Yuval Mazor - Searching for Zen in Software Development

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking in front of a number of my colleagues in Sela about functional programming.  My talk’s title was ‘The Essence of Functional Programming’ and it dealt with what I consider to be the primary differences between functional and other languages.  Thanks to everyone who came – it was pleasure (broken air-conditioning not withstanding..)!  Slide deck is available here.

Purpose One of the most commonly required features in a report is a list of the daily values of some metric over a range of dates (for example, how many open bugs were in the system at the end of the day for each day in the last month).  This query will retrieve these metric values for each day in the date range. Prerequisites TFS 2010 or higher @StartDate parameter – The beginning of the required date range @EndDate parameter – The end of the...

Purpose Many times you want to filter the contents of reports based on sprints or iterations (for example, the number of re-opened bugs in each sprint in the project).  In this case, you often want the default of the report filter to show the iteration path of the current sprint.  This query will retrieve the current sprint’s iteration path. Prerequisites TFS 2010 or higher The Scrum process template A @ProjectGUID  parameter – The GUID of the Team Project in which you’re interested ...

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged and it’s time to get back into the rhythm!  In this series, which I’m calling TFS Reporting Recipes, I’d like to show some tricks, tips and other patterns that help me along when I’m writing reports for customers.  I almost always use the relational warehouse since I feel more comfortable in SQL than in MDX, so for the recipes I assume you’re in the Tfs_Warehouse database. Feel free to sound off in the comments if you have questions/issues that you’d like to see me address. Happy Reporting! ...

Aikido, and I suppose all martial arts, are painful.  Mostly physically painful, depending on how skilled – or rather, how unskilled – the person on the other end of your joint is.  But there is also a great deal of figurative pain.  It’s the pain of letting go of your ego and the pain of emptying your cup.  It’s the acceptance that someone half your size (or less) can be twice (or more) as effective as you are, disabling and throwing you around seemingly without even trying.  It’s understanding that no, it’s not as trivial as your teacher makes...

Having attended BUILD in Anaheim, CA last month, I was looking forward to trying out the various technologies that were introduced:  Windows 8, WinRT + XAML and of course, running it all on the Samsung tablet.  This post is a summary of my experiences.  In general, it’s been good – the tools are appropriate, the APIs pretty much cover what I had in mind and the end result is similar (though not identical) to what I had in mind. Development Environment The first issue I encountered was setting up a comfortable development environment.  While the Samsung tablet...

This morning we received some good news:  Microsoft has released the TFS 2010 training kit that Assaf and I co-authored.  Happy days! You’ve probably heard of TFS and in particular of TFS 2010, the latest released version.  It’s a powerful tool packed with features – but where do you begin?  The Training Kit is designed to help you understand what TFS 2010 can do for your organization and software process.  It applies to all members of the team – developers, testers, business people and of course, managers. So if you thought TFS 2010 was just the next...