TSHAK

MSDN and TechNet Social and Search Updates

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 Expression Sites

No Need to Shout!

MSDN & TechNet Online Get Big Upgrades!

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 just released a new version that greatly improves the autocomplete feature for English and many other languages as well as a few other improvements. Check out Justin Grant's blog post for more exciting details. Most importantly, give it a shot! The results may be better than you think! Second, our team launched a major update to our Forums application. Sam Jarawan posts a huuuge entry explaining the update. The feature list is just amazing. Last, but definitely not least, Social Bookmarking is being introduced as an integrated feature of MSDN & TechNet Online. Dan Truax gives us a high level overview, John Martin dives deeper, and Jeff Day explains how it's "Not Just About Bookmarking". Finally, we've got a great video on Channel 9 talking about all this and much more!

If you're attending the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference please stop by and visit us at the MSDN & TechNet Online Community booth (we'll have folks at the IT Pro week too, but unfortunately I will only be at the Developer conference). We'll be showing off our new sites as well as taking your important feedback on what you'd like to see added or improved. I'll hope to see you there!

GeekFest at TechEd 2008!

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!

Talk: Creating a Feed Service for MSDN & TechNet

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 (WCF) provides a very powerful feed (i.e. syndication) object model for delivering rich and flexible feeds in multiple formats (e.g. RSS and ATOM). Additionally, in .NET 3.5 WCF adds the ability to easily create “RESTful” or “simple” web URL endpoints. Tim will combine these powerful features to demonstrate how the MSDN and TechNet Online team developed an enterprise class feed service with relative ease. This session assumes proficiency in the .NET framework as well as a functional understanding of feeds and the web.

I hope to see you there!

TDD Lessons (Re)Learned

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 have been doing is looking for the test that asserts the needed functionality. Sometimes implementation code gets refactored (i.e. moved around) or is difficult to dissect at-a-glance, but the test is a simple specification stating what the software actually does. I quickly found the test and noticed something else. In my haste to meet deadlines I cheated and didn't completely cover the functionality I was looking for, even though NCover shows it as being covered. This isn't a bug in NCover, rather, it's what happens when you have a method that does more than one thing but your test doesn't test it as such. In summary, the lessons I (re)learned are:

A) Use the tests to tell you what your software does.

B) Write all code test first. Really. You're bound to miss something otherwise.

Using LINQ With Syndication Feeds

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 RSS/Atom feeds. For example, I can easily take Scott's RSS "new posts" snippet and use either ATOM (1.0) or RSS (2.0) without changing any code. Here's an example with his Atom feed:

Simply switch out the Uri to the RSS endpoint and you still have all the strongly typed properties of the feed!

As Seen On Virtual TechEd

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

Microsoft eScrum Version 1.0

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 this tool you can manage the product backlog, sprint backlog, sprint retrospective, and more. The good news is that we decided to release this tool for free! So what are you waiting for, go check it out!

PowerShell Script For Tagspace Tags

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 plain old XML.

TechEd 07 Update

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 at conferences like this is going to lunch alone. Not because I'm a social nerd (although I have been called that before), but because I like to meet customers and hear what they think about the conference, our products, and what problems they're trying to solve with our products. Additionally, Microsoft is a big company, and it's hard to get to know all ~80,000 of us. I also had the opportunity to meet some Microsoft employees and learn more about what's going on within MSDN and Microsoft as a whole.

Now I just need to work on speaking at these events...

Visit Me @TechEd MSDN Booth!

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 current betas as well as what you'd like to see from us in the future.

See you there!

Programming the Web With WCF

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 been working on developing a RESTful service layer for Tagspace on top of these bits. It's been a great developer experience and I highly recommend you check these bits out.

From Steve:

• HTTP/POX Programming Basics
• Zen of the Web Programming Model 
• UriTemplate 101 - This is where he really gets into the new Orcas API stuff.
• UriTemplate.Match - Some info on the underlying web programming API.
• The URI Mug - Because you are *so* obsessed with URI's :).

Make Your EntLib Contributions Known!

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 was never intended to be limited to the core team. We designed Enterprise Library to be very extensible. In fact, the majority of Enterprise Library is built using the very extensibility model that we created. As a result, many of you have made extensions to Enterprise Library for your own needs. Now you can easily share your extensions with the world the recently launched Enterprise Library Contrib project on CodePlex! You too could have your code running on some of the world's most widely used and sophisticated software systems! Read more on Product Manager Tom Hollander's blog.

AJAX AutoComplete Update

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 will hopefully get merged into the main code line. In the meantime, you can download the patch here.