Archives

Archives / 2008
  • Jing - A Really Great Free Capture Tool

    I stumbled across The Jinq Project last week and I think that it's just great.  I've had my eye on TechSmith's Camtasia product for a while and will eventually purchase it when I absolutely need it.  But for a 5 minute video or screen capture, Jing does the job easily.  It may even replace Vista's simple screen capture utility that I use constantly in my work.  Jing installs easily and produces SWF files for video and captures the screen for images.  The resulting file can be uploaded to ScreenCast for free, for a while, or copied to the hard drive. 

  • Visual Studio 2008 SP1

    Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 has finally arrived.  It is a warm welcome with the way that my Visual Studio installation "found opportunities to suddenly restart", let's say.  The SP1 installation is rather interesting, like the VS2005 service packs were.  It takes a very long time to complete, it pops up (and hides) alert windows behind the installation window, it requires the VS2008 DVD, and it requires a reboot if some applications are running such as my Yahoo messenger...  Hmmm...  So I would suggest that when installing this service pack, stay focused on its progress and start it when you don't need to get work done.

  • TFS Reporting Architecture Notes

    Here are some notes and a list of questions and answers regarding the TFS Reporting architecture. I gave a presentation at this month's Dallas Visual Studio Team System user group.  The topic was TFS Reporting but what we really covered was the TFS reporting architecture.  We’ll probably follow-up with a second session of “Effective TFS Reporting” to include demos and the meaning of some of the most used TFS reports. I strongly believe that the TFS Reporting architecture includes several areas that should be understood to effectively and efficiently deliver standard and custom reports. So here are some high points for the benefit of others looking for answers.

  • How To: Unit Test a T-SQL Trigger with VSTS Database Edition

    In Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, three types of functionality are unit tested; Stored Procedures, Functions, and Triggers.  It’s not so obvious how to test a trigger and at this time there are not many examples.  This is probably because there are so many different testing needs.  Testing the trigger is very similar to the more obvious calls to stored procedures and functions.  This example shows how a trigger can be unit tested using the RAISERROR method to cause a test harness failure.  Two other methods exist to perform unit testing failures for those complicated tests.