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Showing posts from March, 2018

Why am I no longer authorized for TFS project?

Sometimes, seemingly out of the blue, I get an alert that I am unauthorized to access the .NET project in TFS that I had been working on a few weeks earlier. Here's what has gone wrong and how to fix it. Is it a network issue? Visual Studio appears able to connect. Yet I appear to suddenly be not authorized. Is it a credentials issue? If so, why? What's wrong?  It happens infrequently enough that it can take several minutes to work out just what caused the problem, yet is common enough that I am using this post as a way of saving myself some wasted time down the road. I currently work in an environment with a policy of frequent changes to your password for our  workstations. Whenever this happens, Visual Studio reports that I am not authorized to access the project in our Team Foundation Server. The reason for the error is that Visual Studio uses cached credentials, and these cached credentials are not automatically updated when the workstati

Computer Science or Software Engineering

This week I was reading the results of the annual Developer Survey from the excellent tech forum Stack Overflow (available here ).  I was struck by a chart about educational background, excerpted below. The top line gathers three different streams of technology education into one: Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Software Engineering. There are profound similarities between the three, which is why they are grouped, yet also significant differences, in their approaches, assumptions and end goals. What struck me was the realization that, despite my strong formation in the Computer Science stream, over time I lean more and more to the Software Engineering stream now.