path to Windows 8!

XAML

If you are a XAML developer, then our XAML based Windows UI controls are for you.  Our WinUI XAML controls are based off our ever popular NetAdvantage for WPF and Silverlight, so if you currently use our XAML controls, then moving into developing for Windows 8 just got a lot easier.  With the same feature set, same API, and same great controls, you can take the knowledge and experience you already have and start writing touch enabled Windows Store applications without skipping a beat.

I bet you’re wondering what you get for the XAML stack.  Well, let’s check out the controls.

• Data Chart
• Grid – CTP
• Barcode
• Calendar
• Currency Input
• DateTime Input
• Masked Input
• Numeric Input
• Excel Framework – CTP
• Persistence Framework – CTP

Wow, that’s a lot of XAML!  Let’s check these controls out in a little more detail.

...

HTML

What’s that you say?  You’re not a XAML developer?  You come from the world of HTML and jQuery?  Give you a DIV and a CSS style any day?  Well, okay I will!  Our NetAdvantage for Windows UI also ships with some great butt-kicking HTML controls.  If you currently use our IgniteUI product, that’s our HTML and jQuery controls, then you’re going to love this.  Our WinUI HTML controls are based off our IgniteUI controls.  Don’t use our IgniteUI controls?  No problem, f you know HTML and jQuery then you already know how to use our controls.  Either way, you are ready to start writing stunning, finger burning, touch enabled HTML Windows Store applications with our HTML based WINUI controls.

So what did we give you in our first release of WinUI HTML?  Let’s take a looksy…

• Grid
• Hierarchical Grid
• Data Chart
• Map
• Pie Chart
• Date Picker
• Date Editor
• Currency Editor
• Numeric Editor
• Masked Editor
• Text Editor

Say Whhhaaaaatttt!  Yeah, that’s a ton of great HTML controls.  Everything you need to get started writing your app.  Let’s dig a little deeper into these babies!

..."

There's nothing like getting something new in a package/subscription you're already paying for. If you're a Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate & NetAdvantage .Net subscriber, there's not one new control suite to play with but two! (but both for Win8 Modern UI/WinStore apps). (There's also a free 30 day trial)

Good to see a top tier vendor make an investment in Windows 8 WinStore Apps.

Also it's pretty cool how they leveraged their existing control suite to provide the XAML/HTML controls. A huge plus if you are using their existing controls.

Want to play with the controls now, free? There are two WinStore app's for that... http://bit.ly/WinUI-XAML and http://bit.ly/WinUI-HTML

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Prism? Infragistics? Dock and Ribbon? Oh my...
Ignite your web dev with the Infragistics Ignite UI learning series by Craig Shoemaker
Navigation, MVVM, XAML and a little IG (Infragistics) in this "Building IG Outlook" video
Infragistics gives their Windows Forms controls some Coded UI Testing love
Parsing 101 with the Infragistics Parsing Framework
Don't be blue, be Indigo! Indigo Studio from Infragistics released today (and it's free forever too)
Infragistics shows off their new Undo/Redo Framework CTP
Infragistics Blogs
Problem/Solution with the Infragistics NetAdvantage 2005 Vol 3 CLR2 Toolbox Install Utility ("Tools.InstallCommunityControls" is not valid)
Upgrading an Existing Application to use the New Infragistics Application Styling Feature
Infragistics NetAdvantage 2006 Volume 1 Released...
Infragistics NetAdvantage Select 2008 Volume 3 released today
New Infragistics ClickOnce & WinGrid KB Articles
Infragistics - Installing NetAdvantage for .NET on Windows Vista

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Getting into the mood... (well...) Microsoft Research Mood Board

Microsoft Research - Microsoft Research Mood Board

Microsoft Research Mood Board is a Windows application that combines image search, image collection, and sketching to support creative activities.

Download Details

File Name: MSRMoodBoardSetup.msi

Version: 1

Date Published: 23 April 2013

Download Size: 3.46 MB

There's not much more information seemingly available. Here's some snaps from the app...

