OK - this last two weeks has been intense. I’ve started a new project at my customer and it is wild; I am Scrum master (nothing new there;) it’s the only way to fly) in a pilot project to create a true SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) at my customer (a big Swedish insurance company).

I am very humbled by the magnitude of the project and where this can take us… At the same time it is so fun; we get to set stuff about the technology (SOA, WCF, Visual Studio 2008, TDD - the works) that I didn’t dream of just a few months back. Also it is great to see the true use of SCRUM - it is rocking, as it of course would.

But it has come to my attention that readers of the blog are missing some personal comments on non-IT stuff. This is...

OK - this is a question that keeps coming back to me. Again and again.

When you add a solution to Source Control in Team Foundation Server (TFS) for the first time there are several ways with their respectively pros and cons. This is how I do it:

1. ith Source Control - create a folder hierarchy that is applicable for your project. Say for example [ProjectName][SolutionName][Branch]. For example $\SakDotNet\BrevMallar\Main
2. Now open the solution in Visual Studio
3. Right-click the solution and choose Add Solution to Source control… (Note! If you don’t see that choice in the menu see below)
4. Source Control and Add file(s) for any additional files that not is included in the solution (or was missed by the way…)

Well - the simplest case is easy enough but if something goes wrong (as it just now did for me) there are some troubles...

One of the most annoying thing with VB.NET is when it tries to help you with syntax highlighting, when using snippets.

You know; you type “property” hit TAB and then the property is created for you. The things that you needs to “fill out” is highlighted with some scary green color (see picture above).

In Visual Studio:

• After the snippet is filled out position the cursor after end property
• Hit ENTER
• The green coloring is gone

If anyone know how to do this in Visual Studio 2005 I would love to know. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee at Länsförsäkringar, level 4. I promise

The previous post about CLS-compliant classes is right in a way but the real answer lies in that when you create a test project with Visual Studio, the created Assembly is marked as CLS-compliant.

This is done in the AssemblyInfo.vb (or .cs depending on your choice). I am not quite sure on why this is done but can imagine that it has to do with that the test project wants to be open for calls on all lot of different classes and components.

However in our case we only had to remove the CLSCompliant(true) from the AssemblyInfo.vb-file and everything was back to normal.

OK - here is a strange one…

[UPDATE ON THIS POST - SEE https://www.marcusoft.net/2008/03/real-answere-type-typename-is-not-cls.html]

We are using dependency injection to be able to inject mocked version of classes that the class we’re testing is using…. (oh, my god - requires another blog-post I think… I’ll get back).

So the first thing we did was to extract interfaces for all the methods the implementation is using. So far so good.

But when I mocked the implement ion of the interface we got a quite strange warning:

Type ‘KodBenamning’ is not CLS-compliant.

Apparently this occurs when a type is referenced by an interface (as parameter or return type) AND the type is not marked with CLSCompliant(true) which, by the way is NOT default, of course…. So - the solution is to mark all your classes used by interface with CLSCompliant(true) and it will work…

Ooh - 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 co-driver…

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 Solution Explorer

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 phoning 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 high level 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...