Technology

Making “Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Estimate” Field Reportable in TFS

If you'd like to make a report in TFS that compares the estimated time to complete a task with the actual time, you've probably come across the problem of Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Estimate not being reportable.  This is a real pain and very surprising that this wasn't done correctly in the first place considering that Work Remaining and Work Completed are both in the right place.  A lot of people (http://blog.nwcadence.com/2008/10/why-is-the-estimated-work-field-not-available-in-tfs-reports-2/) recommend just creating another field and using that instead of Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Estimate, but you can change...

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Managing Cultures in a Global Application

I have been doing a lot of work on globalized applications lately and I have learned a lot. I thought I'd try to share some of what I've learned with everyone. One of the first issues we ran into was managing formatting of data for different scenarios. Educating developers on which culture to use when is challenging and you end up not having a unified formatting. The pattern we came up with was to create a class which defines the culture to use by scenario. public static class Cultures { public CultureInfo UserFormatCulture { get { return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture; } } public...

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