Notes from Tech-Ed session "Team Foundation Server for Everyone"

The video recording of Martin Woodward's two sessions at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, Team Foundation Server for Everyone & The Accidental Team Foundation Server Admin provide an overview of TFS 2010 in about 2 hours. Some notes -

• TFS installation choices - Basic, Advanced
• TFS Basic Wizard - most compact TFS installation possible, provides only Source Control, WorkItem Tracking & Build services; can even work with SQL Server Express
• No requirement for Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server Reporting Services
• Supports client installations - Windows 7, Windows Vista
• Grows when you grow - Client OS, Single server, Multi-server farms
• x64 Support
• Supports Java development
• Team Foundation VSSConverter command-line tool can migrate projects, files, version history, labels, and user information from your Visual SourceSafe database to your server for Team Foundation version control. This tool is included with TFS.
• Helps with Build Automation & Continuous Integration
• Work Item Tracking enables you track everything you need to manage: Tasks, Bugs, User Feedback, Feature requests
• Rich integration in Visual Studio / Eclipse
• Full featured synchronization lets you work in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project
• Web Access lets you get to your work items
• CodePlex uses TFS 2010 to manage 2.5 million users & 15000 Team Projects. Involves 4 Virtual Machine Application-Tier Farm with 10 Team Foundation Server Instances on 2 physical servers
• Developer Division at Microsoft uses TFS - 42 instances, 19,700 unique users, 6,154 team projects, 7.9 million work items

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IBM turns 100

To highlight its achievements in the 100 years of its existence, IBM has released a full-page ad in some Indian newspapers & a dedicated site for IBM's 100 Icons of Progress. A few interesting facts & trivia from that list of accomplishments -

• IBM programmer John Backus and his team produced the first high-level language, FORTRAN (for FORmula TRANslating System) in 1957.
• Contributed to the rise of the Internet by designing with its partners a new high-speed National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) to connect US universities and 6 US-based supercomputer centers.
• Developed storage devices like Magnetic tape & Floppy disk
• Invented the UPC barcode system in 1973
• The first IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) had a price tag of $1,565 & earned Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” award. The brand name PC has got so popular that it is now used as a synonym for a micro-computer.
• IBM engineer Forrest Parry's wife contributed to the development of Magnetic Stripe Technology by suggesting to her husband that he use the iron to melt the magnetized tape strip onto a piece of plastic when he was struggling to combine the two components.  Now you know who is behind the magnetic stripe on credit cards. 

Also see:
100 Years of IBM in Pictures

History of Apple

The History of Microsoft

15 years of Internet Explorer

Windows 7 is 1 year old, Windows platform soon to be 25

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Notes from Tech-Ed session "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers"

Steve Evans' presentation "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers" at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, had some interesting IIS tips & tricks. I transcribed some of them from the more than hour-long video recording on Channel9 -

- Developers have Swiss cheese knowledge – they know a lot but there are holes in what they are familiar with.

Certificates
- Certificate Authority (CA) creates a cert for a specific site & date range, the OS trusts it.
- Client connects to server, pulls down cert & check for 3 things -
* Certificate creator trusted?
* Host header matches?
* Date is in range?
- Configuring SSL certificates - A wildcard certificate can be used for multiple sites related to each other
- You can drop a non-CA issued cert into the Trusted Root Certification Authority to simulate a real scenario while experimenting with a feature

PowerShell
- strong support in IIS 7.5
- PowerShell treats IIS as a drive

DefaultDocument setting
- DefaultDocument setting within IIS Manager lets you specify the default file to return when a client does not request a specific file.
- Interesting IIS notification when I tried the DefaultDocument setting on an Application - "The file ‘default.aspx’ exists in the current directory. It is recommended that you move this file to the top of the list to improve performance"

Feature Delegation
- Feature Delegation module is used to configure the default delegation state for features at lower levels in IIS Manager
- web.config is created automatically when certain settings are added in IIS.
- we have the option in IIS to change which settings are stored in the web.config versus the IIS metabase. Its through Feature Delegation.
- if Feature Delegation is set to Read Only, the setting is stored in the IIS metabase

Application Pool- is where the code runs
- Managed pipeline mode setting for Application Pool has 2 options –
* Integrated – ASP.NET is part of the pipeline
* Classic
- Be in Integrated mode whenever you can
- 10 year old codebase in ASP migrated to IIS 7.5 ran fine in Integrated mode
- Application Pool > Advanced Settings | General > “Enable 32-bit application”-false will address more than 4 gigs of memory
- Application Pool > Advanced Settings > Process Model | Idle timeout – set to 0 on Production server, default is 20 minutes
- Every 29 hours (Recycling | Regular time interval - 1740 minutes), the app pool will recycle (inproc sessions will be lost) no matter what
-Worker Processes module in IIS Manager lists all App pools
- Host rogue or crash-prone apps in a separate app pool so that it’s in a sandbox

Failed Request Tracing Rules
- configure tracing for failed requests. A request trace is logged either when an error status code is generated or when the time taken for the request exceeds a specified duration. If both conditions have been fulfilled, the first condition that is met willl generate the request trace.

