I am moving my blog to another site – WordPress.com to be exact. If you care to follow, please visit www.jamiekurtz.com.

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When was the last time you ordered a pizza like this: “I want the high school kid in the back to do the following… make a big circle with some dough, curl up the edges, then put some sauce on it using a small ladle, then I want him to take a handful of shredded cheese from the metal container and spread it over the circle and sauce, then finally I want ......

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When developing WCF services that interact with a custom Security Token Service (STS), you will need to create at least one X.509 certificate. If you have access to a trusted certificate authority – e.g. a Windows Active Directory domain – then this task is pretty simple. But if you don’t, or maybe you would just rather create a set of self-signed certificates, ......

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My Epiphany – Part 1 After reading Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble and David Farley, I couldn’t help but think “wow! this is the key to becoming truly agile!”. I submit that may be a little overstated, but nonetheless by minor epiphany has grown into an outright passion for enabling rapid development AND delivery of small bite-sized pieces of applications. ......

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As I get more and more proficient with Windows PowerShell, I find that my profile is getting more and more useful. I thought I’d post my current profile’s content here, in case anyone finds any of these functions useful. set-alias gh get-help set-alias gcmd get-command set-alias wo where-object set-alias ss select-string function sync {tfpt online /adds ......

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In VS2010 Beta 2 you can associate your own activity designer with a custom activity in one of two ways: Using System.ComponentModel.Desig... on the custom activity Implementing System.Activities.Presentat... using the Register() method to set up the association at run-time It should be obvious that option (1) couples ......

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I’m working on a project where we are using the Composite Application Library from Microsoft’s patterns & practices team. You can read the official documentation on that site and on MSDN for all the details, but basically the CAL allows you to build applications using totally decoupled modular components – or “modules” in CAL vernacular. These modules ......

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For quite a while now I’ve been wondering if our culture of text messages, emails, messenger/chat conversations, short YouTube clips, rapid-fire news channels, PodCasts, blog posts, Twitter, and Facebook updates is somehow hurting my ability to focus on and develop deeper concepts. By that I mean really dig in, learn, and add value to some larger-then-me ......

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A few weeks ago I was in line at the grocery store behind a lady who was buying a fair amount of groceries. Pretty typical trip to the store, except that as I watched, she was placing her items (from the cart) onto the little conveyor thing quite atypically. Rather than just lining everything up one after the other, she was placing the items here and ......

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I have a small confession to make... A little TFS web service I built over the past few days was the first “real” production-ready application I’ve ever written from scratch where I’ve been good about maintaining unit tests. I even pushed myself to practice real-live TDD, and then even use Moq. I have to tell you, that I am now a firm believer in the ......

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Today some quick tricks finally came together for me with Windows PowerShell. So I can finally write scripts and quickly execute them from the PowerShell shell. If you haven't yet installed PowerShell, you can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/wi... My simple goal was to be able to a) ......

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This really bit me recently, so I want to point it out. You can read Martin Woodward's post here: http://planetscm.org/user/2... but I've copied the jist of it below. Basically, TFS 2008 will not associate any changesets to the first build for a Build Definition. This means that if you create your branch, then create a corresponding ......

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General references to Visual Studio Team System http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... -> Entry point for VSTS2008 (including the different editions and TFS) http://msdn.microsoft.com/e... (TFS specific part of previous link) http://blogs.msdn.com/teams... ......

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Today I was trying to find out who has what checked out from a certain folder in TFS - call it $/Project/Folder. I happened to not have most of that folder downloaded yet - i.e. not in my workspace. I went to the command line, and typed the following: tf status c:\Project\Folder /recursive /user:* That returned with “There are no pending changes.” – ......

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I recently discovered that after you install the 2008 Team Explorer (here) - and you already had the 2005 Team Explorer installed - you may not able to view or edit TFS work items in Excel. Instead, you get an error that says: "TF80076: The data in the work item is not valid or you do not have permissions to modify the data. Please correct the problem ......

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