Edward Thomson

Earlier today we announced the release of Teamprise 3.1, and you might be wondering why you should upgrade. Maybe you haven't run into any big bugs in Teamprise clients (and we hope you haven't.) Or maybe you just don't feel like upgrading for "just a point release". It's true that we only revved the minor version to 3.1, but it's more than just bugfixes: we've also added a lot of good new features.

The biggest new feature in 3.1 is support for working offline in both our Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse and our Teamprise Explorer clients. Offline support is a big advantage for TFS users who have unreliable network connections - particularly telecommuters and road warriors, who might want to get some work done wherever they are, be it a coffeeshop or an airplane.

If you're an Eclipse user and wish to go offline from your Team Foundation Server (or if your network unfortunately takes you offline), just go to the Team menu and select "Work Offline". You'll be disconnected from TFS, yet you'll still be able to perform all the file operations like you expect -- you can add, edit, move and delete files just like if you were online. When your network connection returns, you can choose the "Return Online" menu option and pend all those changes to the server.

Working offline in Teamprise Explorer is even simpler, you don't need to specifically enter offline mode. Simply make whatever changes you wish in your workspace, and click "Return Online" from the Source Control context menu. Explorer will synchronize your local workspace with the server and pend any changes you made while you were offline.

The Command Line Client has had offline support since version 3.0, so that's nothing new, but it does get some cool features aside from that. We've added an XML output option for many commands so that you can parse the results easily from a script. The "brief" and even "detailed" formats tend to truncate output for easy interactive viewing, but this can be troublesome for scripts. The new XML output should be perfect for getting all the information out of Team Foundation Server.

Those are a few of the bigger features, but there are many more. And seeing as this is still a point release, there are a lot of bug fixes, too. If you want to see all the details, check out the 3.1 release notes.

We've spent a lot of time on 3.1, and we think you'll enjoy it, even if you're not the type of person to upgrade for "just a point release".

Teamprise will be exhibiting at TechEd 2008 Developer in Orlando, June 3 - June 6. If you're interested in Team Foundation Server or source control with Java, you should stop by booth 1426 and say hello.

We'll be giving demos of the new Teamprise 3 and all it's great new features. Hope to see you there!

It's been a long time since I updated my blog, in part because I'm lazy, but mostly because we were busy putting the finishing touches on Teamprise Client Suite 3.0. We're very proud of our 3.0 release, it's got a lot of great new features, and we think you'll be very happy with it.

If you're in the greater Chicagoland area next week, I've been invited to the Chicago VSTS User Group to give a tour of the new version of Teamprise. If you're interested in how Team System can play nice with Java developers, I suggest you stop by and check it out:

The meeting begins at 5:30 PM at the Microsoft Chicago (Loop) Offices:
77 W Wacker Dr, Suite 2300

Please RSVP if you're going to attend.

Even if you can't make it next week, be sure to check out the Chicago VSTS User Group, or another user group near you. It's a great resource if you're a VSTS or Team Foundation Server user!

Microsoft's currently launching the newest version of Team Foundation Server as part of Visual Studio 2008. There are launch events all across the US (as well as in many other parts of the world), so if you're interested in the new features in TFS 2008, check out the events near you at Microsoft's
"Heroes Happen Here" site.

Teamprise will be exhibiting at the Chicago launch event tomorrow, March 11. We're in booth 47 - stop by and say hi if you're attending.

Even better -- our very own Martin Woodward will be presenting at the Dublin launch event tomorrow. Be sure to check him out if you're attending out there.

Otherwise, there are still plenty of events in a city near you - be sure to go check out what's new in TFS 2008!

I got a flyer in the mail for the RSA Conference 2008. Since I enjoy cryptography - and despite the fact that I know next to nothing about it - I was interested.

But I'm not going to lie, I'm really put off by the advertising. This year's theme for the conference is Alan Turing. How this conference has been going on for 14 years and ignored him up to now is a mystery to me. (They made a carrier pigeon the theme in 1997. That's right, a carrier pigeon apparently did more for security than Turing.)

But now that RSA has finally decided to recognize the man, they're doing some stupid advertising around it: What Would Turing Do? Which, frankly, would make a cool bumper sticker, and I would have been impressed... if they had just asked the question and not tried to answer it.

