The Althoff Chronicles

  Ever want to add a control to the design surface, but you have so many controls that you have a difficult time finding them? I was shown this neat shortcut that has saved me a lot of time over the past few days. Click on the toolbox or use the Hotkey Alt+Ctrl+x Start typing the name of the control. The control will be highlighted If you have multiple controls that match the text, hit Tab to go to the next one. Simple and easy!

At my company we are in the process of migrating to a new TFS environment. As part of that we wanted to do some house cleaning and only migrate the projects that have been used recently. We’ve got a lot of clients, each with their own project that have been created over the past 3 years. We wanted an easy way to see what the latest activity was on the project. That will give us a good view into what projects can be archived and which ones need to be moved. I could have just gone to Source Control and did a “view history” for each project, but that would have taken a long time (and be very tedious). Instead I wrote a simple console app that digs into each project collection and project and exports some simple project/Check-in data to a CSV file. I can then open up the CSV in Excel and add other info like “Code Status”, and “Migration Status” easily. Here is the code I used. This is a pretty basic example and TFS provides a lot more, but it did what I needed it to. As I always say, Ke...

  When I first started deploying code from TFS I took the simple approach and created a batch file and deployed the websites via RoboCopy. I’m a very “Keep it simple” kind of guy, so this worked for us for a long time and so nothing was changed. With my most recent project however, we were deploying code over a slow VPN tunnel from our servers in Chicago to servers located in Europe. Due to this, the RoboCopy was taking over 4.5 hours to complete. I needed a better/faster way so I started looking into Web Deploy (MSDeploy). I was able to get it working fairly easily and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get it working, and how much time its saved me! I can now deploy the code in less than 20 minutes! I’ve outlined the process in detail below, but in general you only need to do this: Add MSBuild parameters to your automated build Customize the deployment parameters for the website Create a batch file to an auto-generated MSDeploy script Execute the batch file fro...