Ooooh - so nice. And so easy now when i know how to do it…

When you get large solutions and there are loads and loads of files in the Solution Explorer you’ll sometimes (often, in my case) get confused on where you are…

I organize my projects in Solution Folders but still get quite hard to follow, especially when you are the codriver…

But it turns out to be easy to solve. There is a setting in the Options-dialog of the Studio (both 2005 and 2008, luckily) that is called Track Active item in Solution Explorer. When this is checked the file you currently is watching is found and highlighted the Solution Explorer which greatly reduces confusion on where you are.

The setting is found under Tools->Options->Project and Solutions->General->Track Active item in...

I’ve been rightly informed, by several people that my postings with code in it messes up my complete site when viewed on Firefox.

This has to do with the following issue http://unbecominglevity.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/10/2312849.html

Should be fixed now…

OK - the first problem i ran into when using the Conchango template was the first thing i ever did in the project - create a sprint “work item”. This type of WorkItem represents a sprint and hold all the sprint backlog items that is to be done in the sprint.

What i wanted was to give the sprint a name when the error message “TF 20017 - The area or iteration provided for field ‘IterationPath’ could not be found”

Well after almost a complete day of surfing and phoneing and scratching of heads i found the error. The name is not a textbox but rather a dropdown! More specifically the sprints in the Conchango template is constructed around the notion of areas and iteration paths. The have created a few for you, out of the box.

These make up the sprints for the project and hence needs to be...

We’re planning on using WCF for the next project and i have been scavenging the Internet for good introductions to WCF and to message based calls.

Here what i have found so far:

A good highlevel article from MSDN - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480190.aspx

Some great and simply screen cast on how to use Visual Studio 2008 and WCF by Darryl Burling:

• Screen cast # 2 (can’t find 1??)
• Screen cast # 3
• Screen cast # 4

The difference between Messaging and RPC

I’ll hunt some more and put the links up here.

I am starting off a new project next week and we are going to run it as a SCRUM project (of course, there is no other way now is there :)) .

Since our team is highly distributed we’ll need some sort of support to keep the SCRUM-heartbeat going. Let right now say that having distributed team is not a choice of anyone in the project, that just how it is and we’ll have to live with it.

So Team Foundation Server is used at my customer and that is how we will manage the project, code and documentation. We are also going to use the SCRUM-project-template from Conchango.

However this is not good at all in my opinion. You force the team members to update their work in Team Explorer before any Daily Scrum can be held, effective. For the team members that will be just an other...

Here is the solution to my previous posting Could not find file ‘Microsoft.Windows.CommonLanguageRuntime error for testprojects.

As always it is simple when you know how. You simply uncheck the Enable ClickOnce security settings-checkbox under Projects->Properties->Security.

A better solution is the extract the code that is to be tested to an own project, but I’ll use the above for now. We’re only using ClickOnce for testing environments.

I my next project (which is mega-cool, I’ll get back) i will start using TDD from the outset, which seems to be the only way to get it to work. To do that we’ll need a mocking framework and the flavor of the month seems to be TypeMock.

There are not many very good introductions on the net but here are some that are the best so far:

• Unit test patterns, part I, II and III
• Some examples and how-tos that also seems to be good

PS Following a really fast answer (ca 4 hours after my posting) from the TypeMock-team (this Internet thingy is so cool, isn’t it) i want to add two movies:

• Getting started
• Decorators

I ran into an old friend during the weekend. This is an old (80s?) show with improvisation theatre as game between four comedians. It is hilarious!

I met this program again on YouTube. There are loads of clips there. Start here.

Here is one of them that made me laugh out loud.

We have encountered a quite annoying bug when creating a test project that references a Windows application. The Windows application have been deployed via ClickOnce and that when the testproject stopped compiling.

In the test project we got the “Could not find file ‘Microsoft.Windows.CommonLanguageRuntime” error message on compilation.

Here is an article describing that problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907757. No very good solution though. I’ll post out solution in a while.

The solution seems to be to set a reference to the .exe instead of the projectfile. However we ran into some trouble with that also - a better solution is on it’s way…

This is a very common requirement in applications and one that i always need to think a few extra minutes (hours, if you want) before i get it.

The GUI contains a CheckedListBox (or any other list) and the user want to be able to move the items up and down in the list. Yes i know - it seems trivial at first…

Here is one solution that uses a single method that is called with a parameter to indicate if the item is to be moved up or down.

’’’ ‘’’ Moves an item in the listbox ‘’’ Private Sub MoveItemInListbox(ByVal up As Boolean) ‘ Check that something is selected If chklst.SelectedItem Is Nothing Then MessageBox.Show(“Nothing selected”) Exit Sub End If ‘ No flicker - on

' Remember the selected stuff, index, the item itself and if the item is ' checked or not Dim...