How often do you search your development machine for code you developed before? Very often, right? And how often do you look for code on the web? Also very often, I assume. Search in Vista (or Windows Server 2008) are very powerful and so are the known search engines on the web.

So what if you wanted code that other people in your organisation created? That is where you can use Microsoft Search Server!

Search Server is based on Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and has very simple yet powerful additions to search various content sources such as websites and file shares. To get started with searching the source code in your Team Foundation Server:

• Install Search Server
• Create a file share on a server
• Get the latest version of your TFS version control to the file share
• In Search Server Central Administration create a new content source and point it to the file share
• Add new file types, of files you want to search such as .cs, to the content index
• Start a full crawl on the content source

Now you are ready to go: Open the search page and enter something to search for such as "Page_Load". On the result page you will get links to the files in which your search string was found. Nice, right?

So next there can be loads of additions: You can create an integrated search within Visual Studio, apply effective TFS permissions, make search results open in Visual Studio, etc.

Yesterday I was at the Dutch developer days. It was a great day with content sessions during the day and more fun sessions during geek night. Due to work and other appointments I am unable to be at devdays today. If you missed it this year, you should attend next year. See why here http://devdays.nl/

My session was on "Softwarekwaliteit verhogen door beter te testen met VSTS". While hosting a testing session for a developer audience can be challenging, this one seemed to appeal: the room was packed! Thanks to all for attending. The session was recorded on video so I am sure it will be available on the web soon. If you have any questions, drop me a mail.

Slightly related to this subject is a post I saw this morning announcing Pex (Program EXploration). Pex is a new project from Microsoft Research that "generates Unit Tests from hand-written Parameterized Unit Tests through Automated Exploratory Testing based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution". Sounds very promising.

See the announcement http://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/archive/2008/05/23/first-public-release-of-pex-automated-exploratory-testing-for-net.aspx and the MS Research site http://research.microsoft.com/pex/

Surely you have heard of Enterprise Library: The bundled Microsoft application blocks redelivered in a set of reusable components to help development teams focus on business functionality instead of low level technical plumbing such as data access, logging, etc. Consistency, extensibility, ease of use and integration have been goals from the start and it is being improved in every release. If you are not using it on your current solution you probably have a good reason not to.

It is easy to start working with Enterprise Library since the download contains a lot:

1. Binaries, which you can use in your application, and the configuration editor, which enables you to configure settings for each application block in a graphical user interface.

2. Very useful documentation available through Visual Studio help containing background info on EntLib, how to get started, how to develop with EntLib, its design and detailed descriptions of each block.

3. Source that you can optionally install. If you do, you get source code of all (42) EntLib projects and quickstarts for each application block.

Before, you could get Entlib 3.1 to work with Visual Studio 2008, but that took some effort. Installing it and then making it appear in VS was not straightforward. Now the waiting is over:

Enterprise Library 4 can easily be used in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512464.aspx Also EntLib got better performance, WMI 2.0 support and a few minor fixes. But wait, that is not all.... The new kid in town is Unity Application Block!

Unity is a lightweight dependency injection container, which facilitates loosely coupled object development and creation and extensible caching. http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/cc468366(en-us).aspx It can be used standalone too in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. The Stoplight and EventBroker quickstarts give a good overview of the possibilities of Unity. Once you get to know the Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control are very powerful patterns, nicely described here Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern.

Today I was representing a colleague at the jury of the Dutch Imagine Cup semi finals, that consisted of people from Microsoft, Achmea, Delft University and Avanade. We had great fun. Last year I was coaching team Celsus of the University of Utrecht that ended up second in the national finals. Every time I see these students work on latest Microsoft technologies and the assignments I am amazed by the creativity. From all kinds of footprints, dashboards, XNA and board games, these guys had all kinds of great ideas. Obviously some polishing is still needed: only a few teams were actually balanced in terms of technology, business/marketing, realism, presentation, etc. Sustainability is a serious subject and it was good to see the nine teams had invested serious time.

