Requirements Engineering with TFS

 

Some of the best practises from codeplex community can be found here.

My Previous post on RE

Code Branching and Merging with TFS 2010

Distributed development efforts involves working cohesively with geographically distributed teams and working by minimizing the impact of introducing ‘bugs’ or worse breaking the existing code base when new pieces of functionality is checked in.

Now, you all know that with TFS you can

1] Shelve the pending changes

2] Have a code reviewer policy set up on your TFS to avoid the above situation etc.

3] Take out the existing ‘Greatest and Latest’ code to a separate ‘Branch’ and write your code inside this branch, satisfy the requirements with Unit Tests and merge your changes from the separate branch into your main branch (aka production code).

The Codeplex community has put together a branching guide to make this simple and straightforward. I recommend it as a must read for developers.

Links

Visual Studio Team Branching Guide 2010

Mono Tools for Visual Studio - 2.0

Mono Tools for Visual Studio is a commercial add-in for Microsoft™ Visual Studio™ that enables developers to write .NET applications for non-Windows platforms within their preferred development environment.
It allows developers to build, debug and deploy .NET applications on Linux, while continuing to leverage the extensive ecosystem of code, libraries, and tools available for .NET. – Courtesy http://mono-tools.com/

More Here:
http://mono-tools.com/FAQ/

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 RC

WhooHoo!!
Download everything from here
Catch the action here
I’m having a play on the following, till the RC expires!
1] VS 2010
2] TFS
3] Lab Management 
4] Test Professional
5] Agents -Visual Studio Agents 2010 enables scale-out load generation, distributed data collection, and distributed test execution.

Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks

A superb video covering VS 2008 in action. You can also find the MVC  (Multiple Virtual Server, not model-view-controller) demo. Follow the link.

Tools for everyday development

1. Process Explorer

Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you'll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you'll see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded.

2. Debug View

DebugView is an application that lets you monitor debug output on your local system, or any computer on the network that you can reach via TCP/IP. It is capable of displaying both kernel-mode and Win32 debug output, so you don't need a debugger to catch the debug output your applications or device drivers generate, nor do you need to modify your applications or drivers to use non-standard debug output APIs.

Cool Features

• Win32 OutputDebugString
• Kernel-mode DbgPrint
• All kernel-mode variants of DbgPrint implemented in Windows XP and Server 2003

DebugView also extracts kernel-mode debug output generated before a crash from Window's 2000/XP crash dump files if DebugView was capturing at the time of the crash.

3. PsKill

Windows NT/2000 does not come with a command-line 'kill' utility. You can get one in the Windows NT or Win2K Resource Kit, but the kit's utility can only terminate processes on the local computer. PsKill is a kill utility that not only does what the Resource Kit's version does, but can also kill processes on remote systems. You don't even have to install a client on the target computer to use PsKill to terminate a remote process.

P.S: Filemon and Regmon have been replaced by Process Monitor on versions of Windows starting with Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Vista. Filemon and Regmon remain for legacy operating system support, including Windows 9x.

4. Resource Refactor

Features for Resource Refactoring Tool

• Works with C#, VB.Net languages. Supports all project types that ships with Visual Studio 2005 including web sites and web application projects.
• A preview window to show changes.
• Finds other instances of the text being replaced in the project automatically.
• Lists existing resources by their similarity level to the text being replaced.
• Automatically replaces hard coded string with a reference to resource entry.

5. Ghost Doc

Automatically generates documentation for constructors,methods,properties and class. Integrates will with visual studio and style cop and is a must have to get rid of those style cop warnings.

6. Microsoft StyleCop

StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project. This is a definite must have. It enforces consistent looking code across the whole project with multiple developers with varied tastes and preferences.

7. Microsoft FxCop

FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Many of the issues concern violations of the programming and design rules set forth in the Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers, which are the Microsoft guidelines for writing robust and easily maintainable code by using the .NET Framework.

