TFS - Requirements Authoring Starter Kit

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Toolkit: Requirements Authoring Starter Kit

Using the Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (Part 1 of 2)

"The Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (RASK) provides a customizable requirements-authoring solution for software development teams. RASK serves two purposes. It provides the basis of a Requirements Authoring solution and illustrates how to access Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server programmatically from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System (Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office). RASK has broad functionality that you can extend with minimal effort.

RASK integrates several Microsoft products into the solutions: Microsoft Office Word 2003, Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. In addition, RASK uses Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite and Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, which are part of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

RASK is not a complete requirements-authoring application and is not intended to compete with existing requirements-management applications.

This article, Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (Part 1 of 2) introduces the features of the starter kit. The second article, Using the Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (Part 2 of 2) introduces the code that enables each RASK feature.

..."

I’d like to update my Requirements process, so this looks interesting.

But I think I have my stupid cap on. I can’t seem to find the install instructions. Sure I’ve installed/run the downloaded file. Now what? The setup says it’s going to install something, but what? The dot? Can’t seem to find that... And the setup finishes pretty quickly. And doesn’t ask for the TFS server, etc. So I don’t think anything actually installed.

Wondering if I was having a case of the brain farts, I tried installing it again. Then thinking that maybe local installing was silly for a TFS product, I then installed it on the TFS box.

Still no joy. Time to RTFM again.

Thinking it logical to have the setup/install instructions toward the start of the article, I focus there. Can’t seem to find anything. Which means, in my mind, the setup is so easy it doesn’t require instructions? That it’s all automated and Dummy (i.e. Greg) proof?

Since I’m scanning the doc’s anyway, might as well keep going through them, including Part 2.

LOL, THERE they are! At the end of Part 2. Silly me for
not thinking to look there first... :|

Okay, these look like instructions I should read in detail before doing (funny that)...

The thing to remember (and I didn’t) is that this is a "Starter Kit." Meaning work is required to get started with it (as it’s a "kit").

(via Rob Caron - Requirements Authoring Starter Kit)

Technorati Tags: TFS, Team Foundation Server, Requirements Authoring Starter Kit

AmazonCommerceService.NET - Free C# 2 Library to Access Amazon

Amazon Web Services Blog - AmazonCommerceService.NET - Free .NET Library for ECS Access

"Ed Quinn dropped me a note with information about his newest creation, AmazonCommerceService.NET.

AmazonCommerceService.NET is a set of .NET classes. It creates REST requests for ECS and then queues them up, dispatching them to Amazon at the rate of 1 request per second per the license agreement. The results are delivered asychronously as they arrive, using a delegate. Batched requests are supported.


All source code is included (C# and .NET 2.0), as is a sample web site built using the library. ..."

Nice

Added to my "when I get off my butt and start working on my ’My Bookshelf’ project I might need this" list... ;)

Interesting News Post Order...

I was scanning my unread’s this morning and this just struck me as funny...

First I see this headline,
U.S. needs lesson from China on technology

Then right below it I see this,
Chinese researcher fakes chip development

lol... hum, okay... ;)

Word 2007 as your new Blogger Posting App?

Joe Friend: Microsoft Office Word - Blogging from Word 2007

"...
 
Well no more. We’ve been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That’s right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software. That said, I hope that everyone is pleasantly surprised with where we are going with this feature.
 
...
In Beta 2 we have basic FTP support. We hope to add support for metaweblog API picture handling, SharePoint picture libraries, and one or two others. While we have a limited ability to add many more providers to this late breaking feature, the feature is extensible and other providers can insure that their systems work with Word even after Office 2007 ships.
...
 
This is pretty standard stuff if you’ve ever used one of the many blog post authoring applications. In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API..."

NICE.

This with the Word’s extensibility and programmability, I can think of tons of cool ways to tweak it to make Word an uber-posting client.

But let’s wait and see it in action before we sound the death nel for the Windows blog client market...

