A few weeks ago I was invited by the folks over at Elegant Code to do an interview about myself, agile and the stuff I’m working on in VSTS. The podcast for that went live today:

http://elegantcode.com/2009/01/26/code-cast-19-peter-provost-on-agile-visual-studio-2010-and-architecture-tools/

Enjoy!

Cameron Skinner has recently made two excellent blog posts that give a great explanation of how to use Layer Diagrams for architecture and design validation in your code. He shows you the basics of creating a layer diagram and binding it to your solution elements. He then shows you how to incorporate that validation right into your build!

• Layer Validation with the VSTS 2010 CTP
• Incorporate Layer Validation in your Builds

Excellent stuff you should certainly go read.

(For all this stuff, you will need to be running the VSTS 2010 CTP.)

The Text Template Transformation Toolkit, aka T4 Templates, is getting some press recently. T4 is a code generation and templating system that is built into VS, but not enough people know about it.

In P&P, we used it for almost all of our code generation in our Software Factories, and it will be an important part of how we do code-gen in Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition.

This recent article in the Redmond Developer News prompted me to blog this, and it is a nice overview of what T4 is all about with quotes from many of the key people involved in the development of the toolkit.

Here are some more recent posts about T4:

• T4 Code Generation - Best Kept Visual Studio Secret - Scott Hanselman’s Uber Post about T4. Tons of good info here.
• Clarius T4 Editor – written by my good friends and former colleagues at Clarius Consulting in Argentina
• Fun with T4 Templates and Dynamic Data

Enjoy!

In case you missed it yesterday, the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR shipped yesterday!

Here’s a snippet from Gert Drapers’ announcement post on his Data Dude blog:

Although the name "GDR", which stands for "General Redistribution Release", implies otherwise, this really is a complete new release, based on a new architecture. We have taken the architectural changes from the Rosario project (Visual Studio Team System 2010) and rolled them forward in time. Rolling forward these changes help us align the GDR release with the upcoming Visual Studio Team System 2010 release and provide numerous new features and extensibility points in this release. If you would compare the GDR release with the "Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals" or "Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition" you will agree this is a completely new product!

The key architectural changes

• Model based architecture - Everything underneath the covers is based on a true model representation of the SQL Server schema. This facilitates a true offline declarative database development system where the source code defines the shapes of the schema objects.
• Models are implemented by Database Schema Providers, DSP's for short. - The introduction of a provider model enables multiple things at once. First of all the decoupling of release vehicles. For example when SQL Server will release a new version or adds new functionality in a service pack, like they did in SQL Server 2005 SP2 when adding "vardecimal" support, we can simply update an existing provider or provide a new one in case of a new SQL Server release. Overtime we will go to a model where the SQL Server providers will be an integral part of the SQL Server release. The provider model is also a key extensibility point, allowing 3rd parties to extend database project ecosystem and add support for other database platforms in Visual Studio Team System 2010.
• Tool extensibility - In this release external tool writers have full access to the T-SQL parsers (for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008), the SQL Script DOM and the schema model (when inside Visual Studio). This adds on top of the ability to write extend the tools inside the platform. You can extend T-SQL refactoring by writing your own refactoring types (operations) and refactoring targets; add T-SQL Static Code Analysis rules, data generators, data distributions and test conditions. Database Projects (.dbproj) now provide a truly extensible declarative database development platform.
• Separation of BUILD and DEPLOY. - The separation of build & deploy makes it possible to deploy the output of your database project to many different targets and different points in time. Build now produces a single artifact file hat describes the schema inside your database, called a .DBSCHEMA file. This file is used by the deployment engine to deploy your schema.
• Standalone Deployment Engine. - The inclusion of a standalone and redistributable deployment engine makes it possible to deploy the output of your database projects (.DBSCHEMA files) to a target database without the need of having Visual Studio Team System Database Edition installed. This enables key scenarios like the inclusion of database schema deployment as part of your application installation.

All these architectural changes enable many new usage scenarios and interesting new features.

Many, many congrats to the team!

After a great time in Los Angeles last week for PDC2008, I returned to Redmond this week to re-deliver my talk "Architecture Without Big-Design-Up-Front" for the patterns & practices Summit this morning.

I've been doing my demos for this talk using the new Visual Studio 2010 CTP and have it running on by under-the-desk machine (more power than my laptop). But since the Summit is in a different building than my demo machine, I wanted to reach into it from my laptop using the Hyper-V Management Console from Windows Vista.

After getting my machine up to SP1 (one of my prereqs had failed) I was able to install it. But for some reason, I couldn't get it to connect. I could connect with Remote Desktop, but I couldn't connect with the Hyper-V Console.

After a bit of digging, I found a WONDEFUL set of posts by John Howard, a PM from the Hyper-V team. In there he shows you all the security and firewall connections you should check if you have issues connecting to the Hyper-V server.

• Part 1 - The Server-side Stuff
• Part 2 - The Client-side Stuff
• Part 3 - Server-side with Server Core
• Part 4 - In a Domain-joined Environment
• Part 5 - Weirder Domain-joined Stuff

It turns out that all of my settings from Part 1 were correct, but one setting in Part 2 was wrong (WHY??). I didn't need Parts 3-5, but I'm including them here for completeness.

