OK - the weekend has now come to an end. We are all very tired - but also happy. We made it - and most of it sounded very good also.

I think the CD will be very nice to listen to and with a strong message built into it. We have prayed for the message to be clear and for any listener to be blessed by the tone from God.

The highlight of the weekend was probably the recording of the title track Priority which came of very good. An excellent piece by Anders Beijer based on the hymn tune “Slane”. It is associated with the lyrics “Be thou my vision”.

On a personal note the last day of the recording sessions were nerve-wrecking. The only piece left to record was the euphonium solo, Journey into Peace. Things got under way very late (about 2 hours) and we...

Yesterday evening was the last rehearsal before the second and last recording session with my band, the Vasa Band.

We are really in a flow right now; we feel blessed and that God is with us in our efforts and the playing standard is on very high level.

I am really looking forward to the weekend which will be great fun and a lot of hard work. The pieces we are going to record are:

• I Surrender All - a cornet solo by Andreas Holmlund
• Priority - a “major” piece by Anders Beijer
• Swing the pearly gates - swing piece (duh!) by Andreas Holmlund
• Kan Kristus räkna med dig - another swing piece by Andreas Holmlund
• Journey into Peace - euphonium solo by William Himes
• Hawthorne march - a march from the 1920’s

I am really proud of the band and I am sure that this will be...

I have found it! In the first versions of Visual Studio Team Explorer you couldn’t search for checked out files, wild cards or labels.

But now - from Visual Studio 2008 it is back. You can reach it from within the Source Control with a simple right click as shown above.

Here is a thing that have created a lot of confusion and frustration in our projects; when you have a Microsoft Test project under source control the .vsmdi-files gets created multiple times. In one project we have 48 of them. All under source control.

I have even been in contact with Microsoft but they only showed me a workaround that didn’t did the complete trick.

Here is a guy that seem to have solved it. Looks very promising. What you need to do is:

• Delete all the vsmdi-files from Source Control
• Make sure that all the developers and testers deletes all the vsmdi-files locally as well
• Create one .vsmdi-file, by running the test locally at one workstation. Check that file into Source Control

• Follow the steps in this article to make the .vsmdi-files become non-mergeable for the Team Foundation Server project.

  [UPDATE] To be able to...

OK - this is one of those “now where has that file moved”-posting.

When you run tests in a TFS build with MSTest a .trx-file is created. This file contains all the test results for that run. However you can’t view it unless you have Visual Studio…

(Apparently you could publish the result to the Team Foundation Server and then do a report but this is much simpler…)

Here is a tool, trx2html, that converts that .trx-file into a nice HTML-report. And that report could then easily be published on the Team Portal.

And here are, based on this article, some steps on how to include the functionality in your build script:

1. Download the tool
2. Include the RidoTask.dll in your solution or reachable on the server where the tests are run. I’ve included the dll in a solution folder in my solution, called SolutionItems\Tools

3. Reference...

My new project has just completed it’s first sprint; Sprint 1 (or maybe 0 since we have done some basic decisions regarding our technology and environment).

Again - I am amazed how far you can get if you put your will to it. This project was initiated with a whole day meeting that was concluded by a comment from the customer; “you know, several people has been looking into this and said: it can’t be done. Good luck!”. Cheerful fellow ;)

But here we are - good on our way to solve the problem. The team is also surprising me getting some pretty hard stuff done on a relative short time span. Well done everyone!

Fingers crossed for the Scrum Demo (which for our Sprint0/1 is running on my development machine, inside Visual Studio…. Brrr).

We are planning to setup a web camera to view the Scrum Board. This has to do with the team being highly distributed (200 km apart) and us still wanting to maintain some sort of contact.

However - I am lacking a lot in understanding and interest in hardware stuff as for example web cameras. So it took me quite some time to find a good server. But now I have: YawCam

It has all I wanted; you can stream video, it is easy to administrate and you can do minor modification to the output/quality and such stuff. And yeah - it’s free also ;)

Get one now! Thank you Magnus Lundvall Visit the website of the publisher who created it. Great app!

I got to know about a cool tool for testing web services today. The web page that normally is created for you have the small disadvantage that you can’t invoke web services with complex types. Since most non-trivial web services use more types and string and int’s that is not very helpful.

This tool generates a GUI based on the WSDL that allows you to fill out the request object on and invoke the web services as it is expected to be called. You can even fill out headers, user name and password etc.

The only problem with is to find it. I’ve search all over the Internet for Web Service Studio but couldn’t find one single working link. The application was first created at GotDotNet but since that is no more the links to GotDotNet doesn’t work anymore. Also the version found at CodePlex is no good.

But now...

As we do at Marcusoft, our sister company Microsoft are serious enough to be able to laugh at ourselves. If now no one else does it I mean…:

http://preview.microsoft.com/video/videoDetails.aspx?video=5b0e3385-8f48-4dff-bf52-d8204285c0ff

I especially digged the programming face-off.

When we started to use the Conchango template for Team Foundation Server I immediately got a few questions about how the states flow for the different work items.

So - I know that you can get a kind of State diagram for work items but don’t know where to get it. Apparently it’s possible to see with the project template editor but I didn’t have that.

A short post in the Scrum for Team System forum later I got to know the answer. It’s possible to see via Team System Web Access. Here is how you do it:

• Open Team System Web Access
• Open a work item of the type you’re interested in (a sprint backlog item for example)
• In the tools-menu of the work item choose State Diagram (see picture)

Beware, though - those diagrams are not that easy to read / understand. But at least now...