Desktop Icon;

Main screen;

A couple terms searched. Not how the download arrows on the images matches the colors in the search area;

After clicking on an Image (not the download arrow, just the image... think zoom);

The intent seems to download images and build a collage/etc...

The UI seems touch friendly, though it is a x86 download and not a Windows Store/Metro app (so should work on Surface RT Pro or Win8 touch screen, but not on a Surface RT).

There's collapsed view as well;

In short kind of a fun application to play with...

One thing, I'm guessing the dev's had high rez monitors. On my 1368x768 Win8 box, with the application in normal mode, I couldn't get to the bottom of the app, etc, and couldn't resize it from the top/title bar as you normally can. Had to maximize the app to access all the features. Not a biggie but a little irritating.

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Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel download - A granddaddy free ISO mounting utility from Microsoft

Microsoft Downloads - Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel

"This utility enables users of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 to mount ISO disk image files as virtual CD-ROM drives.

Version: 2.0.1.1
Date published: 4/23/2013

Language: English

winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe, 60 KB

Overview

The Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel utility enables users of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 to mount ISO disk image files as virtual CD-ROM drives. This can be highly useful for reading disk images to install software or recover backup files. Notes: This tool is not supported by Microsoft; use at your own risk. Windows 8 users do NOT need this tool. Windows 8 natively supports ISO files. In Windows 8, you can simply open an ISO file and Windows automatically assigns it a drive letter and reads it as a virtual drive.

Supported operating systems: Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP

..."

Not sure how much of an update this is, but this is a grand daddy of ISO mounting tools (one I referenced in 2005) and just the other day I was asked about ISO mounting on a pre-Win8 machine, so...

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Public Sector Developer Weblog highlights a whole passel of free workshops for the coming months...

Public Sector Developer Weblog

• NW Cadence- Live Workshops
• Neudesic- Live Workshops
• Magenic- Live Workshops
• InCycle- Live Workshops
• Imaginet- Live Workshops
• AgileThought Live Workshops

Just a few sessions to keep you busy and your brain growing...

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The First [12] Steps in using Caliburn Micro to build awesome Windows Phone 8 App's

qmatteoq.com - First steps with Caliburn Micro in Windows Phone 8 – The complete series

This post is simply a collector of all the blog posts I wrote about using Caliburn Micro, a very powerfull Model-View-ViewModel framework, in Windows Phone 8. The posts are listed in chronological order, so it will be easier for you to follow the logic path of the posts: from the basic concepts (what’s Caliburn, conventions, etc.) to the most complex stuff (tombstoning, collections, messaging).

This list will be published also at the bottom of every post of the series, so that it will be easier for you to jump from a post to another.

...

..."

Caliburn Micro is one of my favorite MVVM frameworks and I'm really starting to fall in love with my Windows Phone 8, so highlighting this just seems natural, doesn't it? :)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Caliburn.Micro v1.5.0 released (CM gets Tasks, Async/Await and Share/Setting for RT... and bug fixes of course)
Callisto + Caliburn.Micro + these Dialog Helpers = Happy Windows RT Dev Camper
Caliburn.Micro RTW’s (Think a”Lighter/smaller/micro MVVM Framework for WPF, WP7 & Silverlight)
Doing WPF/SilverLight? Interested in presentation patterns like MVVM, MVC? Testing/TDD friendly development? Solutions to common UI architecture problems? Then Caliburn might just be for you

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You are such a Code Digger... Code Digger VS2012 extension released (Think "Pex powered input/output analysis for Portable Libraries Extension")

Nikolai Tillmann's Blog - Introducing: Code Digger, an extension for VS2012

Today, the Pex team at Microsoft Research (Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux) is happy to announce that Code Digger, an extension for Visual Studio 2012, has shipped to the Visual Studio Gallery. After shipping the Moles framework as Fakes in Visual Studio 2012, this is the next step of bringing our research projects to the latest and greatest development environment.

Download now from Visual Studio Gallery

Code Digger comes as a lightweight Visual Studio extension.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/fb5badda-4ea3-4314-a723-a1975cbdabb4

...

What is Code Digger?

