Let me reintroduce myself

Before we start... 

After 5+ years, I've left JPMorgan Chase & Co. and taken a position at Polaris Solutions as a Senior Consultant for ALM using Microsoft Team Foundation Server. 

It's my dream job.  Seriously.

I get to work with some really cool characters like Angela Dugan and Chris Kadel and do some amazing things going forward with Microsoft's ever expanding ALM platform. 

I enjoyed my years at Chase, I had an amazing team to work with.  Being an integral part of that team was critical as we transformed from a very traditional waterfall methodology to a mash-up of waterfall and agile processes all using TFS 2008.  That experience allowed me the opportunity to be recognized by the folks at Polaris who are giving me the resources to expand and share my knowledge at a significantly faster rate than I would in a company of 250,000 people; 37,000+ of those being developers.  Yeah, banks write a lot of software.    

Surprisingly, part of that job involves writing about TFS and how it influences and adapts to each organizations unique ALM process.  The choice of topics is up to me with the restriction to be on ALM and not overdone.  Check.   

Over the next few weeks I'll be focusing on several topics, but the two that will be most notable will be the value within various reports and my personal favorite; implementing Team Foundation Server Lab Management for a second time. 

As a preview to the second. 

Well, I took it out.  According to the ranger guide I may have misspoken from the original content... but I could swear I didn't... 

Tips and Tricks to Sandcastle

Been working with Sandcastle a bit more on a project.  Found a nice article describing both gotcha's and short cuts

http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-tools/taming-sandcastle-a-.net-programmers-guide-to-documenting-your-code/

Drag and Drop Simplified in WPF (and hopefully MEF!)

I've been dealing with a lot of Drag and Drop situations in MEF and a few other tools I'm working on.  The challenge has been the # of ways it can be implemented and many things can give unexpected results.  This tool/library looks to help that out.

http://code.google.com/p/gong-wpf-dragdrop/

Custom TFS Work Item Controls

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/114592/Expression-Control-for-TFS-Work-Items

RazorPDF - An different approach to creading PDF files

Saw this on morning brew, the separation on presentation logic here and ability to create PDF's in a straightforward manner is something we have been lacking for a long time.

http://www.nyveldt.com/blog/post/Introducing-RazorPDF

Article on Function Point Analysis

Interesting article on doing requirements tracing by model driven development (MDD).  Seeing if anyway this can releate to the CodePlex project I've been developing.

http://www.webml.org/webml/upload/ent5/1/FP06.pdf

HP ALM Synchronizer and TFS Issue not finding adapter

I've been working on connecting HP's ALM Synchronizer with Team Foundation Server at work (we still are on 2008 but moving to 2012 one of these days).  I kept getting an issue saying it couldn't find the TFS Adapter even after I had done the following

Installed HP ALM Sync Server/Client
Team Explorer 2008 and 2010
Ran the Install TFS Adapter executable.

And still kept getting the failure. 


TFS. Error: com.hp.qc.synchronizer.adapters.exceptions.Adapter​ConnectionException: Failed to connect. Reason: Unhandled exception in Connect method during creation TfsConnection object. It is possible that the TFS-Adapter.dll is not registered on the Synchronizer server machine. Error message: AutomationException: Class not registered..     After some searching I found the following article that shows that when running in x64 version of windows, you have to run a second command to register the DLL properly in the registry. 

This article lays it out, but here is the command.

%WinDir%\SysWoW64\reg.exe import TFS-Adapter.reg



http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Quality-Center-Support-and-News/Unable-to-connect-to-TFS-as-an-endpoint-in-Hp-Quality-Center/td-p/5287593