Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

C# 3.0 features

I just read Ian Griffiths' post on C# 3.0 and LINQ - Expression Trees (linked from Jomo Fisher's C# 3.0 post, which was linked in John Rivard's Why Visual Studio targets only one version of the .NET Framework, which was in a link from Soma's Multi-targeting of .NET FX in Visual Studio post, which I received in an email notification). ...

How to diff Word documents

John Lawrence responded to someone's question about how to diff MS Word documents, and I thought the answer would help a few more folks. Team Foundation enables you to specify different diff and merge tools for different file types. We don’t have a built in compare tool for .doc files but I did a quick search and found quite a few ...

Team Foundation Beta 3 Virtual PC is available

The last time I wrote about the VPC for beta 3, it didn't make up to MSDN like it was supposed to.  Well, a beta 3 VPC is available now, and a beta 3 refresh VPC will be available as soon as it makes its way through the infrastructure (yeah, I know, trust me at your own risk).The beta 3 VPC is under Visual Studio 2005 -> Visual Studio ...

1,000,000 files in the dogfood system

Jeff Beehler just checked in another 100,000 files, pushing us over 1,000,000 files.  We now have 1,042,659 files in the dogfood system.  Brian Harry sent out a dogfood statistics update in email today, prior to Jeff's check-in.  Watch for the latest stats on John Lawrence's blog...

Power Toy: tfpt.exe

[UPDATE 8/9/2007]  I fixed the broken link to the power tools page. [UPDATE 9/8/2006]  TFPT is now available in its own small download: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5422499!  You no longer need to download the VS SDK.  You can find more information about the September '06 release here.Back at the...

How to work around the diff viewer problem in Team Explorer Beta 3

If you install only the Team Explorer (and not VSTS), there is a known issue (7.3) where the diff viewer won't work.  It also affects the built-in merge tool, but I think that's less painful for users who just need Team Explorer.The tool is diffmerge.exe, and it uses msdiff.dll. The msdiff.dll needs several missing several ...

How to upgrade from TFS Beta 3 to RTM

Allen Clark has posted the document on upgrading beta 3 to RTM so you'll know what to expect. Preparing to upgrade to RTM If you’re using Beta 3 Refresh, you may be wondering what you can do now to make the server upgrade to RTM as painless as possible. Here are a few things that will help. I’ve included the specification ...

Go to Changeset coming for RTM

You still won't be able to drag and drop in Source Control Explorer (some changes are just too large at this point), but you will be able to go to a changeset (without going through the back door using Get Specific Version solely for changeset look up).  In the next drop, the Edit -> Go to menu item will bring up the Find Changeset ...

Brian Harry on when to ship TFS

About half way through a thread on unlocking files locked by another user, Brian wrote a long response in the Team Foundation Forum about deciding what changes to make at this point and knowing when to ship.  It's a good read.  I expect that Brian will likely turn it into a blog post at some point...

Validating XML characters in SOAP messages

I've written about using the SoapHttpClientProtocol subclasses generated by wsdl.exe several times over the last year, including handling authentication, HTTP response codes, and setting timeouts properly.  Today I needed to change the code in TFS to better handle characters that are not allowed in XML. The ...