Entries tagged with wix - Channel 9

geekSpeak recording: All About Team Build 2008 with Steven Borg

glengo — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:09:00 GMT

In this episode of geekSpeak, Steven Borg shares the merits of using Team Build 2008 to radically improve the quality of the code you write. Steven gives a great overview of how to set up automated builds and a build server, and the benefits of investing the time to do it right.

Steven also spends a bit of time talking about why he loves Test-Driven Development (TDD) - but pragmatically rather than zealously. Nonetheless, things like work items, build reports, logs and changesets available with Team Foundation Server can help developers zero in on bugs that "break the build". Breaking the build is bad, and we have a good chuckle about some of the stiff "penalties" that various development teams (even some within Microsoft) come up with for that infraction.

Also in this geekSpeak, get the scoop on what's on the horizon for setup and deployment projects, and hear about a great tool called WIX which makes building projects into MSI files super easy. Steven goes so far as to say that WIX actually changed the way he works, listen to him explain why.

Steven also gives tips on how many of you already have access to Team Foundation Server (and therefore, Team Build) and don't even know it. So it's easy to incorporate these tools into your software build process and, through the Continuous Integration they afford, drive up quality and enhance team involvement. As Steven says, it's like "a little bit of magic."

This geekSpeak was hosted by Lynn Langit and Mithun Dhar.

About our guest: Steven Borg

Steven Borg, a Northwest Cadence principal and the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) practice lead, works with corporations to improve their automated build process and overall software development process. In addition, Steven assists the Team System community as a Team System Most Valuable Professional (MVP), and was a founding member of the Seattle-based VSTS User Group. Northwest Cadence is a Microsoft Certified Partner and VSTS Inner Circle partner that focuses exclusively on helping companies improve their Application Lifecycle Management using Visual Studio Team System.

Forth to .NET Compiler

Mike Sampson — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:52:17 GMT

As a compact, stack-based programming language, Forth was popular in the 1980s as a lower-level alternative to BASIC for microcomputers and is still used in many commercial environments. When Valer Bocan discovered .NET in 2001, he decided to try writing his first compiler, and Forth.NET was the result.

Dr. Sneath interviews him to find out a little more about how a single Romanian developer became one of the first people to extend .NET to new programming languages. Apologies that the video is so shaky: it wasn’t until afterwards that we discovered that the image stabilization feature was disabled. Download Forth.NET from Valer’s website (http://www.dataman.ro/dforth/index.html).

Louis Lafreniere - VC++ backend compiler

Charles — Thu, 11 May 2006 20:24:00 GMT

Louis Lafreniere has been a developer on the VC++ compiler team for a long time; 15 years, to be exact. Specifically, Louis works on the backend compiler. What's a backend compiler? How's it evolved over the years? Where's it going? Watch and listen. Good stuff.

Jim Hogg: Phoenix Framework

Charles — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:03:34 GMT

We recently caught up with Jim Hogg, program manager for the Phoenix Framework, a very robust backend compiler platform co-created by the VC++ team and MSR. Ever wanted to extend the functionality of a backend compiler? Well, now you can, and it's much easier than you'd think given the great work that's gone into "Phoenix" (it's a code name at this point...).