Entries by Bojan

Last week we wrote about the release of the Microsoft Dynamics Business Analyzer for Windows 8. This week we thought we would share a quick demo of the app.

We hope you download the app and let us know what you think!

If you are a developer, starting to work on a Windows 8 application, one of the really important things to understand is the Process Lifetime Management or PLM. Even if you're not a developer, understanding what really happens when you run a Windows Store application or navigate from it could help you use the app better.

PLM is actually one of the major differences between a Windows 8 application and a desktop application. Unlike traditional Windows applications, which will continue to execute in background, Windows Store apps execute only when they are in the foreground. Windows 8 focuses on the apps in the foreground, keeping them responsive and providing excellent performance by allowing the app to use all of the available device resources. Applications that are snapped are running in foreground, too.

Once a user navigates away from the app, the operating system puts the application in the suspended mode to preserve battery. The application remains in memory but all of its thread are suspended. When the user navigates back to the app, it resumes execution where it stopped and you as a developer can't change this behavior. You don't even have to implement any code to make it happen.

This all seems easy and straightforward, but there is a catch. The operating system cannot guarantee that the application will stay in memory until a user decides to use it again. While the app is suspended, the OS can terminate it to free up additional memory. When an app is terminated, all state that has not been saved is lost. As a developer, you cannot allow for this to happen. Since we are not aware whether the application will be terminated, we must ensure the state is saved when the app is suspended and restore this state in case termination occurs.

But do not despair, Visual Studio 2012 does much of the heavy lifting for you. If your app is not complex, the VS project template takes care of this for you, completely. In the Common folder of your Windows Store app you will find the SuspensionManager.cs. VS added the OnSuspending method and following code to existing OnLaunched method in the App.xaml.cs to save and restore the app’s navigation state if the app was terminated by the operating system after it was suspended.

private async void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e)

{

var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral();
await SuspensionManager.SaveAsync();
deferral.Complete();

}

protected override async void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args)

{

…

if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated)
{

// Restore the saved session state only when appropriate await SuspensionManager.RestoreAsync();

}

…

}

In case your application requires anything more sophisticated than this, you will have to implement it yourself, but at least you have a decent starting point. To test how your application behaves when terminated, start the app from Visual Studio and select Suspend and shutdown from the Debug Location toolbar (to activate it, navigate to View > Toolbars > Debug Location).

Merit Solutions is highly devoted to investing in our employees, providing educational opportunities that enable all team members to improve their skills / talent and follow the latest industry trends. All team members are encouraged to attend trainings and conferences, take exams and earn valuable certification in their respective fields.

As an example of this commitment, this year, a couple of our engineers working with industry-leading technologies attended DevReach 2012, the premier developer conference in Central and Eastern Europe. For the 7th time in a row, Telerik, Microsoft, and other valued partners organized this renowned conference which concentrates on developers and testers.

Many prominent speakers presented more than 60 sessions on the following topics:

• Cloud
• Web Development
• Mobile Development
• Architecture
• Agile & Testing

Our engineers had the opportunity to share ideas and knowledge and to discuss current projects with top industry experts and came back energized and with plenty of new skills and ideas.

To find out more about DevReach, visit www.devreach.com.

In Sure Step, projects are a collection of documents, tools and templates that follow the Sure Step implementation methodology. When creating a new project, Sure Step Online Project Wizard will always retrieve the latest content ensuring that project documents are up to date. As the documents reside on SharePoint, it enables easy collaboration of the whole project team.

Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Online Project Wizard is a SharePoint hosted Silverlight application which harnesses the power of both SharePoint and cloud-based content storage. It can be hosted either on your local SharePoint 2010 environment or on SharePoint Online.

After a simple one time process for manually deploying the Project Wizard to the desired SharePoint environment described in the User Guide, Sure Step project can be created on the same site collection or any other accessible locally. (If the site collection resides on another SharePoint farm or web application additional configuration of the destination web application is required. This will be described in one of the later posts.)

Each time a Project Wizard is started it retrieves the configuration information and checks for compatibility. Only if a new version is required (which actually means that there were significant changes to the Sure Step content metadata model) a user will have to download the latest version and redeploy it to the destination SharePoint environment before continuing with the project creation.

