jb's Blog

Testing your WCF calls 29 Jan 2008 08:46

Came across this post just now and thought it was worth a furthor look. One of the internal groups in the Team System group, the "VSTS Rangers" have put togethor an addin for VS2005 and VS2008 which allows you to generate unit tests from a WCF trace file and proxy/service contract which will replay the service interactions. Quite useful if you are building distributed systems and want to simply unit test your controllers which make the service calls while still passing messages through the WCF pipeline.

Having the unit test features installed in your appropriate version of Visual Studio would seem to be a pre-requisite here :)

Check it out on Codeplex!

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Shipping again 24 Jan 2008 09:45

Shipping a new product is always a great feeling and on Tuesday we announced the release of one of our new WPF Controls, a native WPF property grid :)

One of the definite advantages of using WPF is its ability to allow total control over the theming and rendering of your controls. One of the disadvantages at the moment is a lack of good native controls which give you the functionality you need but also the control and performance you are looking for when building your apps - there are definitely plenty of new tips and tricks you need when building WPF apps. What we found when first building out our WPF applications was that there are plenty of WinForms based interop controls, but they really just fail to hit the mark visually or simply underperform.

With that in mind we set off on building out some WPF controls of our own, and the Property Grid is our initial offering in this space (since Ribbons and DataGrids seem to be overly catered for right now) - so if you are looking at building WPF apps soon then check out what we have to offer, and if we dont have a control that you are looking for then post us a note in the forums - you never know, we might well have something cooking in the labs waiting for you ;)

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Zune - Firmware update leads to C00D1249 15 Jan 2008 21:34

Ive started using my Zune again lately and a couple of days ago it wanted me to update to the 2.3 firmware. Apparently this happens once a month. No problem. Lets go!

For those of you without a Zune, the firmware update process consists of a the Zune software uploading a new CAB file to the Zune and then triggering a series of reboots. Cool!

For those of you without a Zune, you will also be blissfully unaware of how brittle this process can be, you see 20 seconds after my firmware updated started, the Zune rebooted and displayed a very unhelpful message "Please connect the Zune to your PC and reinstall the Firmware" - eh?

On the PC side I get an even less helpful message stating "Your device failed to update, error C00D1249". And then you guessed it, time to update the firmware all over again ;)

Unfortunately once you have entered this cycle you are largely trapped and left with a nice Brown, Black or White brick on your desk.

So how to fix it? Well the KB article on my subject is decidedly unhelpful other than to tell me that there are quite a few nasty errors I didnt encounter (except I probably hit the worst one - typical luck..). Some better documentation would be nice, although I did enjoy the suggestion of "5. Try to update the software on the Zune device again. You may succeed on the second try." :)

Thankfully for them and me Im a little more persistant about fixing these things and after trying a fair number of combinations and learning about all the fancy shortcut keys for rebooting or reformatting your Zune (none of which helped much either) I found that the problem seems to stem from being connected to a particular USB port which the device doesnt like. On plugging the Zune in to a new USB port on a seperate PC the firmware update finally succeeded. Daringly (or insanely?) I reformatted the Zune and reproed the issue (and fix) again just to verify the behavior - again a different USB port on another PC and sorted.

So looks like that USB port is off the menu for my Zune for now. For those of you with bricked Zunes desperately searching for some help, I hope this solves your problem since it sorted mine.

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BackgroundMotion for VS2008 08 Jan 2008 10:34

There was a bit of discussion on the .NET list yesterday about testing LINQ to SQL and JD threw a mention about the work we did in Background Motion;

"You could just look at the BackgroundMotion project which used LINQ-2-SQL and used a Repository pattern (with UoW, InMemoryDB testing etc etc). "

Alex rightly pointed out that BackgroundMotion had not been updated for the VS2008 RTM release, so Ive uploaded a patch and new release this morning to the Codeplex to sort this out.

Check it out if you are interested :)

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Happy New Year 2008 08 Jan 2008 06:58

First off, Happy New Year to everyone and hope you had a nice break! Thanks to some awesome South Island weather I managed to have a very nice road trip down south to recharge the batteries and get some outdoors adventuring done :)

Speaking of road trips, Chris and I will be wrapping up the content for the 2008 Summer Road Trip this week - If you havnt registered for these events yet you can do so here.

On getting back from holiday I had some nice news being re-awarded an MVP award for SQL Server as well as being re-appointed as a Regional Director for 2008/2009. Both of these are related to the NZ .NET community which continues to grow stronger each year (in no small part due to the huge efforts of the community leads who help bring you all those wonderful user groups, web sites and mailing lists!). Thanks to everyone for being a part of it :)

Ill be particularly looking forward to sharing the love around SQL Server 2008 during the upcoming Road Trip and more than likely we will be talking about it in more depth this year at TechEd. Remember you can download the November CTP right now and check it out yourself ;)

Today is the first day back at work proper for me - cant wait to get back to it!

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