Mike Parks

35 Posts | 139 Comments

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Mike Parks Code.Where(c => c.IsTechnicalDebt).Refactor();

Jul 18

Don't forget to check out all the great Amazon Prime Day Deals today! I've always been a huge fan of Amazon's error pages, except for today lol If you're a Software Engineer, take a moment to be thankful that you're not responsible for a 34 million dollar per hour error that looks like this :) ......

Posted On Monday, July 16, 2018 6:35 PM

Sep 17

Mesh WiFi 101

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If you're tired of dealing with WiFi connectivity headaches, dead zones, and weak signals, from your old outdated traditional router, upgrading to Mesh WiFi for your home network is worth checking out. What is Mesh WiFi?The best home network upgrade I've ever made. I immediately gained:Max WiFi signal across the entire houseNo more WiFi dead zonesNo ......

Posted On Saturday, September 23, 2017 11:03 AM

Sep 17

Code Search - Visual Studio Text Editor Extension - v1.1 Update

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It's been about a month since I blogged and released the Code Search - Visual Studio Text Editor Extension. The original release of this extension allowed you to use Microsoft's Code Search directly from the Text Editor in Visual Studio by highlighting text and clicking the Code Search context menu option. I've received a ton of positive feedback across ......

Posted On Friday, September 1, 2017 10:40 AM

Aug 17

New Visual Studio 2017 Extension - Code Search (VS Text Editor)

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It's been quite some time since I've cracked open Visual Studio to create an extension freebie for all my fellow engineers. If you're keeping up with the latest and greatest in the Microsoft Engineering world you've probably already heard about Code Search which delivers a one-stop solution for all your code exploration needs by allowing you to search ......

Posted On Thursday, August 3, 2017 7:55 PM code search , visual studio , team services , tfs , source control , architecture , refactoring

May 17

Video Editing PC Build - Ryzen 8-Core Processor

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Hello everyone! It's an exciting day. The first shipment of parts has arrived for the new AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Processor Video Editing PC Build! This fresh new shiny piece of technology grabbed my attention as soon as it was originally released on 03/02/2017. It's worth checking out if you're considering upgrading. The 1700X clocks @ 3.4GHz with 8 Cores ......

Posted On Friday, May 5, 2017 6:16 PM

Oct 13

Metro-Bootstrap + jQuery + Overscroll

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Just playing around with some jQuery. Pretty cool stuff :) Metro-Bootstrap: http://talkslab.github.io/m... Overscroll: http://www.azoffdesign.com/... Dashboard Demo Apps App 1 App 2 App 3 App 4 App 5 App 6 App 7 App 8 App 9 App 10 App 11 App 12 App 13 App 14 Tweet ......

Posted On Saturday, October 19, 2013 2:48 PM

Oct 13

var codeReview = TFS.Features.First(feature => feature.IsAwesome);

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If your team is currently on TFS 2010 and you're looking for an awesome reason to upgrade to TFS 2012, check this video out. Incorporating code reviews into the Visual Studio IDE will take your code quality and risk assessment to a whole new level. Everyone benefits from this. Good code reviewing results in clean code, happy software engineers, satisfied ......

Posted On Saturday, October 5, 2013 1:21 PM

Oct 13

Visual Studio Extensions - Mike Parks & Cory Cissell - Source Code Published

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I've been contacted by a ton of people since Cory and I rolled out our Visual Studio Extensions asking if I could publish the source code to them. A large majority of the responses and feedback have been positive. It's awesome to see the development community using them! We haven't had time to maintain them but hopefully all our new friends that have ......

Posted On Friday, October 4, 2013 10:55 PM

Apr 13

Code PaLOUsa 2013!

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Over the weekend my team and I attended Code PaLOUsa here in Louisville, KY. It's an awesome event and it really brought together the IT community around the area. I'm pretty proud to say that my new employer Zirmed pitched in to help sponsor the event. It was great reuniting with all my old co-workers! Lots of familiar faces and I was very happy to ......

Posted On Sunday, April 28, 2013 3:31 PM

Nov 11

SQL Server Denali CTP 3 - Dockable Windows!

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The future of SQL Server Management Studio looks pretty promising. I downloaded SQL Server Denali CTP 3 the other day and was really happy to see that they've finally implemented dockable windows. I always find myself trying to drag the tabs out of SSMS 2008 to my 2nd monitor. Check it out if you get the chance. Just wanted to spread the word ......

Posted On Monday, November 7, 2011 9:27 PM

Jun 11

A little SQL tip for C# developers

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The other day at work I came across a handy little block of SQL code from Jeremiah Clark's blog. It's pretty simple logic but through the mind of a C# developer making some quick DB updates, seems to me that it's more likely to end up writing out the code in Solution 1 instead of Solution 2 below to solve the problem. Basically, I needed to check and ......

Posted On Saturday, June 18, 2011 1:46 AM

Apr 11

Search Work Items for TFS 2010 Source Code Published on CodePlex

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A little while back we published the Search Work Items for TFS 2010 extension in the Visual Studio Gallery. Noah Coad recently added Cory and I as Developers on the existing Search Work Items CodePlex project. Over the weekend I uploaded the new source code containing our Visual Studio and TFS 2010 updates. Feel free to check out the source code. You ......