Project Wizard retrieves the latest content metadata and generates the options offered in the wizard itself. Content as well as all the options offered in the Project Wizard are dynamically loaded from the Sure Step Online content repository. This enables seamless update of the Sure Step content, addition of new tools and templates, new solutions, project types and languages. This architecture ensures that each time a project is created using the wizard, it will contain the latest content available from Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Online without the need to regularly download and install client and content updates (which can be around 400MB for each language).

The Sure Step content is categorized into seven (industry related) solutions, six Dynamics product lines, five project types for implementation engagement type and numerous accelerators for diagnostic phase and optimization offering. An inventory of more than 750 tools and templates are available for use on each project with partial translation in nine languages. Projects are created for a specific Solution, Dynamics Product, Engagement type and a selected Project Type or accelerator. New project contains copies of all Sure Step documents applicable to selected criteria.

Sure Step Online Project Wizard can be deployed on the following environments:

• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint Online

More info and the links to resources can be found here.

Last autumn Microsoft announced Sure Step Online, which enables you to:

• View the complete Sure Step methodology, including all tools and templates.
• Create and manage customer projects based on the Sure Step deliverables on SharePoint.
• Link to online marketing, training, and other resources on PartnerSource and CustomerSource

Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Online is a new approach to using the Sure Step methodology. Instead of having a client application with a set of content language packs, Microsoft developed a Silverlight application available on Partner Source and Customer Source. As the Sure Step Online is cloud-based, you no longer have to regularly download and install client or content updates (around 400MB for each language) to have the latest tools and templates, Sure Step Online will always contain the most recent content, and be available from anywhere, always.

Some of the advantages of the Sure Step Online include:

• Using the latest guidance and content available online without downloading and installing the client.
• Ability to access and share content quickly from anywhere. All you need to have is an internet connection, a browser with a Silverlight plugin and access to Partner or Customer source.
• All supported languages are also available. Besides English, Sure Step Online offers (partial) methodology and templates in Chinese, Danish, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
• Ability to point users to a specific guidance page or template, which will eliminate the need for them to download the whole methodology to locate the specific content/guidance.
• Ability to create customer projects on your local SharePoint instance, partner hosted SharePoint or SharePoint Online. Projects created using Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Online Project Wizard will always contain the latest templates.

Sure Step Online is available for partners and customers on the following location https://mbs2.microsoft.com/SureStep

For more details, please refer to the Sure Step Online User Guide.

For development teams following an Agile methodology (Scrum), working on a couple of projects and covering a wide set of technologies like ours, it’s fairly common to have a number of team projects for each project we are working on. However, there are a couple of drawbacks when using multiple team projects as described in Good Reasons to not create a new Team Project.

In order to enable managers to analyze and plan our engagement, we needed to find a way to export data from all team projects we are currently working on. Unfortunately, TFS doesn’t support this fairly reasonable request. TFS provides a great integration with Excel, which enables easy exporting, modifying the data and publishing it back to TFS. However, if the query contains work item data from multiple team projects, an error TF208015 is thrown and no data will be exported.

This is a known issue and it in the TFS backlog. Suggested workaround is to create separate workbooks bound to different team projects and then to aggregate the data from tables. This means that you will still need to do a refresh in multiple workbooks.

We managed to find a more elegant way of retrieving the needed data using TFS Power tools. This add-on contains Team Foundation Power Tool (tfpt.exe) – a command line tool that enables you to work with files and directories under version control, team projects, and work items queries.

So, what you need to do is to create a Query in Visual Studio Team Explorer that displays the data you need and then export the data using the following commands. These will generate the TSV(tab separated values) and XML file.

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools>tfpt query /format:xml "Engineering Team\Team Queries\Team Sprint Backlog - All Projects" /collection:http://tfs:8080/tfs/tfs%20projects > d:\allprojects.xml

c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools>tfpt query /include:header,data "Engineering Team\My Queries\AllProducts" /collection:http://tfs:8080/tfs/tfs%20projects > d:\allprojects.txt

Data from this generated TSV (or XML) can easily be imported in Excel and analyzed further, to the great satisfaction of your managers.

Microsoft keeps an open channel and listens to new feature requests from the users, so if you would like to have this feature in a next version of the TFS, go to feature request, register and vote.