TSHAK.NET

This blog has been "quiet as usual" as I've been super busy working on some MSDN and TechNet updates that I'm sure you'll enjoy: Faster Search, Code Search, and Product/Version Info on Results!  Microsoft's New Social App for MSDN, TechNet, and...

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Social, Community, MSDN, TechNet...

My blog has been relatively dry as I have been very heads down working on developing lots of cool features for MSDN & TechNet Online. I am very excited about all of the work our team has done in the last year.  My main focus of late has been Search. We...

If you're attending the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference be sure to check out the exclusive limited invitation GeekFest Party! I'll see you there!...

I'm speaking today at the .NET Developers Association and at a lunch session at the Tech-Ed 2008 Developers Conference in June. My talk is on a project I worked on for the MSDN and TechNet Online team. Here's the abstract: The Windows Communication Foundation...

I needed to figure out if a certain API supported a piece of functionality. The first thing I did was start looking at the method implementation of that API to find the code that I was looking for. I quickly realized what I was doing wrong. What I should...

Scott Guthrie just posted a great article on how to use LINQ to XML to build a simple RSS reader. Another namespace to checkout in .NET 3.5 is the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace. This namespace includes an object model for producing and consuming...

Better late than never! Check out Doug Seven and I on Virtual TechEd briefly talking about unit testing and Test Driven Development using Visual Studio Team System. Virtual TechEd Videos Direct Video Link   Technorati tags: TechEd, TDD, Unit Testing,...

To help manage our Scrum projects within Microsoft, some of us use an internal tool called eScrum. Built on top of Team Foundation Server, eScrum includes a Scrum process template for TFS as well as a web based project management front end. From...

Apparently people are discovering our undocumented service interface. Doug Finke recently posted showing you how to grab tags from Tagspace with a simple Powershell script. Here's a tip: if you don't specify the format parameter you will get...

Thanks to all who made it by the MSDN Community booth! Many of you took the time to chat for 10+ minutes about what you thought of MSDN, what we should do about community, and what you thought about our beta offerings. One of the things I like doing...

I'm about to head off to Orlando for TechEd. Be sure to stop by the MSDN/Technet booth. I'll be manning the Communities area along with a few other Microsoft Communities team members. We're really interested in hearing your feedback about our...

Steve Maine, Program Manager on the Windows Communication Foundation team, has been shedding some more light on what you can do with the "Programmable Web" features found in the latest WCF bits. Yes, we're talking RESTful services with WCF! My team has...

One of the most impactful projects for me as a developer was working on the first version of Enterprise Library. I can't tell you how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to contribute to something that has turned into such a large success. Contributing...

A little over a month ago I updated the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit with functionality that allows for multiple word suggestions for the AutoComplete control. Thanks to the AJAX Control Toolkit's new patch utility, I was able to submit a patch that...

Check out the Microsoft Community Betas. For some backstory, check out my brief introduction to these services.  Of course, since I focused on TagSpace, I've got to point to Korby's great video tutorial on the service. Technorati tags: Microsoft.Communities,...

MSDN Solution Architecture Center has recently launched an Agile Development site (RSS). This is yet another great step in showing Microsoft's commitment to Agile and software agility in general....

This quote struck me the other day: "As systems get bigger, unless you intentionally reduce coordination costs, things explode." -- Ray Ozzie While Ray isn't specifically talking about software systems in this context, it's definitely applicable to software...

Download on MSDN! Read more about this release from Tom Hollander...

The centralized configuration store of the previous IIS releases, known affectionately as the metabase, is gone. - Source I know this isn't new, but it's honestly great to know that my ADSI skills will be deprecated in the near future! P.S. Even if you...

Joshua Kerievsky in Refactoring to Patterns writes about how TDD is sort of a continuous conversation with the code which enables an efficient evolution. This is quite a difference from traditional "big up front design" (BUFD) thinking,...

As many of you know, I joined the Microsoft Community Technologies team a few months ago. In particular, I've been working on what's called Tagspace, a tagging system that will be used across multiple communities (both inside and outside of Microsoft)...

+1 to everything that Brad Wilson said on this issue. The Visual Studio unit testing framework (MSTest) is moving into VS.NET Pro as opposed to requiring you to pony up for VS.NET Team Suite. This is good step, but unit testing should be a first class...

I just stumbled across this great top ten software lessons learned list. I was happy to see the first one on this list: Object orientation is much harder than you think. I would probably state this as, "Software design is much harder than you think"....

Speaking of Microsoft and openness, Jim Newkirk just announced that non-Windows machines will be able to connect to open source projects on CodePlex! This is thanks to the Teamprise client suite which is available for free to connect to an open source...