(via Sandeep Singh Rawat - Word 2007 includes blogging support.)

Another look at Teamlook

notgartner.com: Mitch Denny’s Blog - Clearing a mailbox full of bugs with Team Foundation Server

"...

The plan was always to manage our curriculum development efforts in Team Foundation Server so I created a Team Project using the Scrum process template for Team System (from the guys at Conchango). My next problem was how do I get these e-mails across to the TFS work item store with the minimum amount of effort.

My salvation was Teamlook (by Personify Design). Its an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that allows you to turn the e-mails that you read into work items. ..."

Mitch posts another look at the cool Teamlook TFS Outlook add-in. He’s included a number of screenshots showing just how cool the integration is (no, I don’t work for Personify Design... I just really like software that "just works" and makes my life easier...)

Juan of Personify Design contacted me a few weeks ago, letting me know that they are heads-down, hard at work on the RTM release...

Related Past Post XRef:
Teamlook - Connecting Outlook and TFS

Technorati Tags: TFS, Team Foundation Server, Outlook, Teamlook

Microsoft Exception MessageBox

INauseous() - Microsoft Exception MessageBox - Nice little gem

"...

Microsoft Exception Message Box

The other day I was working with some of the downloads included in the Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - April 2006 and I noticed in that pack an item called Microsoft Exception Message Box.  Here’s the text for that download from the Feature Pack page:

The exception message box is a programmatic interface that you can use in your applications for any tasks for which MessageBox may be used. The exception message box is a supported managed assembly designed to elegantly handle managed code exceptions. It provides significantly more control over the messaging experience and gives your users the options to save error message content for later reference and to get help on messages.

More investigation, on the Microsoft MSDN website under Deploying an Exception Message Box Application the following statement appears:

The exception message box is installed by Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and is supported for use in your custom Windows applications to improve exception handling. In SQL Server 2005 SP1 and later releases, the exception message box is also provided as a redistributable installation program that you can distribute and deploy with your application.

It goes on to state:

• You must include the exception message box redistributable package (SQLServer2005_EMB.msi) in your application setup.
• Exception message box resources are installed in the global assembly cache (GAC).
• The redistributable package is available in all supported SQL Server 2005 languages.
• The exception message box installation does not appear in Add or Remove Programs. You should plan to uninstall the exception message box when your application is uninstalled.

What does this mean?  Well, Microsoft has granted us a license to use and redistribute this Assembly with our own applications as long as we follow the installation rules in the list above. ..."

Now that’s cool. I hate reinventing the "Error Dialog" all the time. This is a perfect kind of component to come from MS. A basic infrastructure item that many (almost every?) WinForm app needs in form or another...

Now all I need is a ClickOnce bootstrap for this and I’m good... Shouldn’t be to hard to create the bootstrap manifest for it (I hope).

For more information, also check out href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms166343.aspx" target=_self>Exception Message Box Programming and How to: Program Exception Message Box

SharpEntropy - Maximum Entropy Modeling

The Code Project - Maximum Entropy Modeling Using SharpEntropy

"This article presents a maximum entropy modeling library called SharpEntropy, and discusses its usage, first by way of a simple example of predicting outcomes, and secondly, by presenting a way of splitting English sentences into constituent tokens (useful for natural language processing). Please note that because most of the code is a conversion based on original Java libraries published under the LGPL license, the source code available for download with this article is also released under the LGPL license. This means, it can freely be used in software that is released under any sort of license, but if you make changes to the library itself and those changes are not for your private use, you must release the source code to those changes.

A second article, Statistical parsing of English sentences, shows how SharpEntropy can be used to perform sophisticated natural language processing tasks. ...

