But it works on my PC!

I recently noticed that I had a few too many ‘Typemock Isolator Quickstart’ help menu items in Visual Studio 2010

After a quick check with Typemock it seems this was a known issue with previous versions of Isolator, you should not see it on a new installation (6.0.10). If you do have the problem do as I was advised, run the VS macro, created by Travis Illig, to remove the extra items.

I have added page to this blog that has links to videos of my presentations. Should make them easier to find them when I need to refer to them.

Whilst try to record some manual tests in MTM for a new Silverlight application I found I was not getting any actions recorded, just loads of “Fail to record the object corresponding to this action” warnings in the actions window.

Turns out to fix this you have to do three things

1. Install the Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 (MSDN Subscribers Only) – this adds Silverlight support to MTM (this I had already done)
2. In your SIlverlLight application you need to reference the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Extension.SilverlightUIAutomationHelper.dll  from the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\VSTT\10.0\UITestExtensionPackages\SilverlightUIAutomationHelper
3. Finally if using IE9 you need to run IE in IE8 mode. To do this in IE9 press F12 and select the browser mode

Once this was done I got the actions I would expect

Cameron Skinner’s TechEd session that goes into more depth on the announcements for TFS vNext is up on Channel 9. Just downloading it for to watch on the train to London this afternoon. I tried streaming live on the East Coast mainline before, their on train WiFi is just not up to it.

Watching the keynote of TechEd 2011 there were some interesting announcements on the vNext for TFS (the TFS section starts about 1:20 into the keynote).

• Storyboarding Assistant – A new product using PowerPoint as the core tools to gather requirements
• New web based dashboard to help manage requirement work items, with loads of drag and drop and pulling much of the functionality of the current Excel planning workbooks into the browser.
• A new web based taskboard (that was demo’d using a huge touch screen monitor)
• Giving the developer a task oriented means to say what work they are working on, and behind the scenes setting their workspace appropriately
• New tooling to allow users to provide feedback on the release in an MTM like style
• Also mentioned was code review tooling, intellitrace in production and much more…

Have a look at the keynote (the video is available now) and breakout session video streams when they appear. Also there is more detail on Jason Zanders blog

Also announced today was that the Java version of for TFS has been released, so you can now port all the home grown tools you have development for TFS in .NET to Java, so they can be enjoyed irrespective of your development platform.

In the 27th June I will be speaking on Lab Management at Microsoft’s “Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors” event at TVP.

For more details see the Microsoft event site

Whist trying to do a cross domain migration of some source between two TFS2010 servers, I got the less than helpful runtime exception

System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: activeWorkspace
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Migration.Tfs2010VCAdapter.TfsUtil.CleanWorkspace(Workspace activeWorkspace)
at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Migration.Tfs2010VCAdapter.TfsVCMigrationProvider.ProcessChangeGroup(ChangeGroup group)

On checking the _tfsintegrationservice_<timestamp>.log I found the more useful

TFS::Authenticate : Caught exception : Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationServerUnauthorizedException: TF30063: You are not authorized to access tfsserver.otherdomain.com. ---> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.

The issue is that when you setup the migration you are prompted for credentials for the remote server, but the actual migration does no occur in the same thread as you setup the definitions, so it only has its local credentials and none for the remote system. Hence the 401 error.

There is no way to enter two sets of credentials within the Integration tool itself, but there is a workaround on Willy’s Cave. This is to place the remote credentials in the PC’s credential manager, this work fine for me

Great news the Black Marble’s WP7 TFS Phone client has won one of the three top prizes on  Red Gate Software’s Windows Phone 7 Competition

You can read the judges comments on the competition blog, I would stress it only mentions my name, but this was Black Marble team effort.

If you want to try it out get the trial version from the marketplace

Are you unsure how TFS 2010 hangs together or what is entailed in installing it?

Well never fear, Microsoft are hosting a webcast on the 12th May that will be given by Black Marble’s own Robert Hancock one of our ALM consultants, which will explain all.

To register check the Microsoft events site

There are still space on the “Connected Development” event, a free event hosted by Black Marble and supported by Microsoft TechDays, on the 26th of May.

I am one of a number of speakers from Microsoft and Gold ALM Partners who will be talking about the latest news and announcements for Application Lifecycle Management and Developing for the Microsoft Platform.

Full details about the event can be found at Microsoft Events.