Blognote

Tagged – 5 Things you didn’t know about me.

// January 8th, 2007 // No Comments » // Tagged

As I have always believed in the Six Degrees Of Separation, I’m not surprised this whole tagging game eventually ended up here. Thanks to Carlo for confirming my believes.
So here are the 5 things you maybe didn’t know about me.

5) I started programming on the ZX81. I had the 16Kb expansion pack and a lot of my time went into typing in programs from the various magazines (there were a lot of those back then). Later I started writing my own programs. As I’m Dutch and only had very minimal education in English when I was 12, I learned myself to read English in the progress.

4) I have a diverse musical taste. I love to listen to Disco Classics, House, Trance, Rock and Progressive Rock. You can run into me at a Steve Vai concert one week and at Dance Valley the other. Some other concerts (in no particular order) you can have seen me would be from Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, Audioslave, Toto, Simon Phillips, David Lee Roth, Joe Satriani, Dream Theater, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Tony Macalpine, Metallica. Some Dance Spots where you can have met me include Trance Energy, Innercity, Tiesto in Concert, Mysteryland, the LoveParade, Parkzicht and de Barocci.

3) I play electric guitar in a band. My guitar had been stolen and after I had spotted it for sale on the internet, hours before I went on vacation to Spain, my friends did enough detective work to have the police get my guitar back, without a scratch.

2) In 1998 I presented a session on TechEd Europe on COM+ Without a doubt it is the largest crowd I have ever presented to.

1) My dad is Indonesian so I’m a half-blood. I guess that’s the reason why I tan so easily and dark, why I prefer heat over cold, why I eat rice at least once a week (and don’t mind to eat it for breakfast, lunch and diner 7 days-a-week) and love spicey food.

Let’s tag 5 more people who aren’t tagged yet, here you go Marcel, Martijn, Ramon, Waseem and Martin

Getting the UK SDC BizTalk 2004 Documenter to run

// September 21st, 2006 // No Comments » // BizTalk 2004

Finally I’ve managed to get the BizTalk 2004 Documenter to run. If you’ve got problems creating documentation using this tool yourself maybe this will do the trick for you as well. The problem I had was that after the generation a Error box would show up, and nothing was created. After fixing both problems below the tool worked like a charm.

The TMP environment-variable
On the machine I’m currently using the TMP environment-variable was mapped to %userprofile%\local settings\temp and the UserProfile is redirected to a network-share. I changed the TMP environment-variable to a directory on the local drive. You can change this in a dialog which you can edit after pressing the Environment Variables button on the the Advanced tab of the System Properties which you get when selecting Properties from the context menu of My Computer.

The path to Microsoft.BizTalk.XLangView.dll
The documenter relies on forementioned dll. The path to this dll is configured in the Microsoft.Sdc.BiztalkDocumenter.exe.config file. When you’ve got a default install, the path to this dll is set correctly, but in my case BizTalk 2004 is installed on a non-default location, so I had to change this path. It was there right under my nose the whole time…

Limiting the AssignedTo dropdown-population for Team Foundation Server workitems

// August 2nd, 2006 // 4 Comments » // .Net, Team Development, Team Foundation Server

The Situation

You are running multiple Team Foundation Server projects with different developers working on different projects. All of the projects use the MSF Agile process. When a workitem is created (Task, Bug, etc.) you are able to assign a workitem to a designated user. The UI contains with a dropdown which is filled with all TFS users, not just the projectmembers. Furthermore you find it undesirable that new workitems are assigned to the creator by default.

Desired situation

When selecting a person to assign a workitem to, the dropdown is filled with persons assigned to the project’s Contributors or Project Administrator group. New workitems are assigned to no one in paticular. Both new and current projects should work this way.

Steps to get there

Download the process template for MSF Agile using the Process Template Manager.
Modify the files Bug.xml, QoS.xml, Risk.xml, Scenario.xml and Task.xml (located in the "MSF for Agile Software Development - v4.0\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions" directory) such that

<FIELD name="Assigned To" refname="System.AssignedTo" type="String">
   <VALIDUSER/>
</FIELD>

is changed into

<FIELD name="Assigned To" refname="System.AssignedTo" type="String">
   <ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true" filteritems="excludegroups">
      <LISTITEM value="[Project]\Project Administrators" />
      <LISTITEM value="[Project]\Contributors" />
      <LISTITEM value="Unassigned" />
   </ALLOWEDVALUES>
   <DEFAULT from="value" value="Unassigned" />
 </FIELD>

The syntax of ALLOWEDVALUES, LISTITEM and DEFAULT as well as some info on expansion can be read in the MSDN Library. After you’ve added users or groups to the project groups don’t forget to do a refresh of the project before opening a workitem, otherwise the list isn’t populated correctly, I think that expanding of the lists is done on the server, not on the client.

To correct any pre-existing projects you’ll have to use the witimport tool to update the template files in each project. So for all your projects you have to run the following commands in a command window (ofcourse substituting the placeholders for your own TFS ServerName and ProjectName):

witimport /t <TFS ServerName> /p <ProjectName> /f <fullPathToModifiedFile>\Bug.xml
witimport /t <TFS ServerName> /p <ProjectName> /f <fullPathToModifiedFile>\QoS.xml
witimport /t <TFS ServerName> /p <ProjectName> /f <fullPathToModifiedFile>\Risk.xml
witimport /t <TFS ServerName> /p <ProjectName> /f <fullPathToModifiedFile>\Scenario.xml
witimport /t <TFS ServerName> /p <ProjectName> /f <fullPathToModifiedFile>\Task.xml

Again, remember to refresh any running Team Explorer instances to receive the changes on the client machines.

JetBrains is creating a Team Development System

// July 21st, 2006 // No Comments » // .Net, Team Development

My former colleagues at Info Support have it for some time now and sell it as part of their Endeavour offering.
I’ve implemented multiple variations, always with the help of the popular CruiseControl.Net
Microsoft has one named Visual Studio Team System
There used to be an initiative for an Open Source variant name NTeam but it appears to be dead.

Now apparantly the people at JetBrains (of IntelliJ IDEA and ReSharper fame) are building one as well. A Team Development System called TeamCity. From the webpages I conclude that they are implementing a distributed team environment which picks an available build server to run the next build on, and it will both build .Net and Java projects. Looks promising, I’ll keep an eye on it.

Let’s get started

// July 17th, 2006 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Back from vacation and ready to go. Welcome on my Blog.

This is the first ever public blog I’m running. Not that this is my first blogpost, I used to work for a company where every employee has his own blog and loved sharing information that way.

I work for LogicaCMG in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Consultant and for the past decade I’ve been building, designing, teaching, presenting and architecting software systems on the Microsoft platform. Starting at VB4 16-bit in 1996 up till the .Net framework 3.0 now and I ain’t gonna quit very soon