Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 06/27/2010

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Windows Live Writer 2011, aka Wave 4, shortcut keys (No you’re not going crazy, some have changed)

Aaron's Live Writer Blog - Keyboard shortcuts for Windows Live Writer Wave 4 beta

“Adding the Ribbon UI to Windows Live Writer gave us a chance to also look at the keyboard shortcuts for the product as a whole. Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts that you can use in the Live Writer beta. We tried to match the same shortcuts used in Office applications looking specifically at Word since it is the most common to Live Writer. I should note that these are for the English build. Some may be localized for a specific language or locale.

…

…”

For a while there, using the new Windows Live Writer 2011 (wave 4) I thought it a little busted. A few of the keyboard shortcuts I used in nearly every post didn’t work anymore. (like CTRL-L to insert a photo, CTLR-SHIFT-V for the past dialog, etc).

But nope, not borked, just changed.

<whine>

This bugs me a bit… My main whine (yeah, yeah, I know this is beta… that’s why it’s just a whine) is that the keyboard shortcuts are not easily discoverable. Without the above post, how would I have known what they were? I like the Ribbon UI in general, and hope WLW’s implementation is still very beta and improves. For example I would REALLY like to editing/customizing, keyboard shortcuts in the tooltips, i.e. a more complete and full Ribbon UI implementation. </whine>

(via Windows Observer - Windows Live Writer Wave 4 Keyboard Shortcuts)

Windows Live Writer Twitter Notify URL Shortner Setting Utility OR How to tweak the URL Shortner used by the Twitter Notify plugin without edit your registry

InsertableContentSource - Twitter Notify, Because No-one Should Be Hacking The Registry

“Anyone who uses the Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer will know that it gives you a tinyURL.com url to tweet your link with, but sometimes, tinyURL isn’t what you want to be using, perhaps you prefer is.gd, or you have your own bit.ly account and want to use your own user details. Joe Cheng, when he was on the Writer team, wrote a blog post detailing how to go about changing this. Then, again, today Aaron Bregel, the Test Lead on the Writer team, wrote another post on how to go one step further and use the bit.ly API key.

Now, both of these posts are fine, and give you good instructions on how to change the setting, but it involves a registry change. The registry is not a place people should really be changing stuff by themselves, no matter how good the instructions, someone will screw it up.

So I decided what was needed was a little tweaker utility, so I quickly wrote one:

…”

Scott (who is no fool no matter his domain name) has come through again, seeing a pain point for the Windows Live Writer community and delivered. Today’s output from his big brain is a simple utility that makes it drop dead easy to switch what URL shortner is used by the Windows Live Writer Twitter Notify plugin.

In short, no more reg hacking!

Downloading, unzip it, run it (assuming you have the .Net framework installed), set it and you’re done.

Thanks Scott.

Friday, July 02, 2010

Windows Live Writer, Twitter Notify and bit.ly? Yep, here’s how…

Aaron's Live Writer Blog - Using bit.ly with The Twitter Notify plug-in for Live Writer

“One of my favorite plug-ins for Windows Live Writer is Twitter Notify which will give you the option to create a tweet on Twitter as part of publishing your blog post. By default it uses TinyURL as the URL shortener. The “problem” with TinyURL is that it uses 20 characters whereas newer shorteners use 17 or less characters and with the 140 character limit of Twitter every character counts.

Joe Cheng wrote a blog post, Using alternative URL shorteners with Twitter Notify plugin, and in the main article he explains how to configure the plug-in to use shorteners like is.gd, snipr.com, snurl.com, and cli.gs but I found in the comments of that post that Max Paulousky has explained how to configure it for bit.ly. What follows are the instructions on how to setup the Twitter Notify plug-in for bit.ly.

First make sure you have the latest version of Twitter Notify. You can download and install it from the gallery. http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=6b2b5ffe-936a-4cb3-869c-c01de29de176&bt=9

Second you need to know your username and API Key from bit.ly. …

…”

I had tried this, using bit.ly, when I did my original post about URL Shorteners and Windows Live Writer, but only very half-heartily and when it didn’t work the first time, because I didn’t know how to setup the URL correctly, I got lazy and gave up.

Luckily Aaron didn’t. He figured it out and better yet shared it with us. :)

So now my Twitter Notify short links should now be using bit.ly. Let’s publish this and see…

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Don’t reinvent your in-house Microsoft Office & SharePoint training… Give your users a productivity boost with the “Productivity Hub 2010” [Free, reg-ware]

Microsoft Downloads - Productivity Hub 2010

“The Productivity Hub is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 site collection that offers training materials for end-users.