FxCop is intended for class library developers. However, anyone creating applications that should comply with the .NET Framework best practices will benefit. FxCop is also useful as an educational tool for people who are new to the .NET Framework or who are unfamiliar with the .NET Framework Design Guidelines.

FxCop is designed to be fully integrated into the software development cycle and is distributed as both a fully featured application that has a graphical user interface (FxCop.exe) for interactive work, and a command-line tool (FxCopCmd.exe) suited for use as part of automated build processes or integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET as an external tool.

Links

Sysinternals Suite
FxCop
The Visual Studio Code Analysis Team Blog
StyleCop
Introducing StyleCop on legacy projects
Ghost Doc
Resource Refactor

VS 08 SP1 and .Net FX 3.5 SP1

Woohoo!! Time to get excited..VS 08 SP1 seems to me like more of a bug fixing upgrade over features. However, .Net FX 3.5 SP1 is exciting with the following

1] ASP.Net Dynamic Data :

ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that enables rapid data driven development without writing code, and a new addition to ASP.NET AJAX that provides support for managing browser history (back button support). For more information

2] Entity Framework

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937723.aspx

3] ADO.NET Data Services Framework

The ADO.NET Data Services Framework consists of a combination of patterns and libraries, which enable data to be exposed as a flexible REST (Representational State Transfer)-based data service that can be consumed by Web clients in a corporate network or across the Internet. The ADO.NET Data Services Framework makes data service creation over any data source. A conceptual view model of the underlying storage schema can easily be exposed through rich integration with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Services created by using the ADO.NET Data Services Framework, and also compatible Windows Live (dev.live.com) services, can be easily accessed from any platform. For client applications that are running on Microsoft platforms, a set of client libraries are provided to make interaction with data services simple. For example, .NET Framework-based clients can use LINQ to query data services and a simple .NET Framework object layer to update data in the service

Downloads

> .NET FX 3.5 SP1

> VS 08 SP1

Visual Studio RSS Configuration

If you wanted to subscribe to a different feed from MSDN, which gets displayed in the start page, use this article here to learn configure Visual Studio to do just that.

VSTS Tips and Tricks

I came across this wonderful blog post detailing some cool tips and tricks using VSTS like Managed Code Analysis (FXCop), adding Check-in policies, Team System for Architects,Developers and Testers, TFS quick configurations , Setting up a load testing lab etc. All in all it's a nice read up on VSTS. The link to this article can be found here.

Software Engineering with VSTS

 

 

 

I'm reading this book called 'Software Engineering with Visual Studio Team System' by Sam Guckenheimer. To say the least, It's not letting me sleep. This book looks tiny though but is humongous in it's content and specifically the application lifecycle management automation through VSTS. VSTS is the best thing to happen to MS technology developers for a long time.. The best part is how the book guides you with Agile methodologies and CMMI practises using VSTS.

Some Links..

The Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite

Video of Sam Guckenheimer talking about VSTS

Software Development methodologies and Visual Studio Team System

The interesting thing which caught my attention was security testing through VSTS. Sam talks about using a fault model base on vulnerabilites observed on other systems, and a series of attacks to exploit the vulnerabilites. He also gives references to published attack patterns which are helpful in identifying the vast majority of vulnerabilites. His reference includes James A. Whittaker and Herbert H. Thompson's book, 'How to break software security: Effective Techniques for Security Testing (Boston: Addison-Wesley,2004). (which has around 19 attack patterns that are standard approaches to hacking systems).
Now, There's a lot of stuff for security from microsoft, for instance the trustworthy computing initiative, SD3 and SDL , Security best practises etc..
I'm wondering if there was an SDL approach inside Visual Studio Team System.. (may be as a part of ALM), What an invaluable feature it would have been..!!

The toys of software construction

The complete set of .Net Framework tools can be found here. Although most of them are built into Visual studio or disguised by it, There are a plenty of them which can come in handy at deployment and security.