But it works on my PC!

Yesterday two new ALM Ranger projects shipped, practical guidance on the use of Microsoft Fakes (which I worked on) and for Team Foundation Server (TFS) Disaster Recovery avoidance, planning and step-step recovery walkthroughs for the worst case scenarios.

Also updates for the Coded UI test tooling guide and the TFS Upgrade guide were released..

For more details see below to follow the links to the Ranger blogs and CodePlex to download the materials.

  Better Unit Testing with Microsoft Fakes v1 eBook

Contains practical guidance for migrating to and unit testing with Microsoft Fakes. Walk-throughs allow you to navigate basic and advanced concepts, giving you a comfortable and confident start in implementing Microsoft Fakes as a mocking solution. The eBook PDF format will be complimented with other eReader formats, i.e. MOBI, in an upcoming update as part of our new content and style dog-fooding adventure.

Team Foundation Server Planning Guide v1.1
featuring new sections on Disaster Avoidance and Recovery Planning, allowing you to spot the “smoke” before you are confronted by a “raging fire”.

Test Tooling Guide (Coded UI) v1

Team Foundation Server Upgrade Guide v2.1

The new Windows 8 ALM Readiness Treasure Map application is available on the store. This is a great way to navigate a whole range of resources available for anyone involved in ALM work.

Overnight Visual Studio and TFS 2012 became available on MSDN for download; I really pleased to say that the ALM Rangers also SIM shipped all our 2012 guidance at the same time. 

I have been working on two of the Ranger project for the past year and have to say I have learnt a lot working with such a great crowd of Microsoft and external TFS experts. Some stuff I learnt was about the 2012 release it is true, but there was plenty on working with a a globally distributed team with a whole host of logistical and time constraints.

It has been a blast, but there is still more to do. Keep an eye open for supplementary ranger guidance releases in the next few months, but for now why not download and read the released guidance and do the hands on labs. I really do think they will answer many questions you have about TFS.

I am really proud to have been involved in the team of ALM Rangers who have SIMultaneous-SHIPped best practice guidance with Visual Studio 11 RC, which became available last night.

I am sure anyone working with Visual Studio and TFS will find the guidance of value, I have certainly learned a lot whilst helping produce the material. It has been a great experience working with a great crowd of people both inside and outside of Microsoft.

Today, as well as the new VS11 Beta bits from Microsoft, the ALM Rangers also shipped best practice guidance to get you started with the beta. This is a project I am very proud to have been involved with.

The full details of the supporting guidance shipped can be found here

A new release of Community TFS Build Extensions have shipped. You can find more details on Mike Fourie’s blog or at the project home on Codeplex

I have just published some documentation on theTFS2010 community build extensions RoboCopy activity

I have just published updated documentation on the SharePoint build activity for the Community TFS build extensions.

I have just posted new VirtualPC activity documentation for TFS 2010 Community Build Extensions. This has been a really nasty set of documentation to write as getting this activity running raises a lot of issues over COM security; thanks to Rik and Andy (our SharePoint specialists at Black Marble who are therefore used to COM problems!) who helped get to the bottom the issues.

The best thing I can say about this VirtualPC activity (and I wrote much of it) is don’t use it. Much better to use the Hyper-V one it is far more flexible, allowing control of remotely hosted VMs, or even better use TFS Lab Management

I have just posted new ‘how to use it 101’ documentation for the nUnit activity on the community extensions site.