Code Digger generates interesting values that show different behaviors of your .NET code. The result is a table showing for which inputs your code produces which outputs.

What is the relation between Pex and Code Digger?

Under the hood, Code Digger uses the Pex engine and Microsoft Research’s Z3 constraint solver to systematically analyze all branches in the code, trying to generate a test suite that achieves high code coverage. Working together with Peter Provost from the Visual Studio product group, we tried to create a really simple user interface. We want to bring the idea of code exploration to every programmer’s fingertips. This is different from the Pex Power Tools where we gave you many options to configure, and you had to embrace the idea of (Parameterized) Unit Testing to get all benefits. Code Digger is not a full replacement of Pex, it is merely the first extension that the Pex team ships for Visual Studio 2012 – stay tuned for more.

Limitations

Code Digger only works on public .NET code that resides in Portable Class Libraries.

By restricting the code exploration to Portable Class Libraries, we avoid problems with code that has dependencies on a particular platform which the Pex engine does not understand.

Visual Studio Gallery - Microsoft Code Digger

Overview

Code Digger analyzes possible execution paths through your .NET code. The result is a table where each row shows a unique behavior of your code. The table helps you understand the behavior of the code, and it may also uncover hidden bugs.

Through the new context menu item "Generate Inputs / Outputs Table" in the Visual Studio editor, you can invoke Code Digger to analyze your code. Code Digger computes and displays input-output pairs. Code Digger systematically hunts for bugs, exceptions, and assertion failures.

Code Digger only works on public .NET code that resides in Portable Class Libraries.

Under the hood, Code Digger uses the Pex engine and Microsoft Research’s Z3 constraint solver to systematically analyze all branches in the code, trying to generate a test suite that achieves high code coverage.

Code Digger is the first extension from the Pex team at Microsoft Research for Visual Studio 2012. Stay tuned for future extensions that bring more aspects of the rich experience of the Pex Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools to the latest version of Visual Studio. If you have feedback for us, or bug reports, feel free to write an email to the Pex team at Microsoft Research. If you have used Pex before, let us know if you are missing a particular feature.

To stay up-to-date, like Pex and Moles on Facebook.

..."

That's an interesting VS Extension and I like how it leverages Pex and MSR work. The fact it only works on Portable Libraries limits it for me, but still I think this is kind of cool...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
[Rumor] Pex and Moles to be part of Visual Studio 11?

Interested in PEX & MOLES? Wish you could go to a five hour workshop on them? Here’s the next best thing…

Think you can’t unit test ASP.Net? Here’s a tutorial for one way, using the power of Pex and Moles
Playing with Pex is just a web browser away at www.pexforfun.com

Pex 2010 (aka Pex 0.90.50303.0) now available on MSDN Subscribers Downloads
Pex license updated – You can now use it in commercial projects
Pex 0.5 Released - Your Parameterized Unit Test Buddy

Read More

I trace, you trace, we all IntelliTrace (or want to at least) - Here's a link round-up to help you learn it

Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog - Learn IntelliTrace

There’s a lot of good content on IntelliTrace and we’ve grabbed a few links here to have in one place. If you’ve got some time and want to get to know more about IntelliTrace in Visual Studio these are great places to go.

Zain Naboulsi on Understanding IntelliTrace:

• ...

A couple of interesting reads in the context of DevOps:

• ...

Of course, we on the IntelliTrace Team continue to blog about the brand new features we are adding, for example:

• ...

If you prefer videos, our own Larry Guger is responsible for many which are included in the list below:

• ...

If you want to give IntelliTrace a spin yourself Brian Keller has collated various ALM Hands-on-labs and some instructions for getting started:

...

"

Nice link round-up about IntelliTrace...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
DevOps & IntelliTrace, better than beer and pizza (well, maybe not THAT good, but...) Here's some ALM Ranger Guidance to show you why...
John shows us how IntelliTrace can be our secret debugging super power
Mickey Makes IntelliTrace Make Sense
IntelliTrace & *.itrace files eating your drive space?
Visual Studio 2010 Licensing White Paper (includes Team Foundation Server, Lab Management and IntelliTrace)
TechEd 2011 North America TFS v.Next News (Think Dev <-> Stakeholder and Dev <-> Ops edition)
Four chapters that didn’t make the “"Visual Basic 2010 Unleashed” book are being given to you free...
The Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management video tour – Six videos, 30 minutes, toward Lab Management guru’ism

Read More

Example using the Task Parallel Dataflow Library help keep... well, your data, um, flowing...

