Richard Fennell

My session on TFS at the ‘Building Applications for the Future’

2013-05-22T21:21:07Z

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on ‘TFS for Developers’ at the Grey Matter’s ‘Building Applications for the Future’ event today. As you will have noticed my session was basically slide free, so not much to share there. As I said at the end of my session to find out more have a look at Brian Keller’s TFS 2012 VM – ready to run demo VM with plenty of hands on labs Team Foundation Service – the free hosted version of TFS – go on give it a try. Brian Harry’s Blog – all announcements on TFS...(read more)

Video on Nuget for C++ on Channel 9

2013-05-22T21:04:03Z

I have been out to a number of sites recently where there are C++ developers. We often get talking about package management and general best practices for shared libraries. The common refrain is ‘I wish we had something like Nuget for C++’. Well it was released in Nuget 2.5 and there is a video on Channel9 all about it....(read more)

Webinar on PreEmptive Analytics tools on the 28th of May

2013-05-20T15:47:17Z

A key requirement for any DevOps strategy is the reporting on how your solution is behaving in the wild. PreEmptive Analytics™ for Team Foundation Server (TFS) can provide a great insight in this area, and there is a good chance you are already licensed for it as part of MSDN. So why not have a look on the UK MSDN site for more details the free Microsoft hosted event. MSDN Webinar Improve Software Quality, User Experience and Developer Productivity with Real Time Analytics Tuesday, May 28 2013: 4...(read more)

Why do all my TFS labels appear to be associated with the same changeset?

2013-05-16T07:41:34Z

If you look at the labels tab in the source control history in Visual Studio 2012 you could be confused by the changeset numbers. How can all the labels added by my different builds, done over many days, be associated with the same changeset? If you look at the same view in VS 2010 the problem is not so obvious, but that is basically due to the column not being shown. The answer is that the value shown in the first screen shot is for the root element associated with the label. If you drill into the...(read more)

A new arrival at Black Marble

2013-05-14T10:03:05Z

Look what the stork delivered!...(read more)

Interested in some tutor delivered training on TFS 2012 in the UK?

2013-05-10T08:23:52Z

Interested in some tutor delivered training on TFS 2012? Well Anthony Borton , the TFS trainer and ALM MVP, is over in the UK running his excellent set of the TFS/VS 2012 focused courses. TFS 2012 Configuration and Administration 10th – 12th June 2013 | Course Outline Software testing with Visual Studio 2012 13th- 14th June 2013 | Course Outline TFS 2012 Developer Fundamentals 17th – 18th June 2013 | Course Outline Interestingly these courses can be taken in the room with the trainer or via Quicklearn...(read more)

How healthy is my TFS server?

2013-05-08T14:31:17Z

If you want to know the health of the TFS server there are a number of options from a full System Center MOM pack downwards. A good starting point are the performance reports and administrative report pack produced by Grant Holiday . Though the performance pack is designed for TFS 2008 they work on 2010 and 2012, but you do need to do a bit of editing. As the installation notes state, create a new shared data source called “TfsActivityReportDS” Set the connection string to: Data Source=[your...(read more)

Workaround for TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity

2013-05-01T14:01:21Z

The problem I have been working on a project that contains SharePoint 2010 WSP packages and a MSI distributed WPF application. These projects are all in a single solution with their unit tests. I have been getting a problem with our TFS 2012.2 build system, all the projects compile but at the test point I get the unhelpful TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: 'Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more...(read more)

Follow the Yorkshire Global Windows Azure Event

2013-04-27T09:48:33Z

Today Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Global Windows Azure Bootcamp event. To see what is happening check out the photos on our Facebook gallery and the #GlobalWindowsAzure Twitter hashtag...(read more)

Thanks for attending my webinar on lab management

2013-04-23T10:58:24Z

Thanks to everyone who attended my webinar session today in TFS Lab Management, I hope the audio issues were not too much of a problem and you found the session useful. We are looking into the causes of the audio problem so hopefully the next webinar will not need people dialling in via the phone unless they want to. A number of people asked for the slides, you can find a copy of them here . As I mentioned in the session if you want a look at Lab Management you can have a go yourself using the HOL...(read more)

Lab Management webinar next week

2013-04-18T15:53:30Z

If you are interested finding out more about TFS Lab Management why not come to the Black Marble Bite size webinar next Tuesday (23rd April). I will be giving a basic overview of the product and discussing some of our experiences implementing it....(read more)

