Archive for December, 2011

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

A while back an announcement was made that TFSPreview.com had been made available for general testing. Various bloggers at Microsoft put an invitation token in their MSDN blogs so everyone can have a go at it.

In this article series we’ll take a very quick look at what the hosted TFS solution by Microsoft looks like.

Articles currently in the series:

Connect Visual Studio 2010 to your new hosted team project

In order to be able to connect to the hosted TFSPreview team project, you’ll need to comply with the prerequisites I’m listing here.

Prerequisites

• Make sure you’re running Visual Studio 2010 SP1
• Install KB2581206 – (KB2581206 – Visual Studio 2010 SP1 TFS Compatibility GDR)

Hook up Visual Studio to your new repository/project

Alright, if you’ve downloaded and installed KB2581206 (which means you’re spinning VS2010 SP1 already) you are read to connect. The procedure to connect to the hosted TFS service is basically the same as if you were to connect to any other TFS repository, which is easy and awesome.

In Visual Studio 2010 SP1, simply make these smooth ninja moves and you’re done:

Make sure to fetch the URL of your account (As seen in your dashboard, like depicted below):

Enter this URL in the Visual Studio 2010 dialogs and we’re ready to kick off:

It’ll ask you for your credentials which you need to use to verify your account details:

You should now be authenticated and your repository should be available:

You’ll go ahead as you normally do and choose the projects that interests you and then you’re basically done:

Your Team Explorer should contain your TFS project and you should be able to work with it as you normally would from Visual Studio 2010:

This means you’ve got all of your standard tasks and operations available straight from VS 2010 (So you don’t have to go to the website to make changes …):

Summary

Easy enough. As soon as you’ve downloaded the required tooling to get connected, you can hook up your new cloud-hosted team project in Visual Studio 2010 without any problems. Give it a spin, it flows quite nicely!

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 6 Comments
• Tags: Cloud, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SP2010, TFS, Visual Studio

Author: Tobias Zimmergren | www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

Sometimes when you’re in a development project you can feel the pain of debugging. If there’s a lot of code floating around it may be hard to sort out the method calls and how the depend on each other if it’s a very complex solution. To ease the task of debugging there’s a great VS 2010 plugin called Debugger Canvas, which will help you to sort out a lot of the hassle while debugging.

In this article we’ll just take a quick look at what Debugger Canvas is and how it can assist us in our daily debugging adventures.

Getting Started with Debugger Canvas

Firstly, you obviously need to download the extension for Visual Studio 2010, which can be done HERE.

Debugger Canvas in Action

When you’ve installed the extension, there’s a few new opportunities presented when debugging. Your new “F5” experience will be based on the new Debugger Canvas UI instead of the traditional debugging experience which means you’ll be able to more easily follow the calls within your code, like this:

When you step into the code deeper, you’ll see how the calls were made quite easily:

Summary

You should definitely take a look at Debugger Canvas if you haven’t already as it’ll be most helpful for you in your development adventures.

Get a better overview here and watch the introductory video!

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 3 Comments
• Tags: Debugging, Development, SharePoint 2010, VS2010

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

In most of my recent projects I’ve been required to hook up some custom functionality and add custom forms, pages and Web Parts. Some of the forms and pages I designed needed to be launched from the Ribbon menu, which of course is contextual. This basically means that when you visit a specific list which inherits from a specific content type, we can choose to display our custom Ribbon controls. One of the most common requirements I bumped into was having some kind of conditional check whether to enable or disable the button based on a set of conditions.

In your Ribbon XML for the CommandUIHandler there’s a property called “EnabledScript” which is a tag that enables you to enter a validation script to determine whether or not the ribbon button should be enabled. In my case I need to disable the custom Ribbon-controls if one item is selected, but otherwise always disable it.

Use the following snippet from the SP.ListOperation, which contains the Selection.getSelectedItems method:

<CommandUIHandler
Command=”Ribbon.Awesome.NavButton_CMD”
CommandAction=”javascript:Alert(‘My Awesome Button Was Clicked’);
          EnabledScript=”javascript:SP.ListOperation.Selection.getSelectedItems().length == 1;” />

It’s really only the last line that is of interest here since that’s where the script magic happens to determine if the control should be enabled or not.

MSDN have some nice samples in one of their articles over here.

