I’ve enjoyed working strictly on my laptop for over a year now. Since I work from home, using my laptop affords me the flexibility of picking up and go to my nearest Starbucks or Panera and finish out my afternoon there. Unfortunately, I’ve had a couple of setbacks with my setup: my laptop battery is suffering a slow and painful death, and now my arm is starting to hurt as if I were getting carpel tunnel. It’s weird because i’ve always heard of it being on your hand/fingers, this is more like forearm and above my elbow, so it could be sports related, but it definitely gets worse as the typing day goes by. So today I spent about an hour moving over to the bigger desk in my office, which allows me to sit more straight than the other one, plus I’m able to use my chair’s arm-rests instead of having my arms floating in the air like they were before. I have a really good ergonomic keyboard, which would probably help even more, but when i hook it up to the laptop, then the screen ends up like 3 feet away from my face and because of my obsession with getting the most data in my screen, my resolution makes everything too small at that range. I tried reversing things so that my laptop becomes my second monitor and and the other monitor was able to get a foot closer which was awesome, but then the laptop gets in the way and i’m reduced to just one monitor. So everything just leads me to “get a kick-ass pc and use your laptop sparingly”. I will probably end up shopping around for a really good chair also, like one of those Herman Miller, which I never thought would be necessary until now…I’m just not sure if I’m ready to splurge on that. This guy almost has me convinced.
Now, that still leaves my 2-3 times per week trip to work out of the house to figure out. I’ve been holding off on spending $200+ on a new laptop battery until I figure out what my new setup will be. I think that I have it resolved by the way of Mesh, which Mikey swears by, so once I get my act together with that I think that all will be good again! I’ve been a loyal Dell user for over 7 years now, but maybe it’s time for me to look around and see what else is out there for me.
Come on, my 2 loyal readers, what should I buy?
Mark Allen
Another approach which works well is to have the XML tag reference a custom TFS group. In my case there is a master contributor group shared between projects so rather than list all the contributor users in the template AssignedTo list boxes I created a TFS group called ‘TeamAssignments’ and within security I referenced the team. Then in the templates I added the tag ListItem value=[project]\TeamAssignments. Now when anyone is added to the team they are displayed in the AssignedTo List box. This also means that another team can be created without changing the templates as the changes can be done in security.
TFS Team Name: Blue (example set up in security)
TFS Group Name: TeamAssignments
Members: Team Blue