A More Complex Example - Tokenizing English Sentences

The Java MaxEnt library is used by another LGPL-licensed open source Java library, called OpenNLP, which provides a number of natural language processing tools based on maximum entropy models. A C# port of the OpenNLP library is available in my second article, Statistical parsing of English sentences, but to provide a more complex SharpEntropy example, as well as to give a flavor of the OpenNLP code, here is a small application to tokenize English sentences, based on a MaxEnt model created by the Java OpenNLP team.

..."

A possible tool for my NLP toolbox...

Related Past Post XRef:

"Statistical parsing of English sentences"


Technorati Tags: NLP

"VS 2005 Web Application Project V1.0 Released"

ScottGu’s Blog - VS 2005 Web Application Project V1.0 Released

"I am very happy to announce that the final release of the VS 2005 Web Application Project is now available.You can download it for free here.

 

The VS 2005 Web Application Project option provides an alternate web project model option to the VS 2005 Web Site Project Model that ships built-into VS 2005.VS 2005 Web Application Projects support the same project, build and compilation semantics as the VS 2003 web project model.Specifically:

• All files contained within the project are defined within a project file (as well as the assembly references and other project meta-data settings).Files under the web’s file-system root that are not defined in the project file are not considered part of the web project.

• All code files within the project are compiled into a single assembly that is built and persisted in the \bin directory on each compile.Incremental publishing of compiled apps is fully supported within the IDE (see this post for details).

• The compilation system uses a standard MSBuild based compilation process.This can be extended and customized using MSBuild extensibility rules.You can control the build through the property pages, name the output assembly or add pre- and post-build action rules.It can also provide much faster compile times for large web projects.

Because the VS 2005 Web Application Project model has the same conceptual semantics as the VS 2003 Web Project Model, it also makes migrating VS 2003 web projects very, very easy - with zero/minimal code changes required. ...

 

...

The main feature additions with the final VS 2005 Web Application Release (above and beyond all the features in the release candidate that you can read about here) include:

• Team Build Support with VSTS: You can now perform automated and command-line builds with VS 2005 Web Application Projects and VSTS
  ...
• Edit and Continue Support: You can now make code updates that apply immediately to applications while the debugger is attached and running (see walkthrough below for details).This is supported with both VB and C# projects.

..."

Very cool.

I’m sure this will be posted everywhere today, but I want to capture the download URL... (so it goes into my remote indexed memory store... i.e. my blog ;)

Please Stop The Bundling Madness!

<vent>
Dear Software Publishers,
Can you PLEASE stop the bundling madness?

Today I received a notice that there was a new version of Windows Live Messenger available and did I want to download it? "Great!" I thought, "I’ve been waiting for this latest beta update..."

Clicking through the usual license stuff, I came to this...

"Are you fricking kidding me! Damn it, I hate this bundling crap!" Was the first thing out of my mouth.

Google, Apple, Yahoo and now MS. COME ON guys! Please DO NOT bundle unrelated technology in your products. It adds a slime layer to your downloads, and, I feel, destroys trust.

Yes, I know it’s easy to uncheck, and I know better than to install bundled crap onto my PC. But I wife doesn’t. Nor my daughter. Or my parents.
So they would get ANOTHER piece of software that I would need to make sure is constantly up to date, or have to later remove, yada, yada, yada.

On another note, if installing the bundled package jacked my system, I would hold the bundling company responsible. Yes, MS, I know it’s not your product, but YOU gave it to me. You installed it by default. You bundled it. If I buy a new car and the tires blow, I don’t hold Firestone responsible, I hold the car dealer responsible. If this bundled product stunk, or slowed down my system, or opened it up to future security problems, LM IM would be the product I would first direct my anger at...

Yes, I know the product I am installing is free and that someone has to pay to develop these products. But many (including LM IM) already has advertising built in. Adding the bundling on top of that adds insult to injury.

Worse case, offer two downloads, one with the bundle, one without (both on the same download page, equally placed., Not like the "hunt the quicktime game" we have to play to get the standalone download). Last ditch, at least default the bundle to unchecked/not installed. Make it a conscious decision to install it. Let us opt-in, not force us to opt-out... 

