Spikeh'd

Recently I've been collaborating via Team Foundation Server 2010 - it's my first time, and I'll be honest... it was very gentle. It eased me in with its promise of improved Source Control (improved over Source Safe, that is) and toyed with me, sporting its ideals surrounding automated builds and work item collaboration. Whilst I've not been directly involved with the set up, using it on a daily basis has been a refreshing change. I'm one of those developers who obsessively refactors code, renames and moves files around until I'm happy everything is in the right place, so when using Source Safe, CVS or SVN, there's quite a bit of repeat work involved when it comes to making sure the source control server is also updated. Suffice to say that TFS 2010 works beautifully in this area, keeping the local, server and project file structure the same as each other. I've been exclusively working in Visual Studio 2010 for a while now, as I've been creating n

A while ago, I set my default browser in Visual Studio 2010 to Google Chrome by using the "Browse With..." trick, and I've been happy with it for some time. Recently I've found that I've needed to do quite a bit of testing in IE, so I wanted to change it back. I went down the "Browse With..." route again, which seemed to work... but every time I close and re-opened Visual Studio, it reset itself back to Chrome. I've been living with it for a while, as I tend to do extended sessions anyway, so it's not been too much of a hassle... but today I've needed to close and restart Visual Studio a few times, so it's become a bit annoying. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it seems that when setting the "Browse With..." option in an MVC project, the settings aren't saved to the configuration file, probably because MVC projects don't actually have physical files to be "Browsed", unlike an ASP.Net project. I'm not ma

I've just had a bit of a clean up with the blog - re-tagged most of my older posts and changed the layout slightly. I apologise if any of your readers have been spammed with updates - just ignore them if so :) I've also deleted some of my posts, most notable are the vast majority of the post relating to my bespoke nTier framework. Since I made them, I've made some significant changes, so the old posts don't really represent the end product any more, and will probably just confuse matters. I'm still working on it, and I've made some good progress. I'm also learning a hell of a lot in the process and getting to play with some cool tools like T4 and MVC3, Razor and unobtrusive JQuery. Instead of blogging while I'm writing it, I thought I would develop it as a standalone framework you can download and play with yourself. It's about 85% complete, and although other commitments are taking over at the moment, I'm trying my hardest to get it finished

I'm in the middle of building a security model for one of my clients. They've specified that they want everything done in the ADO.Net Entity Framework 4.1, so I've been working with it quite a lot recently. Though it hasn't made a great first impression, I'll reserve my judgement until a later blog post. One of my main concerns with EF is separation of concerns / layer abstraction. It offers a fairly robust model (with its limits), but in an enterprise environment, you wouldn't want to expose that model to your presentation code. After a bit of digging (and being pointed in the right direction by a colleague), I found the ADO.Net POCO Entity Generator Visual Studio Extension, which isn't available by default... you have to download it via Extension Manager. I managed to get it to generate my POCO (Plain Ole' CLR Objects) in a relatively short amount of time, but because I'm concerned with the dynamic SQL generated by EF, I've been writing sto