.Net Curry - Building an Image Resizer using .NET Parallel Dataflow Library in .NET 4.5

Abstract: With .NET 4.5, the Task Parallel Library team went another step ahead and built a little known library called Parallel Dataflow Library. This article explains why as a .NET developer, you must know about this powerful library.

By now, we’ve all heard about the Task Parallel Library (TPL) introduced in .NET 4.0. TPL is really neat and goes a long way in making parallel programming palatable for a bigger slice of developers. With .NET 4.5, the TPL team actually went another step ahead and built a little known library called Parallel Dataflow Library.

Parallel what… you ask?

Yeah well, the naming isn’t very helpful and nor has it been blogged about much! But the Parallel Dataflow library is actually quite powerful. It leverages the TPL to provide us with a nice in-process, message passing functionality. This helps in creating a ‘pipeline’ of ‘tasks’ when we are trying to build asynchronous applications. Confused? Let’s try with an example.

Let’s think of this scenario! You need to process multiple images (some processing resizing/applying Instagram like filters or something else, and then saving the new images). Also the images are going to come into your system intermittently. Once they arrive, you need to process them and put them at a destination location. How shall we go about it?

Well one way is to wait for images to arrive, when they arrive (either one at a time or in a bulk), pick each available image, load it, process it, move it to output and go back to waiting. We can do this in two ways

This as we can see is a monolithic and synchronous action for three potentially independent processes. For every file we are doing these three steps while the next files waits to be considered.

In the second approach, once a file is loaded, the ‘loader’ can handover the image to the ‘processor’ and go back to loading again! Similarly, once a processor has done processing, it can handover the file to the output system to save and go back to processing the next file, ditto with the output processor! So these three tasks can actually be piped together, on the input side we have file or files as they come in, on the output side you have file as it gets done. The above image would get transformed into the following

...

As we can see, it’s a pipeline of smaller tasks that communicate with each other when data is flowing through time. The Parallel Dataflow Library helps us build these kind of solutions with relative ease. The parallel execution and asynchronous behavior is taken care of by the TPL, on which the Dataflow library is build.

Now that we know what it does, let’s see some of the types and structures that help the Parallel Dataflow Library achieve this.

Parallel Dataflow Library – Programming Model

Continuing with our above example, if we look at the three blocks we have, the first one can be considered a Source Block, the Last one can be considered the target block and the center one can be considered the transformation block that moves data from source to target while doing some action with it.

...

Conclusion

That was a very quick and brief introduction to the Parallel Dataflow Library of TPL! It is quite extensive with respect to the Blocks that it supports and it’s a matter of cooking up the use case we want to throw at it. I hope to have at least setup the premises under which such an architecture should be considered.

Overall the Dataflow library helps us do ‘in-process’ message passing that can be used for dataflow and pipelining at a much higher level as in with objects in managed code, as opposed to with bits and bytes inside of CPU execution pipelines! "

If you have data or files that flow from one state to a next and have a bunch of them and want or need to live in a multithreaded world (and who doesn't these days?), you might want to check out the Task Parallel Dataflow library. I mean it's there already, you might was well, right?

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Primer for TPL TDF (Task Parallel Library- Task Parallel Dataflow)
TPL (Task Parallel Library) Dataflow CTP Released
PDC10 Async Round-up

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Learning Log Parser Studio in two parts... (From Install to Library Ninja)

Kary Wall - Getting Started with Log Parser Studio - Part 1 & Getting Started with Log Parser Studio - Part 2

Hopefully, if you are reading this you already know what Log Parser 2.2 is and that Log Parser Studio is a graphical interface for Log Parser. Additionally, Log Parser Studio (which I will refer to from here forward simply as LPS) contains a library of pre-built queries and features that increases the usefulness and speed of using Log Parser exponentially. If you need to rip through gigabytes of all types of log files and tell a story with the results, Log Parser Studio is the tool for you!