I want the product I downloaded, I do NOT want you pretending to be helpful by offering these bundles.

Please, ladies and gentlemen, raise above it. Stop the bundling madness. Stop it today.

Thank you,
Greg Duncan
</vent>

Wow, can you tell that pissed me off? ;)

Doing ClickOnce? Think About Adding Your Project's *.user to Your Version Control

AppDev: Something You Should Know by Irena Kennedy - SYSK 121: When it’s Not Only Acceptable, but Recommended to Check into Source Control Your .user File

"Developer’s personal settings and preferences are stored in a .user file.This is why it’s not recommended to add .user files to VSS or other Source Control tool - keep personal to yourself.

 

However, when using ClickOnce deployment, the published version is stored in YourExeProject.csproj.user.So, if you don’t check this file into VSS, when somebody else (or you on another computer) will do the ClickOnce publishing to the deployment server, the version number will restart from zero!Needless to say, that will mess up your versioning… You could manually enter the version you want, but many don’t... So, if you’re using ClickOnce with version auto-increment, do add your csproj.user file to the solution and check it into Source Control tool." (Post leached in full. Please click through to discuss on Irene’s blog...)

Nice tip. And important now that I’m building (and soon deploying/puplishing) on different machines

TFS follows the best practice and doesn’t auto-magically add *.user project files, so you’ll have to do it manually...

Share.OPMPL.org

Randy Holloway Unfiltered - Share Your OPML- A very useful OPML application

"TechCrunch notes the revamped OPML sharing application from Dave Winer, share.opml.org, or Share Your OPML. I’m a big fan of this app because I always want to find new things to read and seeing what other people are reading is a great way to do that. It is also a sobering reality check for me as to how many readers some blogs have versus others (e.g. hardly anyone is reading my site).
 
..."

I’ve uploaded my current OPML if you’re interested... 

It’s weird to see myself listed in the Top 10 Most Prolific Subscribers (725 feeds). Now all I need to do is to not subscribe to the different arrogate feeds (blogs.msdn.com, etc,etc), but instead to each of the blogger’s distinct feeds...

Then again, maybe that would just be insane (and a feed count that I don’t think I really want to know I’m following/reading). Blogs.msdn.com alone has 2821 distinct feeds at this time. Add that to to my feed count... Oh yeah, I REALLY don’t want to know the hard number of bloggers I’m following... :|

Anyway, it’s not a contest... (say it with me, "it’s not a contest... it’s not a contest..." :)

Then again, if you ask my wife, she might think a contest for the highest subscribed count IS indeed a contest. A stupidity contest... DOGH! (Can you tell she’s a geek? ;)

Technorati Tags: OPML, Share.OPML.org

Sample TFS Reports

Tom Patton - Sample Team System Reports

"This attachment contains a variety of samples, experiments and untested reports for use with the Team Foundation Data warehouse. There is a brief overview document describing the reports and how to deploy them. ..."

From within the attachment...

"...
Box Reports
All of the reports shipped in TFS as they are shipped for CMMI projects. These are generally transferable to any process template, but some (like Requirements Details) only make sense if using CMMI Work item types.
 
Portal Reports
Trimmed down versions of the reports we shipped, suitable for placing in portal pages by using the reporting services web parts.
 
Sample Reports
Sample reports. Good entry points here are “Source Code Overview” or “Area Overview”.
 
TFS Report Examples
Simple reports that can be customized to your particular needs. These use the query designer for all queries so no MDX knowledge is required.
 
Warehouse Status
Reports that show the administrative status of reporting.
 
Work Item Overview
A report that shows resolution activity with the ability to view burndowns, team breakdowns, and priority breakdowns.
..."

71 total reports are included in this sample/example package. I’m deploying and checking them out now...

Technorati Tags: TFS, Team Foundation Server, Reports