DiscountASP.NET Hosting

Managed TFS Hosting Now Available in the U.S. and European Data Centers

Announcements, Team Foundation Server

visual studio team foundation serverWe are happy to announce further expansion of our TFS hosting services with the availability of Managed Team Foundation Server Hosting in our U.S. and European-based data centers.

Managed TFS Hosting is a premium service where the customer can get their own instance of Team Foundation Server on a dedicated VM all to themselves. The Managed TFS service comes with 30 gb of disk space.

For our Managed TFS Hosting service we support both the TFS Basic and TFS Full versions. The customer can choose which sku they want.

TFS Basic includes source control and work item tracking. Currently in our Shared TFS Hosting services we only offer TFS Basic.

For our Managed TFS Hosting, we are offering the TFS Full version as an option which includes the features of TFS Basic and also includes SharePoint and Reporting.

If you are interested a Managed TFS Hosting solution, please contact our Sales Team for a quote.

DiscountASP.NET Affiliate Agreement Update

Announcements, Video

We have made an important addition to the DiscountASP.NET Affiliate Agreement that may have an impact on the way you manage your online promotions.

The change requires you to disclose that there is a “material connection” between you and DiscountASP.NET anytime you offer an endorsement or testimonial on our services. This disclosure is necessary in order to be deemed in compliance with the Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Please see the new section of the Affiliate agreement entitled, “FTC Endorsement Compliance.”

What the new guides mean

If you provide reviews, rankings, endorsements or testimonials about a service for which you receive commissions from us, you must clearly disclose the fact that you receive such compensation in a clear and prominent place – that is, close to your endorsement.

For more information and suggestions about how to comply with these guidelines, please visit “The FTC’s Revised Endorsement Guides: What People are Asking,” and “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The FTC takes the Endorsement guidelines seriously and has begun to enforce them for both content providers like yourself and advertisers like DiscountASP.NET. Under the updated Affiliate Agreement, failure to comply with the endorsement guidelines could result in removal from our affiliate program and the cancellation of commissions.

Please take steps immediately to make sure your site is in compliance with the new guidelines.

This information was also sent to all Affiliates via email.

25,000 Free Windows Phone 7 Handsets

Marketing

nokia lumia 800 windows phone 7Mary-Jo Foley reports from Nokia World 2011 that Microsoft and Nokia has partnered to get 25,000 Windows Phone 7 devices into the hands of mobile developers. Looks like they will be doing the giveaway at about 1,000 local events between now and June 2012. So if you are developer who is planning to – or wants to – develop Windows Phone 7 apps, make sure to keep an eye out for events near you and you may be able to get your hands on one of these phones.

(The image is one of the new Nokia Lumia 800 phones unveiled at the Nokia World conference. It may or may not be the phone that Nokia/Microsoft will be giving away.)

2 More Code Camps – Desert Code Camp and the RDU Code Camp

Announcements, Code camps and conferences

This Saturday, November 5, 2011, there will be two code camps taking place.  First we have the Desert Code Camp which will take place at Chandler-Gilbert Community College in Chandler, AZ.  This is the second Desert Code Camp this year and currently there are 83 approved sessions scheduled.  Topics at the Desert Code Camp include .NET, Android, Database, iOS, Mobile and many others.  If you have an interest in web and software development, then this is the place to be, so register today (its FREE!).

Also this Saturday, the RDU Code Camp will be held at the ECPI College of Technology in Raleigh, NC.  Currently there are over 25 talks scheduled throughout the day and the event is expected to host up to 200 Microsoft .NET developers, DBAs, and IT professionals.  There will also be breakfast bagels and coffee, lunch and the all important after party, all for free, so register before its too late.

Code Camps are a great way to meet fellow developers and get involved in your local developer community.  We encourage all developers to attend, speak or volunteer at your local code camps!

DiscountASP.NET Wins Visual Studio Magazine Web Hosting Award

Announcements, Hosting Industry

Visual Studio Magazine Award 2011 - Best Web Hosting MeritWe are very proud to announce that we won the Best ASP.NET Web Hosting Merit award from Visual Studio Magazine in their 2011 Readers Choice Award poll. This is our 6th year to win an award from the Visual Studio Magazine poll!

