Windows Offline Updates

Another project that helps with updating offline or multiple Windows installations:

http://www.wsusoffline.net/

Unit Testing Silverlight 4

Here is the first article in the series about unit-testing Silverlight 4 applications - link.

Unit Testing Framework for Silverlight is now included in the Silverlight Toolkit (link).

Unit-test runner - StatLight - can be downloaded manually or through NuGet.

Check the short tutorial here.

Testing IE in a VM

Microsoft has provided Virtual Machine images for testing sites with different versions of Internet Explorer:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

Available are Win 7 with IE 8 and 9, Vista with IE 7, and XP with IE 6. Images are VHD. For use with Microsoft Virtual PC (or server versions).

Turning TFS Agile

UrbanTurtle is an interface that makes TFS useful and adapts to the agile workflow.

urbanturtle.com

Visual Event for JavaScript

Great visual help for JavaScript developers. Such a neat and elegant way of displaying the JavaScript events on a page.

http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/article/Visual+Event

Using Mercurial with TFS

A recommendation in this day and age, when using TFS for team collaboration, is to use the help from Mercurial or other modern code versioning tools for local changes and offline usage. There is no need to list all the benefits of Mercurial right now. Suffice to say that it provides painless safety net with branching and merging support that allows easier work. 

An article at Los Techies describes the scenario how this can be accomplished. Basically, after checking-out the TFS project, create a Mercurial repository there. Get a MakeWritable extension. Clone the Hg repository into a working copy where you will be making changes and that's it. Use the scripts below to check-in/out from TFS.

source article

PowerShell scripts are located in an online repository.

.hgignore

Using Mercurial with .Net projects, there is a need to constantly create .hgignore file to disregard changes to files that should not go into the source control. The contents of this file are mostly the same for all projects. My list goes something like this:

syntax: glob
*/bin/*
*/obj/*
*.suo
*/Bin/*
*/ClientBin/*
*.user
pull.ps1
push.ps1

Not sure if the ones below should be ignored. Leaving them in for now.

*.vspscc
*.vssscc

Caching Windows Updates

Since Microsoft never bothered to solve issues for small and home users who wanted to cache Windows updates, here is a very practical solution:

http://www.autopatcher.com/

With AutoPatcher, you simply select which OS or a related technology (there is .NET, Adobe Reader, etc.) you want and it will download the files to your local drive, making them available offline. These can, then, be installed on multiple machines, avoiding redundant download in case the Internet connectivity is an issue.

Telerik Tools for Scrum with TFS

Work Item Manager & Project Dashboard for work items on TFS.

http://www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-tools/tfs.aspx