Instead, they give some odd answers that show that their marketing department never bothered to talk to a developer - or even a read a Turing biography. Their answers are frequently bizarre and have nothing to do with Turing: he would "have a raging sushi addiction", "be a huge Dr. Who fan" and would "collect rare Phillip Glass vinyl". (Yes, they also didn't bother to google "Phillip Glass" to realize that they misspelled his name.)

This is the company that was founded by three math PhDs who invented the RSA public key algorithm the RC block ciphers, and the MDx hash functions. And they're suggesting that he would "recite the far reaches of imaginary numbers to pass the time"? I'd like to think that would be beneath Turing... hell, it would be beneath me. (A googleplex times i. A googleplex plus one times i. See, not very satisfying is it?)

Very disappointing.

Especially since it's obvious that really, Turing wouldn't care about sushi or Bill Gates. He'd be far too busy enjoying the liberal sexual mores of this fine time we live in.

Gluing C and Java together isn't particularly difficult - JNI is a well-designed bridge to the world of native code. Simple tasks are straightforward, and more complex ones are still possible. Surprisingly, it's quite easy to debug as well.

When working on native code, I tend to make all my code work in C first - debug it, write some native test cases, and ensure that everything works. Then I write a little JNI glue to make it accessible from Java. This has worked surprisingly well, and given few surprises. But what happens when something goes wrong?

For example: I was writing some ugly Win32 code to do some various things that can only be done in C. Despite my aversion to programming in Windows, I whipped up some native code to access what I needed. I wrote some test cases to confirm that everything worked, and I was pretty happy with myself, until I realized that all the work I had done was on ANSI C strings (ie, null-terminated char arrays.)

Regardless, I tied it up to my Java with some JNI code just to watch it fail when I passed in Unicode strings.

I'm not particularly well-versed in the intricacies of Unicode, and even less so Win32 programming with its WCHARs and PSEC_WCHARs and nasty habit of #define'ing function names to those that end in W. So I wasn't real sure of exactly what I needed to change to make my native code Unicode friendly. It sure would be nice if I could debug this in VisualStudio.

Attaching to a running process in gdb is easy - and it's easy to provide debugging symbols for that process. VisualStudio is a little less straightforward, but just as easy.

First, make sure that your DLL is emitting debugging symbols. Ensure that you're passing these flags to the compiler and linker:

CFLAGS: -Od -DDEBUG -D_DEBUG -Zi
LFLAGS: -DEBUG

Build your native DLL and ensure that a .PDB file was created - this is the debugging information for your library. Run your java application.

Open VisualStudio and setup your symbols. Go to Tools -> Options, and open the Debugging -> Symbols pane. Add a new PDB location which points to the PDB file that was created from your build.

Now you can attach to your java process by going Tools -> Attach to Process.

Finally, you can load the source (ensure that this is the source you built from, in the same directory as your PDB file) and set breakpoints, etc.

Engadget has an article on how to remove the Windows BSOD icon in 10.5. They seem to think that removing it is a good idea - since it's "so pompous and galling".

I call shenanigans. Pompous? Maybe. Galling? Give me a break.

It's true, Microsoft would never do something like this. Mostly because Microsoft cares precious little about interoperability with other network filesystems. CIFS is good enough for everybody - how's that for smug?

I suggest ignoring the whiners and embracing the BSOD icon. And then take it a step further: install xscreensaver and use the BSOD screensaver. Then smile when people tell you "there's something wrong with your computer!"

Sorry for the late notice, but if you're free on Wednesday evening, this might be interesting.

Teamprise was invited to present at this month's Chicago VSTS Users Group to discuss using TFS from within the Eclipse IDE and from non-Microsoft platforms. I'm excited to make a fool of myself speaking in public (and excited to learn that a VSTS Users Group exists in Chicago.)

I'll be speaking with David Dugan who's a Senior Consultant for Sogeti. David will be discussing accessing TFS from older versions of Visual Studio.

Maybe I'll see you there!

A lot's been made of the various frustrations that go along with running Windows Vista. I won't rehash them, mostly because I'm not able to. My frustration is with installing the damnable Operating System:

Perhaps this dialog doesn't look particularly strange, until you realize that the install disc only included four CD images:

(This was the MSDN install for Vista.)

(From the Matchbook Museum)