Removing Webparts

I had an instance where I needed to remove webparts from a page but MOSS would allow it in the usual manner directly from the page. To get around this append ?contents=1 to the url and you can check off which parts to remove – the page needs to be in edit mode for this to work.

Call of Duty: World at War

I had a chance last night to play the beta of Call of Duty:World at War. First impressions were not bad, but everything is going to difficult comparing anything to Call of Duty4:Modern Warfare – which is such an awesome online experience.

I didn’t play much, just a couple of games of TDM, there are three maps available – this is a beta after all, and the ranks only go up to 11. In the RTM there are 65 ranks and (?)prestige's, perks etc to be had. As this is set back in time the UAV, Airstrike and chopper are gone and are replaced by spotter planes, artillery and dogs. If anyone has played the single player mode of CoD4 they will remember the dogs and they are as much a pain in this one as choppers are in 4 – though you do get points for shooting them.

There are additional slots for custom classes, 5 at first but more once you prestige, so all those people who haven’t taken prestige in CoD4, will now have to decide whether to take it in this game for the added benefit of the custom slots.

There is the opportunity to look back at stats and view stats of people in the lobby. Stats are also broken down by game type, if you prefer one game type over another this will give the leaderboard a different look.

Within the beta there are a few game types but looking through the leaderboard filters it looks as though there are quite a few hardcore modes including Headquarters which is touted to come out on CoD4:MW soon (www.fourzerotwo.com)

The maps may be small but I found it quite difficult to guess friend or foe – which leads to the obvious result. You can turn off the icon or customize it above your teammates heads.

You can set the locale for which the lobby so those people who experience lag a lot may find helps.

Would I recommend it – the jury is still out on that one. Will I play it more – no, still a CoD4:MW player working through the 6th prestige and will keep going.

Pex Automated Testing

“Pex is a tool being developed by Microsoft Research which has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of software testing while requiring minimal, if any, effort on the part of the developer. Pex can automatically generate a set of inputs for a paramaterized unit test which can effectively exercise most, if not all, possible code paths.“

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/briankel/Pex-Automated-Exploratory-Testing-for-NET/

There is a talk at the DDD7 at Reading on the 22nd November that include Pex, presentation by Ben Hall, along with ‘TDD and Hard to Test code’, IoC, MVC and lots more.

MSDN: Prescriptive Guidance for MOSS 2007 WCM Sites

I found this on Andrew Connell’s excellent site

http://andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2008/10/09/NOW-AVAILABLE-MSDN-Prescriptive-Guidance-for-MOSS-2007-WCM-Sites.aspx

TDD and Style Cop

In this ever changing world the powers that be, that is to say me and my line manager have decided that it is time to introduce some stability/readability into the code that we and rest of the team produce.

To that end over the next few weeks we’ll be pushing for the use of tools, like StyleCop, to get consistency. Before the end of the year the introduction of TDD. TDD will be the more difficult as we’ll have to factor in the initial hit in code production.

Still around

One final requirement that our end users had was that there should be a vertical menu system that would hide previously selected items and expend the current selection. The OOTB ASP.Net menu system did some of this but when displaying a deep hierarchy it didn't quite do what we wanted it to do. Dipping back into an OOTB publishing site and creating the predicted hierarchy to see how MOSS dealt with showed that after 3 levels the vertical menu gets truncated and a horizontal breadcrumb is created. The breadcrumb was the problem as none of our templates had a breadcrumb in. To resolve the issue we ended up buying the Telerik RAD Controls suite and using the Treeview for the navigation. The styling of the Treeview was done by adding the relevant CSS information into our site CSS.

With the deployment to our production environment, which so far has gone well, focus has moved to Phase 2. In the first part of this phase all the building blocks have been, or will be created, which include all the lists that will be used within the site.

Part of this phase will be using filtered lists - which seem like fun - where the user will select a value in one list and this will be used to populate another.

Code Metrics don't run with a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll

I thought it might be worthwhile to run some code metrics on an event receiver that I'm writing to send emails when someone submits a request.

When running the metrics an error is returned:

Message: An error occurred while calculating code metrics for target file <YourFileName> in project <YourProjectName>. The following error was encountered while reading module 'Microsoft.SharePoint': Security attribute type does not have a default constructor: Microsoft.SharePoint.Security.SharePointPermissionAttribute, Microsoft.SharePoint.Security, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, Publickeytoken=71e9bce111e9429c.

Solution: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/Workaround.aspx?FeedbackID=324796