Our upgrade to TFS 2012.2 has worked OK

2013-04-18T13:57:47Z

I have mentioned in past posts the issues we had doing our first quarterly update for TFS 2012 . Well today we had scheduled our upgrade to 2012.2 and I am please to say it all seems to have worked. Unlike the last upgrade, this time we were doing nothing complex such as moving DB tier SQL instances; so it was a straight upgrade of a dual tier TFS 2012.1 instance with the DB being stored on a SQL2012 Availability Group (in previous updates you had to remove the DBs from the availability group for...(read more)

Great event in Antwerp

2013-04-18T11:46:47Z

I had a great time yesterday at the VISUG Conference in Antwerp , thanks to everyone involved in event. The ALM track organiser Pieter and all the speakers, myself, Martin and Neno , were really pleased to see how full our room was all day. There certainly seems to be more interest in ALM than ever before. If you want to find out more on areas of TFS I was talking on i.e connecting from environments other than Visual Studio, why not look at a very similar session I recorded last year, it can be found...(read more)

Error TF400129: Verifying that the team project collection has space for new system fields when upgrading TFS to 2012.2

2013-04-11T14:02:30Z

Whist testing an upgrade of TFS 2010 to TFS 2012.2 I was getting a number of verification errors in the TFS configuration upgrade wizard. They were all TF400129 based such as TF400129: Verifying that the team project collection has space for new system fields but also mention models and schema. A quick search threw up this thread on the subject , but on checking the DB tables I could see my problem was all together more basic. The thread talked of TPCs in incorrect states. In my case I had been provided...(read more)

Lab Management with SCVMM 2012 and /labenvironmentplacementpolicy:aggressive

2013-03-26T11:05:52Z

I did a post a year or so ago about setting up TFS Labs and mentioned command C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools>tfsconfig lab /hostgroup /collectionName:myTpc /labenvironmentplacementpolicy:aggressive /edit /Name:"My hosts group" This can be used tell TFS Lab Management to place VMs using any memory that is assigned stopped environments. This allowed a degree of over commitment of resources. As I discovered today this command only works for SCVMM 2010...(read more)

Kerbal Space Program - Its educational and written in Mono too!

2013-03-24T11:35:26Z

My son is really taken with Kerbal Space Program . This great games allows you to design your own space craft and so run your own on-going space program, all with a realistic physics engine. What is particularly nice is that this cross platform Mono based application is being built in a very agile manner with a new release most weeks, each adding features as well as bug fixes. There also seems to be an active community of people building plug-ins for extra space craft components and rovers...(read more)

TF900548 when using my Typemock 2012 TFS custom build activity

2013-03-23T21:52:25Z

Using the Typemock TFS 2012 Build activity I created I had started seen the error TF900548: An error occurred publishing the Visual Studio test results. Details: 'The following id must have a positive value: testRunId.' I thought it might be down to having patched our build boxes to TFS 2012 Update 1, maybe it needed to be rebuild due to some dependency? However, on trying the build activity on my development TFS server I found it ran fine. I made sure I had the same custom assemblies and...(read more)

Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Chapter of the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp on the 27th of April

2013-03-21T12:45:51Z

Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Chapter of the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp taking place in several locations globally on the April 27th, 2013. This free community organised event is one day deep dive class where you will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Windows Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. Black Marble’s event will be run by Robert Hogg (Microsoft Integration...(read more)

Installing a DB from a DACPAC using Powershell as part of TFS Lab Management deployment

2013-03-14T16:45:53Z

I have been battling setting up a DB deployed via the SQL 2012 DAC tools and Powershell. My environment was a network isolated pair of machines DC – the domain controller and SQL 2012 server IIS – A web front end As this is network isolated I could only run scripts on the IIS server, so my DB deploy needed to be remote. So the script I ended up with was param( [string]$sqlserver = $( throw "Missing: parameter sqlserver"), [string]$dacpac = $(...(read more)

You don’t half get strange errors when two servers have the same SID

2013-03-12T17:30:03Z

You don’t half get strange errors when building a test environment if when you run SYSPREP’d each copy of your VM base image you forget to check the ‘generalize’ box If you forget this, as I did, each VM has a different name but the same SID. Basically the domain/AD is completely confused as who is what. The commonest error I saw was that I could not setup application (Report Services, SP 2010 and TFS 2012) with domain service accounts. I all cases I got messages about missing rights or cannot communicate...(read more)