Results

If you select one (and only one) item in the list, your custom command will be enabled:

If you didn’t select or selected more than one item, the command will be disabled as such:

Summary

I know many people have been struggling with the Ribbon and making it behave. In this article I simply wanted to highlight one of the very common tasks I’ve seen developers looking for and trying to achieve in some of the last few projects I’ve been involved.

Since my awesome mate Wictor covered a bunch of awesome posts about the Ribbon, I’m not going to dive into any more details than so

Enjoy.

• Posted in Technical
• 5 Comments
• Tags: Development, Ribbon, SharePoint 2010, VS2010

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

A while back an announcement was made that TFSPreview.com had been made available for general testing. Various bloggers at Microsoft put an invitation token in their MSDN blogs so everyone can have a go at it.

In this article series we’ll take a very quick look at what the hosted TFS solution by Microsoft looks like.

Articles currently in the series:

What we need to know before getting started…

Firstly you’ll need to get an invitation token from someone who already have an account on tfspreview.com and then you’re good to go. In this post I’ll assume that you’ve got that already.

Sign in to the TFSpreview account you just acquired:

This should give you access to the Team Foundation Service Preview console:

From here you have a few options for proceeding:

• Create a team project – The first step to create a new TFS site and project
• Download software – You’ll want to visit this link so you can download the required software for connecting from VS 2010, if you haven’t already.

To guide you through the process of getting up and running, I’ll create a new project and call it "TOZIT AB Project 42" so you can follow the sample this article through.

Getting Started – Step by step

Right, so you’ve got your account set up and want to create a project. Follow along and I’ll take you through the entire process. Hang on.

Click "Create a team project":

Next you’ll get a dialog telling you the progress of setting the new project up:

When this is done you can navigate directly to the project or click close. I pressed close and made sure I could see the team project in my project list when I press "Browse all…":

Simply click on the "Navigate" button to navigate to the project and you should see your team project dashboard, similar to this:

What you get here is the intro to your Project. You can see in the top menu that you’ve got options for these things:

• Home (This is what you see above)
• Work
• Source
• Build

HOME

As depicted in the screenshot above, this is the welcome screen of the currently selected project. From here you can control your Product Backlog, Product Backlog Items, Sprints, Work Items and so on. Think of this as your online control panel for the Scrum project. Pretty neat, if you ask me.

WORK

Under the "backlog" tab:

You’ll get a more detailed overview over you current situation in the project including the Product Backlog, Sprints and Work Items with an overview as well as detailed information about each item you select. From here you can control, create and modify your current project quite easily from the Web Browser.

For example, you can create a new PBI (Product Backlog Item) from here:

and it’ll immediately appear in the list below, and you can start working with it:

I’m obviously not going to walk you through each and every button on these pages, that’s for you yourself to try out, but this should give you an overview and idea of what’s available.

Under the "board" tab, you can easily get a really awesome overview of your current status in the project with all your Product Backlog Items in the selected sprint. You can easily drag and drop these items from one to the other section:

(Pretty awesome…)

Of course you can edit everything from the browser UI here as well:

Under the "work items" tab you can get a more familiar overview of the current work items, and even create you own queries in the section to the left – much like you would do from Visual Studio otherwise:

SOURCE

Under the Source tab you can see (perhaps one of the most important things) the source code of your project including the history, changesets, shelvesets and so on:

BUILD

An overview of your current build configurations. In this post I haven’t set up any build configurations yet, but keep your eyes out for that soon enough.

Summary

This was intended to be a short introduction of what capabilities and features you’ll see in the hosted Team Foundation Services 2010 hosted service. More on this subject to follow!

Enjoy.

• Posted in Misc, Technical
• 6 Comments
• Tags: Cloud, Source Control, TFS

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

 

A new blog platform means…

I finally migrated from WSS 3.0 as a blogging platform to WordPress. Obviously WordPress contains tons of awesome utilities and functions for SEO and general blogging tasks. The SharePoint platform was pretty descent to have the blog hosted on, but in reality it doesn’t beat WordPress when it comes to just the blogging.

This also means I’ve got a new RSS Feed Url (http://feeds.feedburner.com/tobiaszimmergren). I’m looking forward to posting some more awesome content during 2012.

• Posted in Misc
• 18 Comments
• Tags: Blogging, Wordpress