None of this is of much use if you don’t have LPS and know how to get it up and running but luckily this is exactly what this blog post is about. So let’s get to it; the first thing you want to do of course is to download LPS and any prerequisites. The prerequisites are:

1. Log Parser Studio (get it here).
2. .NET 4.x which can be found here.
3. Log Parser 2.2 which is located here.

Once everything is downloaded we’ll install the prerequisites first. Run the installer for Log Parser 2.2 and make sure that you choose the “Complete” install option. The complete install option installs logparser.dll which is the only component from the install LPS actually requires:

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Running your first query

By this point you are ready to start running queries. All queries are stored in the LPS library which is the first window you see when opening LPS. To load any query to run, just double-click it and it will open in its own tab:

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Here are the results from my test logs after the query has completed:

 

Conclusion

And that’s it, you are now up and running with LPS. Just choose your logs, find a query that you want to use and click run query. The only thing you need to be aware of is that different log formats require different log types so you’ll want to make sure those match or you’ll get an error. In other words the format for IISW3C format is different than the format for an XML file and LPS needs to know this so it can pass the correct information to Log Parser in the background. Thankfully, these are already setup inside the existing queries, all you need to do is choose an IIS query for IIS logs and so on.

Most every button and interface element in LPS has a tool-tip explanation of what that button does so be sure to hover your mouse cursor over them to find out more. There is also a tips message that randomly displays how-to tips and tricks in the top-right of the main interface. You can also press F10 to display a new random tip.

You can also write your own queries, save them to the library, edit existing queries and change log types and all format parameters. There is a huge list of features in LPS both obvious and not so obvious, thusly upcoming posts will build on this and introduce you the sheer power and under-the-hood tips and tricks that LPS offers. It’s amazing how much can be accomplished once you learn how it all works and that’s what we are going to do next. :)

"In my last post, Getting Started with Log Parser Studio - Part 1, I showed how to get Log Parser Studio along with its minimal prerequisites installed, basic setup as well as running your first query. In this post I'll be taking you on a basic "getting around town" tour to help familiarize you with the LPS Query Library and managing queries. To kick things off let's take a quick look at the library.

Above we see the library that holds all the queries. It's fairly self-explanatory that its a list of all the queries that LPS manages along with a description, date modified, type of query and the query itself (all of these are not visible in the image above). All queries are prefixed with the basic category they reside in. For example a query that queries log files for an IIS website will appear in the following format: IIS: Name Of Query. This makes it easy to visually browse for the query you are looking for.

If you'll remember from my last post I mentioned that the type of query needs to match the type of log being queried. These prefixes directly or sometimes indirectly correlate to those types so if you have IISW3C logs you need queries for, then queries beginning with IIS: are the ones you want. You can also sort the queries by clicking the column header of the field you wish to sort by.

Another advantage to this is searching. Notice the search box at the top right. To quickly narrow down the visible results in the library to list only the log type you need, simply type part or all of any prefix and click the search (>) button. This is free text search of the query name field so you can search for any text contained in any query name no matter where it falls within that string. To clear the results and show all queries again click the X button or press the escape key on your keyboard.

To open any query just double-click it and it will open in it's own tab. You can also right-click a query from within the library for a list of context menu options which are as follows:

..."

LPS (Log Parser Studio) is a great tool for those who want to use Log Parser but not doing doing it everyday don't remember the command line syntax. Also the Library feature is cool and very time saving...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Log Parser Studio - Think "Log Parser GUI" Or "Making Log Parser click-click fun and easy to use..." or "Query Analyzer for Log Parser"

Here's a look at the Microsoft Log Parser from a different point of view, from the Computer Forensics' side of the house OR Check out a 'Query Analyzer/SSMS' for Log Parser called Log Parser Lizard

Log Parser Ping Graph Fun (aka “Using Log Parser to parse command line output”)
SELECT * FROM Log... with the cool tool that’s been around for years, Log Parser!

