I have a strange request for developers of RSS Aggregators. I would like to be able to sort on the date/time they arrived in my client – NOT just the date/time of publication. OK – so I know everything is thinking what the heck is he talking about so let me explain.

I guess like many people, my list of subscribed RSS feeds is growing to a quite considerable number. I try to keep these well organised in my reader of choice (Sharpreader) by placing each feed into an appropriate folder based on categories I choose. I find I am now starting to select the top level folder in the tree which is Subscribed Feeds which simply displays a list of all feeds in date-time order. This is all quite logical and would suit most people most of the time. The problem I have is that being in Australia [GMT+10], all of the local Australian feeds always appear at the top of this list (not always a bad thing) and I am starting to miss new posts from overseas locations Eg. US West Coast [GMT-8]. This is due to the fact that a new post from a local Australian blogger would appear at the top of my list as I am in the same timezone. A new post from someone in LA or Seattle would appear AFTER any posts made in the last 18 hours which could put this three or four screens of information.I do not reliably change the status of the feeds I am reading to “read” so sorting based on read/unread doesn’t really offer a solution.

So what do I want? As stated in my first paragraph, I would like to be able to sort based on when the new item was detected or first read by my RSS client. If I haven’t started my reader in the past couple of days, all new posts would appear in my list with the current date/time not a problem. Four hours later someone posts a new entry to one of the feeds I subscribe to and hey presto, it appears at the TOP of my aggregated list regardless of the timezone they are in.

Does anyone know of a way to do this or a reader that could accommodate this type of sorting?

Just adding my voice to the crowd to let people know that Visual Studio 2003 SP1 is now available for download. Read more about this on Somasegar’s blog entry.

A quick post to add my voice to the others (Rob, Martin) in saying Congratulations to VSTS MVP Jean-Luc David who announced yesterday that he is joining the ranks of Microsoft Canada as a Developer Evangelist.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jean-Luc at a book signing that Rob Caron arranged at TechEd in Boston earlier in the year and the MS Canada team have done well with this hire.

Want to get into something really cool at TechEd Australia this year and help out a very worthy charity at the same time?

Want to see the Dev’Garten in action and have the opportunity to work in this developer wonderland?

Want to rub shoulders with some of Australia’s leading developer talent and talk about all manner of nerdy goodness?

If so, check out Mitch Denny’s post all about the  Community Project at TechEd 2006 Australia. This is a great idea and with Mitch at the helm you know its going to be a hive of frenzied activity.

Between the Dev’Garten and the Hands on Lab area there’s no excuse for developers not get their hands dirty with Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server at TechEd this year.

See you there!

Rob Caron’s provided a timely reminder to everyone that installed the TFS Release Candidate and Trial versions of TFS… They are starting to expire now! From his blog post;

“Once you’ve reached that magic day, and there is no countdown leading up to it, you won’t be able to access Team Foundation Server. You’ll get an error message that reads, “TF30072: The Team Foundation Server trial period has expired or its license is otherwise invalid. Install a licensed edition of Team Foundation Server to continue.””

Don’t be caught out. You can find out when your TFS Trial edition will expire using Martin Woodward’s “TFS Top Tip #7 – Determining when TFS Trial Edition will expire” post.

Read Rob’s full post here – Expiring Foundation Server Installations

Well the name says it all. We can now go ahead and toss those dual core, dual proc behemoths and replace them with a Micro-PC equipped with a Via EPIA motherboard, 1Gb RAM and a 2.5” HDD. Kick start the new box with a paltry 20watts of power and away you go.

So what could you do with your new ultra energy efficient box? Set yourself up with a full Team Foundation Server installation naturally.

Read Dave’s blog post for the full details. Way cool man!

[Dave Glover: Possibly the World’s Smallest Team Foundation Server]

 

 

It looks like Eugene (Attrice Corp) has been busy with the Sidekicks suite of utilities. The just released version 1.1.0 of Team Foundation SideKicks includes an integrated UI that allows each Sidekick to be easily accessed from a single form and not only have the Workspace and Status Sidekicks been improved but there is a brand new History Sidekick to boot. Eugene has the following to say about the new History Sidekick;

“The main highlight of the new release is History Sidekick that provides comprehensive view of all aspects of item history in version control, including item changesets, latest version properties, items branches, item merges history, item merge candidates and item labels history. Additionally user is able to compare item versions ine each list to track the changes in code.“

Get all the information about the many features in this product by visiting the Team Foundation Sidekicks product page or subscribe to the SideKicks blog. The free download (435kb) of this suite is available from the product page.

As the date for the TFS SP1 Beta approaches, there’s one feature that will make TFS much easier to access from outside an organisation and that’s the new extranet support.

An excerpt from Brian Harry’s post on Stuff in the pipe for Team Foundation Server.

“Extranet support” – We implemented an ISAPI filter that will allow the intranet to use NTLM and integrated auth while the extra net uses basic auth.  This enables TFS to be more easily deployed in environments where people on the internet need to be able to access TFS without having VPN.

One of the things you should probably consider if this is something that interests you, is how you have named your TFS server and is this name Internet suitable. If not, Etienne Tremblay has posted a great article on Changing to a friendly Team Foundation Server Name.

Remember, this article is NOT about the extranet support coming in SP1, but rather how you can change your server naming which may be useful if your are considering external connectivity once it becomes available. I need to change a few TFS servers in anticipation of the extranet support so I’ll be following Etienne’s steps in the next few days.

 

Subscribing to the TFS Events using bissubscribe.exe is a powerful way to receive notifications for many of the events that occur within TFS. These events can trigger emails or trigger web services that go off and do all sorts of useful things (Eg. Continuous Integration or notification of a WI change). One of the challenges of doing this is making sure you have the expression you need perfectly correct before you execute the bissubscribe command line. Finding a list of existing subscriptions is also the domain of commandline switches etc.

Well things have just got a little easier. Naren has just posted a little utility originally developed by one of his former colleagues in the WIT team that provides a nice convenient GUI for much of this work. The source code is available as well in case you want to tweek this a bit or add the functionality to your own TFS management application.

Thanks for sharing this Naren

 

And the answer is Can it what! Brian Harry has posted the July dogfood stats for the developer division TFS server and the figures are amazing. They have now reached over 33 MILLION files under source control in TFS. In the last week alone, they have handled 335,821 WI queries and had 25,066 get operations.

They have also done quite a lot of investigation around IOPS (I/O’s per second) for their SAN and as a result have ordered a new SAN. Check out the stats on this baby;

43 disks

RAID 0+1

4 disk shelves are needed to hold these 43 disks.

31x300GB disks for data

12x146GB disks for Log and TempDB

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Make sure you read Brian’s full post to get all the details.

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