The ALM Readiness Treasure Map v2.1 has begun its journey to release. We will keep you posted as to its status. Note that although it is listed as Release 3, this is version 2.1 of the application. This will be reflected in the settings for the application once published.
FIRST UPDATE: We’ve passed two more steps!
SECOND UPDATE: We’re almost there! I hope it doesn’t take 5 days.
Hello, fellow pirates! Hopefully you have had a chance to use version 2.0 of the ALM Readiness Treasure Map application and are enjoying the improvements that it brought over v1.0. Our team has been working on even more improvements in v2.1, primarily around Windows 8.1 compatibility.
If you’ve been living on an ALM-free island and don’t know what the Treasure Map is, head over to a better island and learn all about it.
Known Issues
We still have a few outstanding issues, but are anxious to release v2.1 so you can all start using it. Our lead tester Darren has been waging a war on bugs and has surfaced (no pun intended) some items we’re still addressing. Here are some you might encounter as you use the new release.
With Windows 8.1, snapping works differently from Windows 8. So, while the width of the application is greater than 320 pixels, it continues to show the full-width view. Once the width is narrower than this, it switches to snapped view. As the full-width view is narrowed down towards 320 pixels, the title text on the home page of the app starts wrapping, but not in the way we would like. It has insufficient spacing between lines of text and also may get cut off a bit. We will be addressing this in v3.0.
When reading news items after clicking the “News” island, if you right-click between items, the app bar pops up with a refresh button. If you right-click on an item, nothing happens. We need to display the app bar no matter where you right-click.
When hovering over an island, it is highlighted to show that it has the focus. However, when you hover over the green label text, the highlight is lost and the island no longer looks like it has the focus. We will work to fix this in v3.0.
Pinch and zoom sometimes doesn’t work, even though you’re using the correct gestures. The touch system is very sensitive to slight movements and often thinks you are scrolling horizontally rather than trying to change the zoom. We have some ideas about how to fix this in the next release.
Planned Features:
If you think v2.1 is great, look at what is coming in v3.0!
Content updates! Up until now, the only way to have new content in the Treasure Map was to publish a new version of the application. We are going to make the content dynamically updatable so you only need to update to a new version of the app when there are enhancements to it.
We will be adding treasure chests on each of the islands to show when you have completed an entire category of content. The individual “projects” each have this feature now, but the islands will be getting it, too.
More user interface improvements.
And other surprises!
How to get involved:
We would love it if you would download the Treasure Map app, try it out, and leave feedback for it in the Windows Store. We would also appreciate you providing feedback on Twitter, Facebook, etc. to increase awareness of the application. Also, please download version 2.1 as soon as it ships and provide feedback there, as well. We really appreciate your contributions and have been incorporating user suggestions since the first release.
6 April 2016 Update: Added the correct values for VS 2015.
If you are working on ASP.NET MVC web sites in Visual Studio 2013 (VS 2013) or 2015 (VS 2015), you need to make one registry change if you want to run IIS (Internet Information Services) Express as a 64-bit process by default. Use one of the methods, below.
Within VS 2013 or VS 2015:
Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions | Web Projects | Use the 64 bit version of IIS Express…
* Thanks to Christian Lundestad, David, Javier Collazo and Eliza for pointing this method out in the comments.
Today I discovered that you can redirect the output of Team Foundation Service’s tf.exe command to a file. I thought that because it displayed dialog boxes as the results of commands that you couldn’t redirect its output to files. However, commands such as tf history will do just that when you specify redirection, such as:
1
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe"history */recursive>history.txt
Of course, if your Visual Studio directory is in your PATH, then you can just specify “tf history…”. Note that you may also need to adjust your path, as earlier/later versions of Visual Studio will not be stored under the “Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0” directory.