Version: 06-28-10

Date Published: 6/28/2010

Language: English

Download Size: 80 KB - 1006.2 MB*

Overview

Microsoft has developed the Productivity Hub to help support your ongoing end user training efforts.

The Hub is a SharePoint Server site collection for 2007 and 2010 that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs.

The Hub uses SharePoint Server’s social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way.

The 2010 version of the Productivity Hub includes a quiz feature, a section called ‘Get it Done’ that offers training for tasks such as email management and collaboration, and also features Silverlight. There will be a non-Silverlight version of the 2010 Hub delivered in late June.

The 2007 Hub contains 2007 content only (v2) with 2010 content added in v3 (to be released in June 2010). You can also add 2010 content packages to your current Hub. Watch for more document on migration from your 2007 Hub to your 2010 Hub.

What the Productivity Hub is:

Format: Pre-loaded SharePoint site collection, optimized for Web 2.0 functionality and easily deployed within SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint 2010 environment, depending on version

Content: Convenient end user productivity training in a variety of formats (documents, videos, podcasts, etc.). Receive free quarterly updates of content that you will learn about through the Productivity blog.

Blog: The Productivity blog offers tips and tricks for end user productivity. Use it as is, or your training staff can use the posts as their own to help them get started in running an internal blog.

Train the trainer: Includes IT/Manager section to aid with deployment of the site collection, and guidance to develop the Coach program

Products: Office 2007 and Office 2010 (including SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010), Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8, Project, Visio, Live Meeting, and Communicator [GD:Emphasis added]

You can also download additional content packages that expand the training materials you can make available through the Hub.

…”

You know me, I hate seeing time wasted on re-inventing the wheel. And it seems this happens a good bit with in-house/internal training. Don’t do it, at least without first checking out the many outstanding, and free, training resources available like this one…

[Windows] Phone 7 Action Pack (wp7ap) – Tools to make WinPhone7 Dev even easier

CodePlex - Phone 7 Action Pack (Windows Phone 7)

“Project Description
Phone7ActionPack #wp7ap is a set of tools aimed at making developing for Windows Phone 7 as easy as possible. It will include some useful Extension Methods, Behaviors, Actions, Triggers and several controls.

If you talk about this on twitter could you kindly tag it with #wp7ap and you can follow me on twitter @phpn00b where I will tweet any an all news.
I will be posting more samples here http://www.anythingtheycando.com/blog/index.php/category/wp7ap/

First release is up and I will be aiming to do a major release every 2 weeks. Till I get some real meat on the action packs bones.
The action packs goals are simple to bring in to expression blend for design time usage as many as possible of the underlying elements of the framework.

It should be noted that any class not marked as stable or working is still in development and not expected to work

Currently Implemented (at some level)

OrientationChangedGoToStateBehavior - Forces visual state changes based on changes to the phone orientation

PhoneFileDataSource - Control that will read/write/list files in the applications Isolated Storage

MakeCallAction - Action that can be attached to any FrameworkElement that will make the phone call a number based on bound properties

CallMethodAction - This is just a simple port from Silverlight of the same basic action that calls a method on a target element

ChoosePhoneNumberAction - Simple Action that will bring up the phones contact list and allow the user to pick a phone number

Goals

PhonePositionControl - expose as dependency properties all useful information about the position of the phone

TakePictureBehavior - simple behavior that takes a picture based on an event on the attached object

AccelerometerControl - expose as dependency properties all useful information about the accelerometer on the phone so that visual elements can be bound to them.

…”

There’s a few things here that caught my eye, but more importantly was that the source for all this is available. We’re all going to need help ramping up on WinPhone7 dev and a rising tide raises all boats, yada, yada.

(via The Road to Know Where - Codeplex Releases "Windows Phone 7 Action Pack" for Developers)

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Playing with Pex is just a web browser away at www.pexforfun.com

Pex For Fun

That’s just too cool. You can play with Pex, checking out how cool it is, without any impact to your system, installs, downloads, etc. Just browse and start playing… ;)

There’s nothing like seeing it in action to get the feel for what Pex can do.

(via Peli's Farm - Pex, Stubs, Moles, QuickGraph, MbUnit, Reflector Addins - www.pexforfun.com–> try Pex in your browser)

VS 2010/TFS2010 RTM VM’s (Virtual PC/Windows 7/Hyper-V) now available - Play with VS/TFS without getting your main messy…

Brian Keller: Technical Evangelist for Visual Studio Application - Now Available: Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs

“I am pleased to announce that the RTM version of the Visual Studio 2010 virtual machine, along with sample data and hands-on-labs for key application lifecycle management (ALM) scenarios, is now available.

