Macrocosmic Technologies

The October 2008 release of the TFS power tools is now available. If you’re more advanced that code monkey, you’ll want this. TFS is now integrated with the Windows shell. You can right click a file or directory, get latest, add to source, merge, and everything else you used to need to do through the Visual Studio IDE.

TFPT has also been updated to allow searching of check-ins based on server path, committed date range, committed user, check-in comments and check-in notes. PowerShell is supported as well, for basic operations.

Within the Team Explorer, there’s a new node called “Team Members”. Prepopulated with your project’s team members, you have the ability to view an individual’s check-ins, pending changes, and shelvesets. You can, of course, populate with AD users or TFS groups.

While planning the redesign of an enterprise application at my employer, we’re using the Microsoft patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide as one of our design guides.

We started by baselining the current application against the guide, and found it deficient in every single outlined quality attribute. Specifically, the quality attributes outlined are availability, conceptual integrity, flexibility, interoperability, maintainability, manageability, performance, reliability, reusability, scalability, security, supportability, testability, and usability. Unfortunately, these deficiencies are what lead to the biggest pain points, both for the business and the technologists trying their level best to deliver the optimal solution to it.

Obviously, there are tradeoffs inherent in these quality attributes. One obvious tradeoff is security versus performance and usability. All three are important in nearly every application, but depending upon the threat profile of the application, security may take precedence over nearly every other attribute.

According to the document, during the design process, the following guidelines should be considered:

• Quality attributes are system properties that are separate from the functionality of the system.
• From a technical perspective, implementing quality attributes can differentiate a good system from a bad one.
• There are two types of quality attributes: those that are measured at run-time, and those that can only be estimated through inspection.
• Analyze the tradeoffs between quality attributes.

Some of the questions from the guide include:

• What are the key quality attributes required for your application? Identify them as part of the design process.
• What are the key requirements for addressing these attributes? Are they actually quantifiable?
• What are the acceptance criteria that will indicate you have met the requirements?

Charges were filed today against eleven people who stole 40 million debit and credit cards from several stores, including the infamous TJX breach. Other affected companies include BJ’s Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, Forever 21 and DSW Inc.

Whew, that’s a lot of data leakage. If only there were some standard that companies processing credit cards were to be held to…