The problems of Search Engine Optimization are usually considered to be the problems of the marketing division of the company, and system administrators or software developers almost always have no clue when what they do causes significant troubles for website marketing.

Today we will talk about one of the biggest problems you may encounter in Search Engine Optimization – the content duplication problem, and what you, as web developer, system administrator or website owner, should do to prevent it.

More...

Once your Team Foundation Server is performing automated UI testing on daily basis, it starts to check your code when needed. When Team Foundation Server finds that your software is doing something unexpected, it automatically creates the bug work item. This time we are going to talk about these bugs, how to get most out of them, and how to use that functionality to boost the effectiveness of your software development. More...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server has two most important features – the source control and the build automation. Although other features are very important as well, these two are pretty much enough to consider the purchase of the Team Foundation Server.

Today we are going to talk about the Build Management system of Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server. More...

What could be easier, for a software developer, than to write a kiosk application? You set the rules, you have only 4 buttons to deal with and users just can’t do anything bad or unexpected. What could be wrong with such solution?

The absence of proactive thinking.

More...

What could be more tragic, than to realize that your team cannot into Scrum? Or any other framework, supported by Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server. One day you just wake up with a single most powerful desire – to end this pain, no matter what. And this “what” could be really painful as well, as it could mean migration, and if you are not scared yet – you should be, and I’ll tell you why. More...

“You see, there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth. Causality. Action, reaction. Cause and effect.”

Merovingian, The Matrix Reloaded

Sometimes I think that lack of proactive thinking is a root of all evil. Buzzwords aside, I am talking about the analytical skills and using them.

By coincidence or not, but for the last few months, when I am analyzing the cause of someone’s failure in any area, it appears that lack of analytical skills, or thinking 2 steps ahead, was the paramount part of it.

As a metaphor to understand what I am talking about – let’s take a car. Imagine, that someone has created a car without brakes. Because he was only thinking about taking off, and not about how his journey would end.

A friend of mine once left home with about 120$ in her pocket. She took a ticket to a plane and fled to England. No plans, no language, nothing at all. She was 15 years old somewhat naïve girl. I wish I could have a better example of real-life lack of proactive thinking. More...

This is part 4 of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for Developers walkthrough. Last time we were speaking about the unit tests, and that was useful, but very basic foundation of what you can do in terms of Test Driven Development. However, we can conventionally separate testing in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server to 3 levels. So today we are going to talk about the second level – Advanced Testing techniques, such as Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Tests and Load Tests.

If that’s only the middle layer of complex testing in Visual Studio 2010, what’s in the last one, you might ask? There will be test automation using Hyper-V virtualization with Virtual Machine Manager and yes, we will discuss it later as well.

But today we’ll begin with Test Impact Analysis. More...

This is the 3rd post in a series of articles about Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for developers. And this time it is about test driven development. Previous one is available here.

Test Driven Development is the concept, which dictates creating unit tests before actually writing the code. To help you to understand this, let’s assume that you are writing the calculator program. And that whole calculation process is done by a separate class named Calculator with functions such as “Addition”, “Subtraction”, “Multiplication” and “Division”.

Now, according to Test Driven Development process, you should first create the test project, and write your tests for each of these functions. Since you know what result should be given for what input (like – “2 + 2 = 4”) you can make your tests to assert, that if you are running the Addition function with parameters of 2 and 2, the result is 4. If the result is different or exception occurs – the test is failed. More...

During my career as a Microsoft Certified Trainer, I’ve been training .NET software developers and Windows system administrators – usually they were well established professionals longing for more knowledge and ready to purchase a training course instead of a car.

But there were people, and they still appear regularly, who suddenly make a decision to become a software developer. Either it’s because they were ignited by the idea and believed in own capacity of writing new software, or out of curiosity or any other reason – be it money, prestige or worrying about own future.

So this post is for such people. If you are considering to become a .NET software developer and wondering what should be your first step – I will do my best to explain it right now. If you are seasoned .NET software developer, then perhaps you won’t find much useful information here, but you’ll have a link to give when someone will ask you that question – “I want to become a software developer, what should I do?”. More...

How to make the URL of your page look more user-friendly or just make it self-explanatory? And anyway – look different from what it really is? In ASP.NET version 4 it’s easier than ever.

Why would we need that feature anyway?

It’s been quite popular trend in web development since the very beginning of dynamic Web – first, we didn’t want anyone to see the extension of our files, as this posed a security risk. Anyone, who could see that our page is actually an ASP page, would understand that you have Internet Information Server, which was considered “dangerous” at that time – not even because it was too bad, but because Windows NT 4 Server was user-friendly enough so people wouldn’t need to be MCSE in order to install and run web server. It wasn’t hard for Linux either, but Apache didn’t offer any dynamic contents out of the box. More...