This virtual machine (VM) includes Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, and a sample application along with sample data which supports 9 hands-on-labs. This VM includes everything you need to learn and/or deliver demonstrations of many of my favorite application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities in Visual Studio 2010. This VM is available in the virtualization platform of your choice (Hyper-V, Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and Windows [7] Virtual PC). Hyper-V is highly recommended because of the performance benefits and snapshotting capabilities.

This virtual machine is based on trial software which will expire on December 15, 2010. Another updated virtual machine will be posted before that date.

Please note that if you were using the RC version of this VHD, it expires June 30, 2010 …

…

Tailspin Toys
The sample application we are using in this virtual machine is a simple ASP.NET MVC 2 storefront called Tailspin Toys. …

…

Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts
The 9 hands-on-labs / demo scripts which accompany this virtual machine cover several of the core capabilities of conducting application lifecycle management with Visual Studio 2010. Each document can be used by an individual in a self-paced hands-on-lab capacity, to learn how to perform a given set of tasks, or used by a presenter to deliver a demonstration or classroom-style training.

…

…”

This is a must read post if you want these VM’s. Brain does his usual outstanding work in providing all the download URL’s for feeding to your download manager of choice, but more importantly how best to use the VM, dealing with the activation messages, etc.

If you need a VS2010/TFS2010 RTM environment to play with, experiment with or do development with (say you’re playing with TFS and want to tweak/dev against it, etc, etc) then there’s no question, get this VM.

(via Visual Studio news - Download now the Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data and Hands-on-Labs)

The one Microsoft Demo VM to rule them all? (Think “Win Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, VS2010, SharePoint 2010, Office Web Apps 2010, FAST, Office Com Server, Exchange 2010, Office/Project/Visio 2010…”) [Now with Download URL’s for FDM]

Windows XP Mode to no longer require hardware virtualization [Updated: Now with links to the 32/64 update/patch]

Monday, June 28, 2010

Which TFS2010 “Agile” Project Template one is right for you? One side-by-side of MS Agile v5, MS Scrum v1[Beta] and Scrum For TFS(SfTS) v3

Crispin Parker's Blog - Scrum for Team System v3.0, MSF Agile v5.0 and Team Foundation Server Scrum v1.0 (beta)

“With the recent launch of the new Microsoft Scrum template, I am often asked about a feature comparison between the Microsoft templates and SfTS. So, below I will look into the features available in each of the process templates.

Project Life Cycle Tracking

…

Project Feature Tracking

…

Reporting

…

Project Portals

…

In Summary

I’m sure there are many other comparative aspects that I have overlooked. But I think I have clearly demonstrated that each of the templates offers features that will be just right for someone. Whether you are looking for a simple quick start scrum setup, mature project management that nods towards scrum or a complete enterprise level scrum adoption, there is something there for you.

One of the big wins for the SfTS template is the advanced Auto Rollup feature. The ability for values on linked work items to directly effect values on other work items cuts out a massive amount of administration work and is only available in the SfTS template. The rollup features give you a richer experience and makes the whole project hang together in a logical way. The process that controls the auto rollup functionality is (like the rest of the SfTS template) completely customisable. If you needs to change the rollup behaviour, you just edit the associated rules file contained within the installed SfTS web service.

…

…”

This is the first side-by-side comparison of the new TFS2010 “agile” Project Templates that I’ve seen.

My major concern about Microsoft’s new Scrum Template is that we’ve seen other Scrum templates from Microsoft in the past, that eventually died. Picking a TFS Project Template is to important to pick one that might not have a future… If Microsoft’s is going to be included “in the box” when it RTM’s then that’s one thing. ~~But if not, then I’d be worried about its lifespan.~~ [GD: See update on this below]

Update 6/29/2010 @ 7:30 AM (PDT):

Driving forward from a comment left by agovorine (thank you), I pinged Aaron Bjork via his “Announcing Team Foundation Server Scrum v1.0 Beta” post about my “in the box” concern.

Quote:

“Yes, this template will eventually be "in the box". Obviously our plans for vNext are not completely nailed down, but I anticipate having an Agile and Scrum template moving forward along with our CMMI template. This is not just a "cool additional template".”

Prefect! I’m now a much happier camper and will be focusing on this template more in the future… :)