With the recent release of Visual Studio 2010 RC, I decided to take Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 RC for a spin also.  I was really interested in seeing what new and great features are being offered, because there has been a lot of buzz around this release of TFS. 

After installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate on my laptop and setting up TFS 2010 as a new install, which was way easier than I remember 2005 being, I connected up VS 2010 and TFS 2010 with out a problem. 

However I ran into a ton of problems trying to get Visual Studio 2008 connected to TFS 2010.  I eventually had to resort hacking the registry to get everything to work as it should.  Here are the steps I used:

1. Click Add Existing Team Project Button
   
2. Click Servers Button
3. Click Add… Button
4. Type in full server name with collection specified and trailing slash, it complains if there is no trailing slash
    
   If you actually try to use this to select projects to edit, everything will look like it went smooth.  However you will notice that no projects actually show up in the Team Explorer
5. Close Visual Studio
6. Remove the trailing slash from the registry key of the server you just added here:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/VisualStudio/9.0/TeamFoundation/Servers
7. Open Visual Studio
8. Connect to your TFS 2010 server and select the projects that you want to use in 2008.

Hope this helps somebody else down the line as I am sure more and more people are going to run into this problem as they adopt TFS 2010.

Note: You can do this in all one step by just adding the value into the registry, I just find this way a little more visually pleasing for explaining the concept in the blog.

Tags: Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio

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As promised here is the updated scripts for CodeRush Xpress 9.3, which was released a few week ago.

The Keyboard Command Way

Shift+Ctrl+Alt+O

The Registry Hack Way

• Show Menu for CodeRush Xpress (x86)
• Show Menu for CodeRush Xpress (x64)

I will state this again: I really wish DevExpress would stop treating the registry as a dumping ground and creating a new parallel registry path with each new install, it makes customizing the registry settings very difficult to keep up with. I could see it for each major version, but common is a new registry path really needed for each minor version?

Tags: CodeRush, Visual Studio, Xpress

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As I announced yesterday I will be speaking at the Philly Code Camp 2009.1 on Visual Studio 2008 for beginners.  As part of this presentation I want to be able to provide the 10 most valuable tips for beginners using Visual Studio.

I did a quick search of the internet last night, on this subject, and everything seemed to point to Sara Ford as the defacto standard on Visual Studio tips.  She even has a best selling book on the subject, appropriately called Microsoft Visual Studio Tips.

And because she is such an awesome person all the royalties from the book are going to a scholarship fund to help pay for the the costs of sending Hurricane Katrina survivors to college. So if you are interested go pick up a copy.

The problem is that she has 251 tips in the book, and 382 tips on her website and I need to widdle this down to the top 10.

Here are my top 3, so far:

1. Did you know… You can create toolbar buttons to quickly toggle your favorite VS Settings? – #372
2. Did you know… how not to accidentally copy a blank line? – #050
3. Did you know… How to optimize Visual Studio for multi-monitors? – #381

What are yours? If you have a favorite please include it in the comments below with a link (if possible).

Tags: Code Camp, philly.net, Public Speaking, Visual Studio

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I have been a huge fan of jQuery ever since I started working on IdeaPipe about 10 months ago. Mostly because of its simplistic DOM access using standard CSS syntax that we all have to learn anyways in the modern Web 2.0 world. In addition to the ease of finding elements on your page, it also works very nicely with other frameworks, I have used it in combination with Microsoft AJAX, Google’s GData JavaScript, and TinyMCE.

Personally I found this to be amazing news, because Microsoft is shipping an Open Source project, licensed under MIT License, with its flag ship developer tool, Visual Studio.  Maybe if we play our cards right, we can start seeing other projects like NUnit and Moq start to ship with Visual Studio.  I have my fingers crossed.

John Resig the developer of jQuery had this to say on his blog:

Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).

And according to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft is also extending the standard product support to jQuery:

We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24×7 with Microsoft PSS.

This is probably some of the most exciting, because it means that jQuery will be a supported stack in some of the more rigid enterprise development environments that won’t install anything that isn’t supported by Microsoft.  I also beleive this is great news for MVC, because jQuery makes MVC just that much more useful for the average developer.

Tags: jQuery, MVC, Visual Studio

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