Team Foundation Service

With the upcoming release of Team Foundation Server (TFS 2012), Microsoft proposes us a great preview of the ALM Platform by offering a try on the TFS Cloud solution : Team Foundation Service.

Using your live account, you can quickly integrate your team in a project, define your process template and use most of the TFS modules. The integration with Visual Studio Team Explorer is similar to a classic connection and the web access has been improved in performance and design.

A pleasant TFS evolution and an interesting service solution for small enterprise.

Have a look @ :http://tfspreview.com/

Quick wins on performance in your web applications

According site requirements and business needs, your web application has to reach sometimes a higher level of reactivity. Most of the business applications does not encounter this situation because the main focus is set to business rules and engines(data manipulations and processes) and not really about interfaces and network… However, it’s an other deal with public and mobile web sites.
There are already many sites which propose some tips on site optimizations, but I’ll focus on ASP.NET Applications and my own feedbacks. Following some simples tips to gain performances in few changes…

Manage your Feeds with RSSToolkit

A good resource when you need to read or generate feeds like RSS, Atom, OPML or RDF : RSS Toolkit (http://aspnetrsstoolkit.codeplex.com/).

RssToolkit is a complete and simple framework to manipulate your RSS feeds in your .NET projects, from reading to generating them. Moreover, knowledge about Atom or Rss standard is not necessary : you can easily switch from RSS to Atom when generation is required.

Save your time with Attrice Team Foundation Sidekicks

As you already may know, a great effort has been made in the administration part of Team Foundation Server 2010 regarding the previous versions. Except if you like command lines, a useful tool exists now to manage installation, projects collections, permissions, etc… Quite simple and really necessary.

However, when you begin to think that you are saved of commands and data manipulations in TFS Database, TFS can persist to challenge you with others errors and corrupt states. Be sure that the case is rare, but sometimes…

YouTube video thumbnail

Here a little tip/work-around to get a thumbnail from a media available on Youtube.

Upload a video file with Youtube API

After reading many documentations and posts about the topic, I think it will be usefull to share a part of code to upload a video file to Youtube with the .NET API. This one is provided by google and the following sample use it.

Floodlight on Silverlight Architectures !

I have started to learn and practice Silverlight 2.0/3.0 since many months and I must admit that it was not a simple task. Coming from a long experience in ASP.NET development, it was a change to use client-server solutions and a great pleasure to discover others syntaxes(WPF) and architectures… but when it comes to find an architecture for Silverlight and the only thing that you have is silverlight.net(a great site with good information but, in my personal opinion, lack of synthesis), you can be lost through informations. That’s the point I want to highlight in this topic : provide a quick architecture/pattern guide to everyone who want to start a Silverlight application.

101 Linq Samples

There is a while that I have this link in my “Linq bookmarks collection” and I think it will be helpfull for beginner and anyone who has forgotten a scrap of Linq syntax or has failed to build a query…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/aa336746.aspx

Execute DotNet Code on the fly

Sometimes, we need to execute a short part of code to accomplish a unique and simple task, like deleting all files of a folder and his subfolders or testing a network communication… All sort of tasks that you don’t need/want to create a project or a page/form.

So, I have written on my spare time a Visual Studio AddIn(winform application) that can help me to execute this sort of code.

Display a hierarchy with Reporting Services

The reporting services limits can be easily reached when your customer ask you, for example, to display a department structure or an object composition.

In my example, we have:
Dep1
Dep11
Dep12
Dep13
Dep2
Dep21
Dep211
Dep2111