Download details: Log Parser 2.2

The Unofficial Log Parser Support Site
IIS Diagnostics Toolkit (January 2006)
SQL Server 2000 Report Pack for IIS Logs

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"The Essential Binary Repository Management Cheat Sheet" (Think "You've got bin's in my source VCS... No, you've got source in my bin VCS")

DZone - Binary Repository Management

The Essential Binary Repository Management Cheat Sheet

Software development produces both source code and binary artifacts, and both kinds of artifact need to be handled differently. This Refcard assumes basic familiarity with source repository management, and is intended to help you design and configure a binary repository, optimize it for various workflows, and fit it smoothly into your software development lifecycle.

From the PDF

CONTENTS INCLUDE:
❱ Repository Requirements
❱ Repository Design
❱ Hosting & Management
❱ Security & Maintenance
❱ Binary Releases
❱ Popular Repository Managers... and More!

Software development produces two distinct kinds of artifacts: (1) source code, and (2) binary artifacts. This Refcard assumes basic familiarity with source repository management, and is intended to help you design and configure a binary repository, optimize it for various workflows, and fit it smoothly into your software development lifecycle.

I liked the broad, cross platform nature of this refcard.  While for .Net Dev's, Nuget is pretty much the real go to for this, what I thought interesting was that two of the three products mentioned at the end provide Nuget support i.e. Nuget is as much an api as Nuget.org is a repository. Remember, you don't have to use Nuget.org if you don't want too. Nuget makes it very very easy to use other repositories...

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Bye bye Kona code name... Hello "Prism for Windows Runtime"

Brian Noyes Blog - Kona is Dead, Long Live Prism!

If you have read my blog, seen me speak at conferences or user groups, or read some of my articles lately you might know I have been working with the Microsoft patterns & practices team on guidance for Windows Store Business apps. This guidance has been code named “Kona” up until recently, and I’ve posted and written articles on that in various places.

As the team was getting the guidance ready for release, they decided to rename it to “Prism for Windows Runtime”. The names have not all been updated on the Codeplex site or in the downloads yet, but the code has been refactored to the final namespaces and project names that it will ship with.

Specifically the guidance is called “Prism for Windows Runtime”, and it is guidance on building loosely coupled, maintainable, testable applications based on the MVVM pattern for WinRT, especially Line of Business or Business to Consumer applications.

The guidance contains:

...

If you want to learn more, be sure to check out my article series here, and keep an eye out for my Pluralsight Course that will be out in a month or so titled “Building Windows Store Business apps with Prism”.

Prism for Windows RT (fka Kona) - Prism for Windows Store apps Drop April 10, 2013

I'm happy about this name change... And glad to see Prism, even in a Windows Runtime world, continue to get some attention. Also, as Brian notes, the "Kona" code name is still there on the project. These things can take a bit to change

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Windows 8 + Kona + Steve = Itinerary Hunter
Kona, Kona, Kona! [Think P&P dev guidance for composite application WinStore Apps {Yes, like Prism, but not}]

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14 Minute cartooned video guide to to building your own Azure IaaS Pop-up Lab

Plankytronixx - Cartoon and Demo: Build the World’s Simplest Pop-Up Lab in Windows Azure Using IaaS Features

I thought this would be interesting since WIndows Azure VMs and Virtual Networks were released as a Generally Available (GA) service With the diagrams live-drawn in “cartoony” format, this video shows how to build a really simple lab consisting of 2 IIS web servers connected to a load balancer with traffic balanced over port 80.

It incorporates a series of click-by-click screen videos to show how to create the VMs, install IIS, connect the endpoints up to the load balancer, shut the servers down and delete them off the Azure Hypervisor hosts to stop $charges. Then to reboot the saved disks and reconfigure the load balancer to pop the lab back up again.

Cool, low stress, walk though for creating your own quick and dirty pop-up lab...

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Just about everything you ever wanted to know about SQL Server Date and Time Data Types...

