Another collection of links that accumulated in my "Starred" folder.

• The Extended Right-Click Menu in Windows 7
• Clean Design-Time Friendly ViewModels: A Walkthrough 
• New TDD Kata - Interactions
• Complex Filtering in isotope.js
• Scrum and the impediment blues
• Developing for an International Audience
• Fundamentals of the Managed Extensibility Framework
• Building Offline Experiences with HTML5 AppCache and IndexedDB
• Six Reasons Not to Use Guard Classes
• MetroGridHelper: A helpful debugging assistant for designers and developers alike
• Metrotastic– Palette Generator Preview
• Windows Phone 7 Market Place Test Kit
• ScreenShots.cs: How to capture screenshots of your app on your device 
• Full-height app layouts: Navigation and History
• Useful Visual Studio Extension - Web Essentials from Mads Kristensen
• VIDEO: The Art of Speaking - with Scott Hanselman
• Using QUnit with Razor Layouts
• Week 1: MarkPad 
• Awesome Visual Studio Command Prompt and PowerShell icons with Overlays

I wish everybody a good and safe end of year! Incidentally, I upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 2.5 ...

Last week, a colleague and I were victimized by PowerPoint and a certain template that includes animations by default - even when the animations don't fit the presenter's style. I couldn't let that slide (hah!) and had to research whether there's a possibility to turn of all animations with a simple switch. It turns out there is, as described at http://malektips.com/powerpoint-2007-remove-animations-slide-show.html.

I ran into a situation where the order of registration of the areas in my ASP.NET MVC application was important.  So far, I've been using AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas() to have all areas registered automatically. Sometimes I got lucky and the areas were registered in the order I wanted, but sometimes they weren't, leading to mysterious 404 errors.  It took me some time to diagnose that the problem was indeed the ordering, then some more to find the right google query.  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1639971/mvc-2-arearegistration-routes-order describes my order, and Eilion's answer saved my day: a way to manually register areas in any order I choose:

var area1reg = new Area1AreaRegistration();
var area1context = new AreaRegistrationContext(area1reg.AreaName, RouteTable.Routes);
area1reg.RegisterArea(area1context);

The last day of 2010 not only marked the end of the year, but also the end of my employment at Tech Talk.  I've spent 4 wonderful years there, and I am very grateful to have met and worked with a very fine collection of people indeed.  I've learnt much, both professionally and personally.  As Douglas Adams famously wrote: So long, and thanks for all the fish!

For the past few years, I’ve been using Team Foundation Server to address the source control needs of my hobby projects.  Soon I’ll have to leave that TFS behind, so naturally I’ve been looking at ways to get my source code out.  Getting only the tip of the iceberg is trivially easy of course: get latest version, unbind from source control and you’re done.  But I’d really like to get out the history as well.  I’ve evaluated several options.

TFS Integration Tools

First stop on the road were the TFS Integration Tools.  The TFS Integration Tools are a fairly mature set of tools for migrating from one source control system (including, but not limited to, TFS) to another TFS server. I set up a virtual machine with TFS Workgroup Edition, Team Explorer for both TFS 2008 and 2010. I was all set to go but then I ran into a critical problem: my VM is not in the domain of the old TFS server, and thus I don’t have access to the old TFS from my VM – even though the TFS Integration Tools GUI offers the “connect as a different user” functionality.

I decided to give up on the TFS Integration Tools, since I wasn’t convinced about wanting to store my source in yet another TFS.

Git-TFS

Second stop on the road was the Git-TFS bridge. It quickly turned out that this is really only a bridge: it’s designed for developers who don’t want the heavy-weight TFS source control interfering with their daily work but who will eventually check their stuff in into TFS.

SvnBridge

SvnBridge is another bridge, this time for using TortoiseSVN with TFS.  My idea was to use this bridge in connection with a Git-Svn bridge and export everything into a Git repository.  I abandoned that idea as well since I don’t feel comfortable using Git (yet).

We don’t need no Source Control …

I finally hit paydirt when the umpteenth Google query came up with Migrating from TFS to SVN.  That article describes a way of extracting older versions from TFS by date.

The author (Joel Potischman) goes on to describe how to check in those versions into SVN.  I decided I did not want to use SVN either – after all, I just spent several hours getting my code out of TFS, so I didn’t want to put it into another server system that I don’t know too well.

In addition – being the pedantic bugger that I am – I didn’t want to extract my code by date (as in the article), but by changeset.  That turned out to be rather easy, and I changed Joel’s TFSGet script as follows:

mkdir source
cd source

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" get "*.*" /all /version:C%1 /recursive /overwrite

cd ..
rename source %1

You use this script by calling it with the number of the changeset.

Changesets, changesets, changesets

Now all I needed was a list of all changesets in my TFS project to automate calling TFSGet – I didn’t feel like calling it manually about 1000 times.

First idea: get the list of changesets using tf.exe.  I didn’t find out how to do that, and neither did our local TFS expert.

Second idea: use the TFS object model.  I didn’t find an immediately self-evident way of retrieving changesets from there either.

Third idea: Excel to the rescue.  It turns out that getting the numbers of the changesets is trivially easy, in a banging-your-head-on-the-desk sort of way: Stack Overflow has the scope in TFS query (in Visual Studio) to get all check-ins.

So armed with all that knowledge and a bag full of glue scripts I set to work. I left the script running overnight and it was busy extracting the last couple of changesets when I came back to my pc in the morning.  Hooray!

ConQAT - includes a Clone Detection feature for finding instances of copy-paste inheritance and candidates for extraction.

See http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/csharp/cs_misc/designtechniques/article.php/c12527__1/A-Star-A-Implementation-in-C-Path-Finding-PathFinder.htm

Two more links:

• Xamalot features lots of free XAML clipart
• How do I Include Vector-Based Image Resources in my WPF Application?

I've collected a couple of links with WPF/Silverlight/MVVM learning content over the last couple of months.  Here they are:

• Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern
• Build Your Own MVVM Framework
• Real-world MVVM Presentation from DDDSydney
• Sample Data in the WPF and Silverlight Designer
• Stuff – WPF Line of Business Using MVVM Video Tutorial
• Silverlight 4 Training Kit
• Article about Service Locator, MVVM, and MessageBoxes