But it works on my PC!

Bletchley Park have announced that they have got some Lottery Grant funding, which is great news. Again I you urge you to visit if you are interested in the history of our trade.

You can now get updates on Agile Yorkshire events via twitter @agileyorkshire

Must be that time of year, I see we are looking at an exam for Scrum Masters

I don’t see any point in my repeating myself, especially when Gojko has covered essence of the subject so well

We have been consolidating our Hyper-V system of late, moving various older systems onto a new SAN based cluster. This has meant we have just moved our virtual TFS2008 build machines. After the move I started seeing the following error on all the builds using that server, re-enabling the build machine had no effect.

I restarted the build VM but this did not fix the problem; I had to also restart the TFS2008 AT, once this was done all was fine. I guess that there was a cached IP/ARP table somewhere routing packets the wrong way.

Technical Tip: if you can’t see the build server don’t just assume it is always the build server at fault, it might be the other calling machine i.e. the TFS AT

Interestingly our TFS2010 build machines did not suffer this problem.

I have been having a play with the boot from VHD functions in Windows 7, it seems like a really useful feature when you need the raw power of your PC, but would like the ease of management of Virtual PCs (i.e. can copy them around and archive them), There are many posts on the steps that are required to add a boot from VHD partition  to an existing standard install (remember the VHD must be for a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 operating system), I followed notes on knom’s developer corner. Just a couple of things that got me:

• The notes say to press Shift F10 to open the console and enter the DISKPART commands to create and mount the new VHD. This is fine, but I then closed the window to continue, this is wrong. In step 6 the notes do say to Alt Tab back to the installer and this is vital. If you close the command window, as I did, the new VDISK is dismounted so you cannot install to it.
• After the install I could dual boot, I had a ‘real’ Windows 7 install and my ‘boot from VHD’ install. The boot manager showed both in the menu, but they both had the same name ‘Windows 7’, only trial and error showed me which was which. Also my new VHD boot was the default. All a bit confusing and not what I was after. As I find the command line to BCDEDIT not the friendliest for editing the boot setting I tried to use EasyBCD to edit one of the name to ‘Windows 7 VHD’ and alter the default to my original installation. This caused me to end up with two boot options that both pointed to the ‘real’ installation. My guess is that EasyBCD does not understand VHD boot on Windows 7. I therefore had to use the manual command as listed on TechEd. Once this was done all was OK

The next step is to try a VHD boot from an external USB or eSATA disk.

Telerik have just release a new work item manager and dashboard application for TFS, first impressions are very good. Why not download your copy and have a look?

We had a company outing at the weekend to Bletchley Park for their Annual Enigma Reunion event. A great chance to see the place where Enigma was cracked and some of the equipment they used to do it, such as the working  rebuild of a Turing Bombe

Whilst down there we also took the chance to have a good look around the National Museum of Computing, which shares the site; you know are are getting old when a third of a museum is devoted to equipment you have worked on!

I would urge anyone interested in the history of our industry to take the time to drop by Bletchley Park to have a look at both the museums on the site. And if you can, donate to aid their upkeep as neither Bletchley or the Computing Museum get any governmental support. Think of them live steam preservation societies, full of keen volunteers, with loads of ideas and partially working equipment that just need a bit of money to save a history the UK led the world in.

This Wednesday is the night for the regular Agile Yorkshire meeting, It was meant to be on Pex but the speaker has had to cancel (but you can see a video he did on the subject at DDD online).

So in Ben’s place we are doing some Grok Talks, short ad hoc open mike talks. It should make for lively discussions, and is that not the key purpose of any user group?

So, free beer usual place, Wednesday night, hope to see you there

Whilst working on our TFS2010 Beta 1 test server today I got the following error when I tried to create a new team project

TF250020: The following SharePoint Web application is not valid: http://vs2010.mydomain.com. Verify that you have the correct URL.

I thought this strange, as I was doing nothing I had not done before, creating a MSF Agile team project with default settings. What I did notice was that in the new project wizard I had the server URL as http://vs2010 but the error message said http://vs2010.mydomain.com. So I checked the alternate access mappings in the WSS central admin, only vs2010 was listed, so I added vs2010.mydomain.com as the Internet alias and it all leapt into life when I tried the wizard again.

Question remains how did this work before, operating system service packs maybe?