Great plugin into Visual Studio 2008 that I love.  This app lets you see what files are different from your production or development server from your local machine and will push out the changes for you.  You can just tell it to push and all the files are copied.  When you create a new file it tracks it, when you change a file it tracks that.  Then when you are ready push all your changes up to QA or Production via FTP.

http://www.dispatchasp.net/

Seamless Integration with Visual Studio 2005/2008.

Visual Studio is a fantastic IDE but lacks a simple way to deploy incremental site updates via FTP. Dispatch bridges this gap, with a few bells and whistles.
Dispatch supports C# and VB web projects using In-Place compilation or Web Application Projects (WAP) on both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Dispatch also supports multiple web projects in a single solution, each with their own deployment configuration. Once you're in Visual Studio, stay in Visual Studio.

So worth $30

I’ve put together, from the Microsoft Site a Step-By-Step plan for getting certifications by Microsoft in the areas of .Net 3.5 Development, Team Foundation Server, Sharepoint and SQL 2008.

I’ve listed in order that you need to study and take exams that makes the most sense. The links go back to the Microsoft site Training/Certification pages.  This list is to make it easy.  Just follow it down and you study the book or e-learning class, then you take the listed exam and you get the listed certification.

Ok who at Microsoft can I go hug and bow down too for creating Test and Lab and Test Runner and the CodedUI Recorder script generator.  Client of mine wanted to do more automated and better testing of their web apps. I knew VS 2010 had new testing tools but didn’t know to what extent. So I did some quick research and installed it on my own and tried it out against a business application I develop.  Wow.

I still have a lot to learn on it’s use but in 5min I created a script that I could automate and test the UI functionality of the business web app.

Applications to look at:

• Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft Test and Lab Management 2010 (Yes this only works with Team Foundation Server 2010. If you have TFS 2008, you’re out of luck.
• Microsoft Test Runner 2010 (Comes as part of Test and Lab I believe)

Some quick overview features

1. You can record your testing and play it back later to automate it
2. It’s designed for non-developers but not end-users, for someone in QA
3. With this tool you can have “Shared” scripts, so say you create 100 scripts and we change the login functionality. You would only need to edit that one shared script and all the other 100 are changed.
4. Manual Testing can be turned into automated testing
5. You can setup test environments for local, QA and Prod
6. You can do full screen capture when manual testing and it will create Bug item in Team Foundation System with your screen shots and all the steps you performed and what data was used when you were developing.
7. You can use datasource for username’s and passwords and addresses to test with etc.
8. You can perform Coded UI Automated Scripts without coding anything, a recorder records and generates it for you.

You can view the Test and Lab Management Video here, skip ahead to 13:10 into video to see it in action. http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/2/8/2/3/7/4/104Episode23AnIntroductionToManualTesting_ch9.wmv

CodedUI Functionality in VS 2010 Video. Fast forward to 2:20 to 7:10:  (You can do this on any VS 2008 project you have, using VS 2010 only) http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/5/4/1/8/6/4/104Episode18FunctionalUITesting_2MB_ch9.wmv

Good Post on some of the Lab stuff: The Microsoft Test Runner – innovation for the Generalist Tester

Well for MSDN Subscribers, Visual Studio 2010 Beta is live and available.

Jason Short posted a blog over here about it.

Some of the new features he stated:

• .Net 4.0
• Cloud Development - Windows Azure which is basically utility computing where you pay by the hour for your usage.
• Parallel Development - Not sure if this only means PLINQ for .Net developers or if they are only talking about C++ devs.  
• TDD Improvements - Editor changes for building test cases first, and then writing the code.
• ASP.NET - CSS grids and design surfaces changes, more Javascript debugging improvements.
• C++ Compiler - Lots of changes for C++ development, including MFC.
• Sharepoint templates 
• New Project Templates
• Windows 7 - MFC updates for Ribbon UI, and WPF changes.
• Application Model Changes - Reverse existing codebases, and lots of changes in Architect Edition to support more model types (including Class Libraries finally).
• Test Runner - This is potentially huge as it allows testers to submit bug reports complete with callstacks and traces that you can actually use to resume an app at the error point to avoid the dreaded No Repro on bug reports.

Here the offical site, and the VS 2010 MSDN Channel with videos.

The last feature, Test Runner, sounds awesome!

Found this post, and though it would be worth noting for my development friends.

If you are experiencing slow project close, try switching off participation in the feedback program in  Help | Customer Feedback Options... dialog. If it does not help, try disabling component in registry by changing

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages\{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11d2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}

to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages\Disabled-{2DC9DAA9-7F2D-11d2-9BFC-00C04F9901D1}

When I tried to create a unit test and expand my website to find the classes and namespaces.. I started to get "“Value does not fall within the expected range.” popup message. Well found the solution below, those they are doing it for a different reason it works nevertheless.

Found the solution here:

"...open the Configuration Manager from the Build menu, and for each of your website projects listed there, change its Platform to “Any CPU”.  Be sure to make these changes for each configuration type defined for your solution (e.g. Debug, Release). "

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrissc/archive/2008/08/22/vs2008-sp1-website-profiling-bug-and-workaround.aspx

Well I've had this problem awhile.. where if you move over to Vista and IIS 7 you'll notice that your Debug sessions timeout very quickly, 90 seconds to be exact.

It's very annoying.  I had once went through my app pool changing every time value I found to something higher just to fix it for the moment, which is a bad idea. I usually like to know why something happens and figure how to fix it properly.

So I came across a forum article on asp.net written by jshallard.

Here is the solution for fixing your Debugging Timeout Issue:
I went with the first option, I like to debug forever

In IIS 7 go to the Application Pools and select the Advanced Settings for the pool which you process runs in. In the Process Model section you can do one of two things;
    * Set the Ping Enabled property to False. This will stop IIS checking to see if the worker process is still running and keep your process alive permanently (or until you stop your debugged process)
    * If you prefer to allow IIS to continue the monitoring process then change the Ping Maximum Response Timeout value to something larger than 90 seconds (default value).

So you're setting up a new Workspace for Team Foundation and you get an error when you try and point a Source Control Project to a local folder that someone else was using as well..... Then you get the error message....

Error: "The working folder ... is already in use by another workspace on this computer"

I ran into this problem setting up a contractor's PC after the previous contractor using that PC had left.

The problem is you can't just go load up and delete workspaces unless your the owner. So in order to solve the problem I had to run a command line command for Team Foundation. Open Visual Studio 200x Command Prompt.

Tf workspace /delete developer05;<domain>\jsmith

To get that info I needed the owner name of the workspace and the workspace name. You can do

tf workspaces

You can find a list of Team Foundation (tf) commands here:

tf workspaces [/owner:ownername] [/computer:computername]
[/server:servername] [/format:(brief|detailed)] 

tf workspace /delete [/server:servername] workspacename[;workspaceowner]

Note: Common mistake is to forget the domain name of the owner if you are on a domain. <domain>\UserName