CodeProject - Date and Time Data Types and Functions - SQL Server (2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012)

Introduction

It would be better, if we know the different functions available with SQL Server for date and time. So that we can make use of functions properly in different scenarios. In this article we will go through all the available date and time data types and functions with sample codes. This article will list down the available date and time data types and functions for SQL Server version from 2000 and above.  If you want more info on any items then click on the 'read more details' of that section and that link will take you to MSDN site.  

Table Of Contents 

• Introduction
• Background
• Date and Time Data Types - Quick Reference
• Date and Time Data Types - In Detail
  • time
  • date
  • smalldatetime
  • datetime
  • datetime2
  • datetimeoffset
• Date and Time Functions - Quick Reference.
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server 2000 and 2005
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server 2012
  • Date and Time Functions - SQL Server
• Date and Time Functions - In Detail
  • GETDATE
  • CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
  • GETUTCDATE
  • SYSDATETIME
  • SYSDATETIMEOFFSET
  • SYSUTCDATETIME
  • DATENAME
  • DATEPART
  • DAY
  • MONTH
  • YEAR
  • DATEADD
  • DATEDIFF
  • ISDATE
  • EOMONTH
  • SWITCHOFFSET
  • TODATETIMEOFFSET
  • DATEFROMPARTS
  • DATETIME2FROMPARTS
  • DATETIMEFROMPARTS
  • DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS
  • SMALLDATETIMEFROMPARTS
  • TIMEFROMPARTS
  • @@DATEFIRST
  • SET DATEFIRST
  • SET DATEFORMAT
• Functions that can affect the output of date functions
  • @@LANGUAGE
  • SET LANGUAGE
  • sp_helplanguage
• Functions that helps to convert date and time values to and from string literals and other date and time formats.
• Interesting Date and Time Questions
• References
• Summary

Background

The main objective of this article is to give a common place for all date and time data types and functions for all SQL Server versions so that we don't need to jump from one page to another. This article will help you to understand the different functions available with different versions of SQL Server with simple examples (All examples are self descriptive). At the same time this article can be used as a quick reference too. 

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..."

We're talking 21 pages of Date Time Data Type text... yeah, wow. I love the comparison across versions matrixes.

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TFS/Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 CTP 1 is available (think "Batch of Bug Fixes" release)

Microsoft Downloads - Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 CTP 1

This is a community technology preview (CTP) for Visual Studio 2012 Update 3.

Version:2012
Date published:4/15/2013

Language: English

VS2012.3 CTP TFS Express ENU.iso, 483.0 MB
VS2012.3 CTP TFS Server ENU.iso, 1.1 GB
VS2012.3 CTP.exe, 1.3 MB

Visual Studio 2012 Update is providing continuous value to customers, adding new capabilities year-round to features in the main product release. These releases will be aligned with the core software development trends in the market, ensuring developers and development teams always have access to the best solution for building modern applications.
This is a community technology preview (CTP) for Visual Studio 2012 Update 3. These cumulative updates to Visual Studio 2012 include a variety of bug fixes and capability improvements. More details can be found here.

Statement of Support:
PLEASE NOTE: This Technology Preview has not been subject to final validation and is not meant to be run on production workstations or servers. Due to a limitation in this preview, Internet access is required during installation, even when installing with the /layout option. Please ensure Internet access is available before installing this update. Since installation of Visual Studio CTPs and installation of Team Foundation Server CTPs work differently, please read the recommended upgrade approach for each product carefully.

For Visual Studio: The recommended approach for upgrading Visual Studio on test workstations is installing the latest Visual Studio Update CTP on top of an RTM release or a previous CTP build of that Update. Visual Studio CTPs can be upgraded to a different build.

For Team Foundation Server: Do not install a Team Foundation Server Update CTP on a production server, as it will put the server in an unsupported state. Unlike with Visual Studio CTPs, installing a Team Foundation Server CTP fully replaces the current release on the server with the CTP. Team Foundation Server CTPs cannot be upgraded to future CTPs or releases nor “downgraded” to a previous release.

...

Description of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 CTP 1

As has already been noted, VS2012.3 is looking like a bug fixed release. Kudo's to the team for keeping up the cadence...

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