The company I’m currently working for has about 100 developers, who are committing their code to SourceSafe.

Since Visual SourceSafe (VSS) has some serious issues and is far away from bein state-of-the-art the company is now in process of testing Team Foundation Server (TFS). Our team is the test team and we have moved our source (without history) to TFS.  

After some days of using the system, we were looking for the feature “Find in Files”, which was used quite often in the VSS era. We installed the TFS Powertoys which gave us a “Wildcard Search”. At first sight this feature looks like the good old VSS “Search in Files” but in fact this option searches only in filenames. After some googling I found this StackOverflow post of some other guy, who was looking for this feature.

For me it’s unbelievable to ship such a big product without basic functionality like “Search in Files”.

There are some answers which pointed me to a cool project: CS2Search.

CS2Search lets you index your code and search with some neat queries like

interface:IFooBar

Obviously this will give you all IFooBar interfaces in your indexed repository.

CS2Search uses Lucene.net to index the code.  Since Lucene.net uses files as input, you have to setup a scheduled task or some triggers/notifications to get the latest code out of the Source Control System.

I really like the CS2Search idea.  But It’s a pity for us, that there is no VB.net parser available out of the box, since the company develops in VB.net. But as simoneb said in this blogpost, it is possible to integrate your own parser through Windsor IoC.

Building a parser is a nice exercise and thanks to Microsoft and it’s missing search-feature in TFS I will dig around in this topic soon.

This will be my first blog entry on my new stuff-for-geeks.com site.

I decided to talk more about my daily life as a consultant and developer in the .net scene.

So here is my little HowTo:

1. Get a decend machine for your site

2. Choose a domain name

3. Choose a blog engine

4. Install and configure the site

5. Install the blog engine

Step one:

My choice was a root server with Windows 2008 Web as os.  You can get one with great support at strato.com. The machine was up and running in a few hours. 

Step two:

To start my blog, I needed a pretty domain name. I dug around my parked domains and found stuff-for-geeks.com! I bought this domain back in 2004. The idea was to sell geeky items like the good old IBM Clicky Keyboard. (Well that business was not running very well, but the silver lining was that I'm now proud owner of some rare vintage keyboards...)

Step three:

The Blogengine.

Some days ago the Visual Studio start page pointed me to the MIX 09 Keynote Video. Scott Guthrie introduced the Web Platform. You can get the Web Platform Installer (WPI) here. This little tool makes it really easy to install apps and developer tools on you server or workstation. Included are different Blogenginges. After some googling for the different pieces my decision was to use blogEngine.net.

Step four:

Site Installation

Installation of a site is very easy with the IIS 7 Manager. So I added a new blank site, and told IIS to listen for Host Headerslike stuff-for-geeks.com.

Step five:

Last not least by installing the blogengine was very easy. Just click install in the WPI and choose which site you want your app to be in. That's it. WPI is not just copying the contents to your directory, it configures security settings (BlogEnginge.net needs write access to the AppData Folder) you, so that after the installation you have a ready to go app on your machine!