Taming TFS - Digitally signing assemblies

Signing is a bit more tricky than strong naming. I didn’t want to use delay signing, because that requires additional configuration on development stations, so just like with strong naming – plain old simple build on the development machine and the fancy stuff on the build server.

Registering a certificate in the certificate store

This is another bit that will be helpful with our next tfs build script modification.

To use a certificate for either strong naming or signing code, you need to place it in the certificate store of the user asking for it (e.g. if you’re executing an automated build, the user in whose context the build is executed)

Creating a certificate signing request (csr) on windows

This bit will be useful for the next tfs build script modifications that I will describe in a later post.

Apparently there are a couple of ways to create a csr - openssl, online services, dedicated tools…

But there are also ways to create a csr without installing any software. There's the easy way (for those who have IIS installed) and the bit more complicated way (for those who like command line tools – that would be me)

Reading manifest from assembly

Information like product name, file version, copyright, etc are stored in the assembly manifest. In this post I would like to present how these informations can be read from an assembly and showed in the UI.

EF Code First and SqlServer Ce 4.0 – the simplest example ever.

Recently I needed to write a simple database application. I chose the Entity Framework Code First (Code Only) as a Object Relational Mapper (ORM) because its simplicity and quick development process. If you did not yet heard about EF Code First then this is a good place to start. Entity framework is a very powerful technology. It totally makes the whole dirty work which in the …

Taming TFS - Strong naming assemblies

Today we’re going to look at another build script adjustment – strong naming assemblies.

The scenario we are aiming for is that during development, the assemblies are not signed (so developers don’t need to have the a certificate file - a little bit more on that later), but during a build on the build server they are. This can be handled by providing additional parameters to msbuild.

Taming TFS - Assembly versioning

The assembly version is a number in the form of <Major>.<Minor>.<Build>.<Revision>. What value the placeholders are assigned to is totally up to you, we chose to set the first three numbers manually and set the last one to the change set that the source was built from. At the same time, I didn’t want to limit the options, so by examining the “Build Number Format” input in the default template, I decided to merge the parameters available there with a custom parameter set (the build number format provides a couple of params, but doesn’t provide access to the change set number).

TrueCrypt whole disk encryption step by step

Although TrueCrypt has a rich documentation (available here) I could not find any quick step by step tutorial on how to easily encrypt whole system. So this was the reason for this screenshot-based beginner’s tutorial. 

Every confusing topic and phrase is well documented in TrueCrypt documentation so I will limit the comments to the very minimum.

Before you start installing TrueCrypt and encrypting your system drive prepare one blank DVD or CD which will be used for rescue purposes. If you already got one, we can start…

Displaying hierarchical data in WPF and ASP.Net MVC

Let assume we have following self referencing table of people

Taming TFS – Default build template

The default build template in tfs is good enough for starters, but what if you want more? Thankfully tfs is flexible enough to customize the build process with anything you want, so let’s get to it!