Thanks John! You saved my ass.

PS. Now that PDC is behind me, I'm planning a bunch of blog content to share all that great stuff with the rest of you. Stay tuned!

I don't know how I get myself into these things, but it looks like I'm hitting three conferences in three weeks, only two weeks after moving my family into a new house.

Foolish? Hell yeah. Fun? You bet!

I'm very fortunate this year to be one of the folks representing Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. PDC is always a special conference, because this is where we get to tell you what we've got coming up for developers. What is the next cool thing? Only one way to find out and that is come to PDC.

My talk at PDC is called "Architecture Without Big Design Up Front". It is a mix of agile development, architecture tooling, a little process, a real world problem to solve with real code (so made up samples here) and hopefully some fun.

The week after PDC I fly up to Redmond to kill two birds with one stone: my monthly visit to my team in Building 25 on campus and a stop off at the P&P Summit to talk again. I always  love the P&P Summit as a speaking gig. The audience is small, but not too small. The talks can be very interactive and you always get to talk about interesting things.

The following week, I'll be in Barcelona Spain for Tech Ed EMEA. I'll be repeating my PDC talk there for people who couldn't make it to LA, and I'll also be doing my classic "Agile Talk on Agility". (Thanks again to Brian Button from whom I stole this talk years ago). My wonderful, amazing wife Emily is coming along on this one (she never lets me go on trips like this solo), and it just happens to coincide with our 8th Anniversary, so we're going to do a little vacation while we're there.

Hopefully I'll bump into some of you on the road this tour. Please if you see me walking the hallways or in the hotel lobby or at one of the many social events, feel free to walk up and introduce yourself.

See you there!

Somehow this slipped past me, but a couple of weeks ago a webcast that I did with local Architect Evangelist Joe Shirey posted up on Channel9.

Here’s the official description:

ARCast.TV - Peter Provost on what’s coming for Architects in Visual Studio Team System

The upcoming version of Visual Studio Team System (code named Rosario) has a number of new features and functions for Architects.  Senior Program Manager of Visual Studio Team System for Architects Edition, Peter Provost, sits down with Joe Shirey to discuss what investments Microsoft has made into the product and how it will potentially improve the lives of Architects.

In addition to that, a number of other great webcasts have been going up by my team mates and other VSTS folks. We’ve created a special section on Channel9 for all of this great content at http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/ so please go check it out!

I’m always amazed at the things people will believe. Today I got trackback spam from a “water for gas” site on my miles per gallon post. (The trackback has since been deleted.)

I hadn’t run across this particular “technology” yet, so I dug into it a bit. It turns out there are dozens of sites out there claiming you can add a water-based fuel system to your car to significantly improve your gas mileage.

The gist of what they’re claiming is simple:

1. You use energy from your car’s electrical system to electrolyze water into Hydrogen and Oxygen.
2. You then run the gaseous hydrogen and oxygen back into your intake manifold where it burns in your engine’s combustion chamber, resulting in more power with less gasoline used.

Sound oh so simple. Except that this is yet another instance of someone peddling a perpetual motion machine.

Here’s the problem: The first law of thermodynamics states:

The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings

In layman’s terms, this means you can’t get something for nothing. Applying that to the water for gas system, it basically means you will use more energy electrolyzing the water into hydrogen and oxygen than you will get combining them back together when you burn them in your engine.

In other words, if you took the gasoline completely out of the equation, you would eventually have your battery die because the engine wouldn’t make as much energy as it produced. (See this breakdown of the math if you want more info.)

What is more interesting than the bunk science displayed here is the willingness of people to be duped by this and respond with things like “but my friend has one and it works great”. Here we have some guy in middle-America (with little or no scientific or engineering experience and certainly without any of the proper equipment necessary to actually test this) telling you that the last 200 years of science and engineering are false and that perpetual motion (or snake oil) are real. The fact is, most of these scams are actually MLMs and Pyramid Schemes, do I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the misleading information.

Remember people: If something seems too good to be true, it almost always is! The ultimate test for this in on, however. Bruce Simpson has offered up a million dollars to the first person who can prove it works. Read more over at the One Million Dollar HHO Challenge site. (He’s got a bunch of other great links to the real science involved here in case you want more info.)

So thanks to the trackback guy for letting me learn a bit about this new form of Snake Oil. Hopefully this will help a few more people save their money for things that actually will save money on fuel, like cars that get better mileage.

Thanks to Heath Stewart for sending in some nice updates to the vim syntax file for PowerShell.

Changes in v2.7:

1. Added begin, process, and end keywords for script blocks
2. Make foreach and where highlight when used as foreach-object and where-object

The new version is up and available here: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1327

Last night I finally got around to upgrading my Blackjack to Windows Mobile 6.0. I’d been delaying because they didn’t have an updater that ran on Vista and I don’t have an XP machine available. Once the Vista updater arrived, I put it on the backlog.

I had an old WoW theme for my Blackjack but I decided it was time to make a new one. Here’s a photo of it running on my phone:

If you’d like to download it, here’s the ZIP file: LichKing_SmartPhoneTheme.zip (26KB)