Posted On Monday, April 11, 2011 7:09 PM

Oct 10

Some handy tools - Copy As Path / Send To Toys

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So I was reading through Cameron Skinners blog the other day and came across his post about the "Copy As Path" context menu option in Windows Explorer. Turns out this menu option is hidden unless you right click on a file while holding the shift key. It also turns out that this feature has been around for a while and I'm just now catching up :) I thought ......

Posted On Thursday, October 28, 2010 8:41 PM

Sep 10

Our Visual Studio Extensions hit over 20,000 downloads!

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A few months ago Visual Studio 2010 RTM was released. My friend Cory and I noticed a few features that would really come in handy but were not included in the release. After learning how to write extensions, we decided to create a few of our own. We used all of them locally for a while. Around April/May we decided to publish them to the Visual Studio ......

Posted On Monday, September 27, 2010 9:04 PM

Jul 10

Go download the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools!

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If you're using Visual Studio 2010 as your IDE I'm sure you've heard that Microsoft just released an update to their Productivity Power Tools extension a couple days ago. If you haven't installed this yet, go do it now! It's packed with tools that will help you when programming in VS 2010. The best tool out of the set is called Solution Navigator. It's ......

Posted On Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:03 PM

Jul 10

WCF & WPF Peer Channel Chat

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A few days ago I was reading up on some WCF technology called Peer Channel. It looked pretty cool so I decided to try it out. I was pretty shocked to find out how easy it was to build a chat messaging service using this this stuff. I was able to run a chat client on my computer, a chat client on my friends computer, and the WCF Chat service on a server. ......

Posted On Monday, July 5, 2010 6:27 PM

May 10

Work Item Visualizer for TFS 2010 - New Extension

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I released another new extension to the Visual Studio Gallery again today called Work Item Visualizer for TFS 2010. I've only heard positive things about it so far, hopefully it stays that way :) Basically, it creates a diagram of all work items linked to a work item ID which the user specifies in a search box. This extension was coded using DGML (the ......

Posted On Tuesday, May 25, 2010 10:54 PM

May 10

Search Work Items for TFS 2010 - New Extension

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A few months ago I was constantly using Visual Studio 2008 with Team Foundation Server 2008. Searching for work items with queries inside Visual Studio became a pain until I found an add in that simplified it into one little search box in the IDE. It allowed me to enter some text in, hit the enter key, and it would bring back a list (aka open a .wiq ......

Posted On Thursday, May 20, 2010 11:43 PM

New Bing Maps

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Normally I don't stray too far from Programming and TFS on my blog posts but I'm just really impressed with how much Silverlight has improved Bing maps. I use to be big on MapQuest, then hopped over to Google, but now the new Bing Maps have everything I need. The two coolest features are right on the main page. All you have to do is go to http://www.bing.com/maps/ex... ......

Posted On Thursday, May 20, 2010 10:52 PM

May 10

TFS 2010 Auto Shelve Extension

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We've been working with the Visual Studio 2010 SDK and the TFS 2010 SDK a lot recently to create new Visual Studio Extensions. You can find these extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery. If you're a developer/programmer, you should check it out, they have some pretty cool tools out there. I'd be surprised if you told me you went there and couldn't find ......

Posted On Wednesday, May 12, 2010 6:22 PM

Visual Studio 2010 - Faster Startup with /nosplash

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I read a blog the other day about the /nosplash switch in Visual Studio. Apparently, it's been around a while and I'm a little late on finding out about it. I figured I'd share it for those of you that come across this and didn't know about it as well. Basically all it does is turn off the Visual Studio splash screen which speeds up initial startup ......

Posted On Wednesday, May 12, 2010 5:51 PM

May 10

Visual Studio 2010 Modeling and Architecture Tools

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Jennifer Marsman (Microsoft Evangelist) and Cameron Skinner (Microsoft Visual Studio Product Unit Manager) recently stopped by our office while they were passing through Louisville on their tour to give us a presentation on the new Visual Studio 2010 Modeling and Architecture Tools. I checked out these new features when Visual Studio 2010 Beta versions ......

Posted On Thursday, May 6, 2010 11:31 PM

Apr 10

New Visual Studio 2010 Extension - Collapse Solution

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If your team has recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2010, take a second to check out the new Extension Manager. You can use it to browse through or install tons of tools, controls, or templates from the Visual Studio Gallery. My friend, Cory Cissell, and I recently teamed up and created an extension of our own called "Collapse Solution". It adds an ......

Posted On Tuesday, April 20, 2010 10:12 PM

Oct 09

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2!

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We recently had Stephen Toub, a Senior Program Manager on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft, swing by our office and walked us through some really cool ways to start implementing parallel programming using Visual Studio 2010 and the 4.0 Framework. I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to attend this, it was one of the best presentations ......

Posted On Thursday, October 29, 2009 11:43 PM

Sep 09

TFS - View all pending changes for all users

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Team Foundation Server allows you to see who has what file checked out at any time. If you would like to see a list of files that any TFS User has checked out, follow the steps below: Open Visual Studio 2008 > Click File > Source Control > Find In Source Control > Status Select "Display all checked out" or "Display files checked out to" ......

Posted On Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:13 PM