Last year's national winners and international semi finalists from Delft University were sharing their experience too, that created a cross-language playing applications including international memory and a chat module with icons as a form of sign language.

Obviously we are very much looking forward to the national finals, which will be at 28 may. Hopefully the teams will have more surprises in store.

Visual Studio Team System is Microsoft's solution for application lifecycle management. ALM helps software teams tremendously to ensure quality, predictability, etc. Microsoft released VSTS 2005 a few years ago and 2008 in November last year. Now development is underway for the next version of Visual Studio Team System codename "Rosario". You can find more information here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb936702.aspx and you can even test-drive the latest bits http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/11/april-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx. If you do, please provide feedback through http://connect.microsoft.com/, which is one of the activities we do as part of the Rosario Technical Adoption Program. 

Two fellow Avanauts, Gerben van Loon and David Slot, released a very cool solution today:

Check it out at: http://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF and tell us what you think.

What is it?
Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

Why are we releasing this?
For the current version of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is offering WSSF and Avanade is offering a similar service factory within ACA.NET. WSSF is an interesting guidance architecture with a lot of developers interested in it and quite a number of organizations have adopted it. Because Microsoft left out EntLib support for WSSF Avanade thought it wise to share an EntLib extension asset for WSSF.

What’s the difference between ACA.NET and WSSF?
Microsoft is offering WSSF and Avanade is offering a similar service factory within ACA.NET. The differences are:

ACA.NET is a multi-tier application factory where WSSF is only focused on the service layer. ACA.NET adds a UI DSL for OLTP web applications and it can also fully generate the data access layer and database.

ACA.NET is more focused on productivity gains. It has features like auto proxy generation and refresh.

ACA.NET is more geared towards large (enterprise) projects:

The designers support different scaling scenario’s then WSSF: models show less details and it supports cross model datacontracts;

Has Entlib integration out of the box;

It’s able to generate service facades, non http services (tcp, named pipe, msmq) and WCF Transaction settings;

It has extensive training material available;

It’s supported by Avanade.

Wow, it has been a busy time. Avanade have been accepted in the Technical Adoption Program for Visual Studio Team System codename "Rosario". Two weeks ago the kick-off for this interesting program was led by the VSTS product team in Seattle.

Yesterday I was present at the Application Lifecycle Management event in The Netherlands. Ajoy (http://blogs.msdn.com/ajoyk/) opened the day with a keynote on the business value of VSTS. Achmea, KPN and Ivar Jacobson were also keynoting. My colleague Damir Varga presented his experience in performance testing using VSTS. Good stuff!

Next week Leon and I will repeat the MSDN InTrack session on .NET 3.5 which we did in january. http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/evenementen/intrack/msdn/msdn_intrack_netframework.aspx 

And finally Avanade will be doing three presentations at DevDays this year http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blog_arie_leeuwesteijn/archive/2008/03/03/developer-days-2008-sprekers-en-onderwerpen.aspx

Come see us!

Together with Leon Krancher I will be presenting .NET 3.0 and 3.5 in the Microsoft Innovation Center:

http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/evenementen/intrack/msdn/msdn_intrack_netframework.aspx

Last month has seen a lot of releases following the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and Team System http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-shipped.aspx , http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-team-system-2008-ships.aspx

The story around VS SDK and Domain Specific Languages toolkit http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2007/11/22/what-s-new-for-dsl-tools-in-vs2008-vs2008-sdk.aspx

VSTS Web Access has made access to TFS so much easier for non-technicians http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/30/vsts-web-access-power-tool-for-team-system-2008-released.aspx

The ASP.NET extensions provide a Model-View-Controller framework and VS2008 Silverlight support amongst others http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-3-5-extensions-ctp-preview-released.aspx

And finally today the upgraded power tools for Team Foundation Server have been released http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/12/21/december-07-release-of-the-tfs-power-tools-for-tfs-2008-are-available.aspx

If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above.