We want to thank all the developers out there for their continued support throughout the years. We promise to continue working hard for you and we’ll continue to push forward with cutting edge hosting solutions that support the latest Microosft web stack.

I would like to congratulate some of our partners as well:

– Congratulations to Telerik who won the Best Collaboration, Project Management and Agile Solutions for their TeamPulse product! And please note that Telerik is offering DiscountASP.NET customers with a 15% discount on TeamPulse for this month of November.

– Congratulations to Red Gate Software for winning in the Best Database, Data Development & Modeling category with their SQL Source Control product! And please note that Red Gate is offering DiscountASP.NET customers with a 20% discount on SQL Source Control until the end of the year. Get details in the Control Panel (ASP.NET Hosting or TFS Hosting)  marketplace.

Why I’m a Telerik TeamPulse Fan and a TeamPulse Offer

Announcements, Inside DiscountASP.NET, Team Foundation Server

Telerik TeamPulseJoe posted about how to connect Telerik TeamPulse with our TFS Hosting service. What he mentioned but may not have fully stressed in the post was that at DiscountASP.NET, we have adopted TeamPulse to manage your own internal application development process.

We have always had an agile development process with continuous updates of our control panel and intranet, but our process was never really formal. So our CTO, Frank Cheung,  made a decision to start using TeamPulse and for our dev team to become more agile in a more formalized way.

The TeamPulse product helps us keep to a scheduled sprint. Nowadays, our team has daily stand-up scrum meetings and uses planning poker. Of course, we are still learning, improving and evolving our agile development processes but for the most part it is helping us gain productivity.

So you may be asking why a non-developer like me is blogging about TeamPulse? Well, I became a fan of TeamPulse exactly because a non-dev person like me can be involved in the development process. And I can contribute to the development process without bogging the process down.

Let me explain.

One of the cool features of TeamPulse is the idea board. It’s an area where I can post an idea, feedback or feature request. What I post doesn’t have to be technical – just the high level idea of something that would be cool to get done. These ideas can be broken down into tasks later by people that are more technical than I am. The project manager can get the various tasks assigned to devs as part of a future sprint.

The powerful thing is allowing me to have a formal place to put down ideas and organize them. Prior to using TeamPulse, I would need to keep a list of ideas myself (and you can imagine many of them just being lost) or I’d email someone about an idea but there was no formal way to track it and no easy way to get the idea into our development work pipeline.

The other thing that I like is getting more analytical insight into our development processes – with information about burndown and velocity. This helps us improve our development cycle continuously.

So being a fan of TeamPulse, I’m also glad to announce that Telerik has agreed to provide our customers with a 15% discount on their TeamPulse product for the month of November. Here’s a coupon code that you can use to get this limited time deal on TeamPulse.

TEAMCOU-QTWUZZ

Remember this coupon is only good until November 30, 2011.

Using TeamPulse with your hosted TFS service

Team Foundation Server, Technical

We’ve been using Telerik’s TeamPulse in-house and I’ve finally had an opportunity to try it out against the hosted Team Foundation Server 2010 service that we’re offering.

If you’re interested in evaluating TeamPulse, Telerik offers a trial version in two flavors. For basic functionality, a hosted trial version is available but it doesn’t offer TFS Synchronization, so you’ll need to use the TeamPulse Installable Trial.

Before proceeding with the installation and configuration of TeamPulse, make sure that you have the following from your Account Information page:

  • Server Name
  • Team Project Collection Name

TeamPulse requires a SQL Server database and the configuration of a local instance of SQL Server Express is a part of the installation process, or if you have a development database available to you, you can elect to connect to an existing database server.

When you configure TeamPulse to synchronize with your Team Foundation Server, you’ll want to use the following values:

  • Server Name: Your DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server
  • Collection: The name of your Team Project Collection
  • Path: tfs
  • Port Number: 443
  • Protocol: HTTPS

The URL preview should look like https://tfsxx.discountasp.net/tfs/CollectionName.

For the credentials, make sure that you’re using an account that is a Team Project Collection Administrator.

There’s a lot of information that’s already been published that I’d recommend reviewing:

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