Log Parser Lizard
- free GUI tool for MS Log Parser

MS Web Deploy /One Click deploy - available through command-line (MSDeploy.exe) & GUI
- Example: msdeploy -verb:sync -source:webServer -dest:webServer,computerName=demoiis -whatif - informs what would change on a sync but not actually change it.

Security
- After the Code Red security issue in IIS5, from IIS6 onwards components of IIS are disabled by default.
- URL Scan is built into IIS 7.

Web Platform Installer - app store for IIS

URL Rewrite - popular extension for IIS
- allows us to write rules to change the request coming in & going out on they fly
- comes with a bunch of pre-canned rules
- The sample rule UserFriendlyURL makes URLs SEO-friendly
- provides rewriting capabilities based on rules for the requested URL address & the content of an HTTP response. So if user types http://site2.com/ IIS can make it look as http://www.site2.com/
- You can rename URL Rewrite configured rules in web.config to have memorable names rather than using the automated default names.

IIS Express
- true IIS except it does not run as a service, it runs as a app under your user context.
- "Use IIS Express" appears in context menu for project in VS & you can switch from using Cassini to IIS Express. URL Rewrite, FRT, Log files (for use with Log Parser) available with IIS Express

Also see: Free videos from major Microsoft Developer events are archived on Channel9

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JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag

Photo gag by an observant Niyaz PK (click on image to enlarge)

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Try these VHDs instead of using any pirated Microsoft software

Programming with new Microsoft products & technologies does not have to cost anything. Besides offering time-limited (trial editions) or feature-limited (Express editions) versions of its products, MS also makes available VHDs of some of its popular products. Here is a list of such VHDs that I've come across (work in progress) -

• IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9 
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010
• Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management
• Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project Server 2010
• Windows Server 2008

The downside is that most of these VHDs are time-bombed and are VERY bulky.

If after evaluating a product, you wish to seed these trial editions of the OS, SQL, VS, etc. with MSDN keys so the VPC doesn't expire, you can (as acknowledged by an MS evangelist in the comments section of this link).

Also see: HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

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Google Maps Driving Directions gadget - useful for a "Contact Us" page

Google organizes "the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful" but info about some of its own products may be a little difficult to find. If there was a reference to Driving Directions gadget & the Static Maps wizard on the Google Maps API Family page, they could be easily discovered. As these useful utilities exist on orphaned pages and are hard to find, many developers may go on to create their own components.

The Google Driving Directions gadget is a nifty utility that organizations can configure for their websites to show on a map where they are located. More importantly, it optionally lets users type their location & then shows the travel route visually & through textual instructions.

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Free, online, open-source book on web performance - Book of Speed

Stoyan Stefanov, a web performance expert, Facebook engineer, ex-Yahoo, smush.it creator & YSlow 2.0 architect, has released the draft of Book of Speed for free & public access. Currently 5 of the planned 9 chapters are online.

In his blog post announcing the release, he also mentions another free, online JavaScript resource by Marijn Haverbeke - Eloquent JavaScript. 

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Chrome Offline Installer

Chrome uses a installer that you have to first get which then downloads the latest stable version of the browser. If you have to install Chrome on several machines, you can grab the offline installer. That way, you don't even need internet connectivity for each install.

I found this helpful tip on the official Chrome Forum.

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HOW TO export Contacts from a LG CDMA Mobile to newer phones

I recently needed to copy Contacts from a LG-Reliance CDMA Mobile handset to a GSM smartphone. After a bit of monkeying around with the available options, I found that you can copy Contacts to the CDMA SIM.

I inserted the CDMA SIM into the GSM smartphone and could successfully copy the Contact details to the smartphone.

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Popular sites which use Lucene

List compiled from Lucene wiki's link database & references in various online articles -

• Apple
• Disney
• IBM
• LinkedIn
• Wolfram Research, Inc. - Wolfram Research uses Lucene for internal tools, the Demonstrations project, the Mathematica documentation search and site searching.
• Pluralsight
• StackOverflow

(work in progress)


Also see: Large sites that run on ASP.NET

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