This has been a hard case to crack for quite sometime now… And it’s really annoying since at first the task seems so simple. Bare with me for a short history:

Very often users of a system want to send emails through the application, or send things in the application (document etc.) via email.

That is no biggie, I’ll use SMTP-mail - you think… until they add the demand “and of course we need to know if the mail reach the delivery address”. Often that last part doesn’t come up until the system is in production and the situation occurs.

Now you have some real tricky questions to handle. SMTP is a fire and forget protocol. There is no waiting until the mail has reached the recipient. Until .NET 2.0 that was also the case for us programmers. And of course you don’t want to integrated with Outlook or whatever...

OK - as you all well know Microsoft doesn’t put as much effort into Visual Studio for VB.NET-developers as for C#-ditto. I don’t know why - but can only speculate that they don’t won’t that language around in the long run. This is not sarcasm - it quite obvious if you switch between the languages.

So someone else has to help us - here are great bunch of tools that assist the lonely VB.NET-developer in his struggles: http://www.mztools.com/index.aspx

My favorite feature so far is the ability to find dead code - that is code that isn’t used. I have remove many rows of code this way… lot less to maintain.

This weekend we had a moving in party. Yes, I know it’s about half a year late - but hey…

We just got two room repainted and fixed. It looks very nice and is really a big difference from before. I have had my doubt if it was worth it (living in one room with all the furniture’s for two weeks is hard on my orderly psyche) - but it sure is.

So the party saw some 20 people in our 68 m² apartment. Crowded, crowded - but very nice and a lot new and old faces. Great to meet everyone at once.

Tomorrow is another sprint demo. I love the fast-forward way of incrementing doing improvements that SCRUM offers. One of the features I really like is the way that the developers get to feel good about themselves and to be proud. Really builds team spirit.

If you haven’t tried SCRUM out yet - do it already. It’s dead simple to get started and will give you results (faster, reliable deliveries, better team spirit, happier customers) right away.

This entire week has been concerned with Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).

There are really a lot of interesting features in this product. Some are excellent (the source control system and the ability to share data in the development project) and some not excellent yet (i miss a lot of easy configuration stuff for msbuild for example). In short i like it. A lot.

But the more I learn about TFS the more I want to use TFS to the full extend of the product. I have a hunch that it will rock more and more as you start to use more and more features.

There are also a lot of interesting and useful stuff on the NET about it. Here are some introduction videos for example: http://teamsystemrocks.com/tutorials/

ps. Changed my mind - that link is GREAT. The first two videos I saw could...

Really, really in a hurry right now. Cannot withhold these two great links with answers to some very common and annoying problems with Visual Studio Team System) and Team Foundation Server:

• How to run tests in a build without test metadata files and test lists (.vsmdi files)
• Beware the Team Test VSMDI file

Found this today http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=6280

It’s one of those Patterns and practices document (why are they always so long, 496 pages… Come on!). It doesn’t seem to be quite finished yet but looks very promising.

Last week Miriam did it again. She held, all of her own, the weekend-evening devotional (well I am not sure of the word for helgmålsbön, but that will have too do…).

Again she did it with a most visible easy and some very interesting thoughts. “God is bothering me…” who’ll ever knew that that would be the theme for one of those shows.

Well - if you missed it, it’s about ten minutes of sharp-edge thinking. And you can see it again here See the program I SVT Play and choose the 15 sept show).

Way to go Miriam - you are honoring our prayer group on your mission trip to Norrland ;)

I’ve been looking for a long time for a tool that watches the builds of TFS for me, something that CruiseControl.NET does in a nice way.

Now I found it - in a nice working version - here.

It is open source so you probably need to compile it before it runs. I am also not sure if it starts up automatically or if you have to add it to Autostart maybe.

However it looks nice and does the job to great satisfaction. Those green blobs are really gratifying.

Hmmm - another “Why does VB.NET hides so many useful things from me?” thing that adds to my determination to vote for C# whenever I get the chance.

The case is as follows; you have a project that you want to strong name. However it references a assembly that not is strong named. That will give you the following error from the compiler:

Unable to emit assembly: Referenced assembly [...] does not have a strong name

So the solution (for us C#-junkies) is to go into the project properties and put your .snk file into the box for “Wrapper Assembly Key File” (under “Common Properties” and “General”).

However if you use VB.NET then you’re stuck! There is no box like that because the VB.NET-team of Microsoft thinks that is to hard for us to handle, or something.

Here is one solution which is quite hard to pull...