But it works on my PC!

I posted recently about my experiences in upgrading DotNetNuke 5 to 7, what fun that was! Well I have now had to do the move for real. I expected to follow the same process, but had problems. Turns out the key was to go 5 > 6 > 7. Once I did this the upgrade worked, turns out this is the recommended route. Why my previous trial worked I don’t know?

Anyway I ended up with a local DNN 7 site running against SQL 2012. It still was using DNN 5 based skin (which has problems with IE 10) which I needed to alter, but was functional. So it was time to move my ISP.

Historically I had the site running on Zen Internet, but their Windows hosting is showing its age, they do not offer .NET 4,  and appear to have no plans to change this when I last asked. Also there is no means to do a scripted/scheduled backup on their servers.

The lack of .NET 4  meant I could not use Zen for DNN 7. So I choose to move to PowerDNN, which is a DNN specialist, offers the latest Microsoft hosting and was cheaper.

I had expect the migrate/setup to be awkward, but far from it. I uploaded my backups to PowerDNN’s FTP site and the site was live within 10 minutes. I had a good few questions over backup options, virtual directories for other .NET applications etc. all were answered via email virtually instantly. Thus far the service has been excellent, PowerDNN are looking a good choice.

Martin Hinshelwood did a recent post on moving source code between TFS servers using  git tf. He mentioned that you could use the --deep option to get the whole changeset check-in history.

Being fairly new to using Git, in anything other than the simplest scenarios, it took me a while to get the commands right. This is what I used in the end (using the Brian Keller VM for sample data) …

C:\tmp\git> git tf clone http://vsalm:8080/tfs/fabrikamfibercollection $/fabrikamfiber/Main oldserver --deep

Connecting to TFS...

Cloning $/fabrikamfiber/Main into C:\Tmp\git\oldserver: 100%, done.

Cloned 5 changesets. Cloned last changeset 24 as 8b00d7d

C:\tmp\git> git init newserver

Initialized empty Git repository in C:/tmp/git/newserver/.git/

C:\tmp\git> cd newserver

C:\tmp\git\newserver [master]> git pull ..\oldserver --depth=100000000

remote: Counting objects: 372, done.

remote: Compressing objects: 100% (350/350), done.

96% (358/372), 2.09 MiB | 4.14 MiB/s

Receiving objects: 100% (372/372), 2.19 MiB | 4.14 MiB/s, done.

Resolving deltas: 100% (110/110), done.

From ..\oldserver

* branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD

C:\tmp\git\newserver [master]> git tf configure http://vsalm:8080/tfs/fabrikamfibercollection $/fabrikamfiber/NewLocation

Configuring repository

C:\tmp\git\newserver [master]> git tf checkin --deep --autosquash

Connecting to TFS...

Checking in to $/fabrikamfiber/NewLocation: 100%, done.

Checked in 5 changesets, HEAD is changeset 30

The key was I had missed the –autosquash option on the final checkin.

Once this was run I could see my checking history, the process is quick and once you have the right command line straight forward. However, just like TFS Integration Platform time is compressed, and unlike TFS Integration Platform you also lose the ownership of the original edits.

This all said, another useful tool in the migration arsenal.

With Visual Studio 2012 have you missed the automated unit test generation tools that were present in Visual Studio 2010?

If you have then the ALM Rangers have produced the ‘Unit Test Generate VS Extension’. The first beta of this is now available on the VSGallery.

Why not download it and try out so you can provide feedback to the team?

I have been doing some editing of the standard scrum TFS 2012 Sprint Burndown report in SQL 2012 Report Builder. When I ran the report after editing the MDX query in the dsBurndown DataSet to return an extra column I got an error:

• on a remote PC it just said error with dsBurndown dataset
• on the server hosting reporting services, or in Report Builder, I got a bit more information, it said the TaskName parameter was not defined.

On checking the state of the dataset parameters before and after my edit I could see that the TaskName parameter had been lost

Manually re-adding it fixed the problem.

Interestingly which parameters were lost seemed to depend on the MDX query edit I made, I assume something is inferring the parameters from the MDX query.

So certainly one to keep an eye on. I suspect this is a feature of Report Builder, maybe I am better just using trusty Notepad to edit the .RDL file. Oh how I love to edit XML in Notepad

Just watched a good session from TechEd USA 2013, it was billed as Agile Software Development with Microsoft Visual Studio ALM but has little that was specifically TFS based; no demos just war stories from Aaron Bjork and Peter Provost

It is a good discussion of the problems, experiences and solutions the Microsoft Visual Studio team went through when trying to move to agile development, including

• Sprint lengths, be consistent across teams
• Retrospectives, do you actually act on them?
• Technical debt, do you write features or bugs?
• Measure what you do
• What is the role of the product owner/manager?

Well worth a watch

If running an Ubuntu guest VM on Windows 8 Hyper-V you have a problem if you want to make use of a wireless network on the host machine. DHCP does not seem to work.

Firstly you have to create a virtual switch in Hyper-V

and connect it to your wireless card

you can then connect a Network Adaptor on the Ubuntu guest VM to the new switch.

Now for most operating systems this is all you need to do. The guest VM would use DHCP to pickup an IP address and all is good. However on Ubuntu 12.04 (and other versions judging from other posts), if you are using a virtual switch connected to a wireless card, DHCP does not work. The problem appears to lie in the way Windows/Hyper-V does the bridging to the Wifi.

You have manually set the networking settings. You need to track down the correct network using the MAC address. Remember that as the system is having network problems you might need to enable the connection (with the slider top right of the dialog if using the UI) before you can set the options

Once this is all set you should have a working network.

Now some posts suggest that you can avoid this problem if you use a ‘legacy network adaptor’ when you create the VM in Hyper-V, but this did not work for me. In fact even manually setting the IP address did not help on the legacy adaptor.

Today at TechEd USA Brian Harry announced Visual Studio 2013, have a look at his blog for details of the new ALM features. These include…

• Agile Portfolio Management
• Git source control on premises
• Revised team explorer including pop out windows
• Improvements in code editing and annotation
• Improvement in web based test management
• Team Room – chat like collaboration
• Cloud based web load testing
• The start of addition of release management to TFS via the purchase of InRelease

For more info see the various sessions up on Channel 9

My Windows 8 based Lenovo W520 has an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wifi chipset, it has been giving me problems with this for a while.

The most usual problem is that if I sleep or hibernate the PC when I restart it, in a different location, there is a chance I cannot connect to Wifi networks. I can see them, get a limited connection but no IP address as DHCP fails. Sometimes using the hardware Wifi switch on the front left of the PC helps, sometimes switching into Windows 8 airplane mode and back out does, but not always. Often I need to restart the PC.

I have also had problems in Lync video calls, for example on Friday I was having all sorts of problems with a call, it was working for a few minutes then locking. When we swapped to a colleagues supposedly identical W520 all was OK.

So I think I have a problem. Time for some digging.

So I thought it was worth trying newer drivers, I had the default 15.1.x drivers provided by Windows update that are about  12 months old. I got the latest 15.6.x from Lenovo.

Also after reading around the subject I also set my Wifi adaptor to not controlled by power management (right click the network tools tray icon, open network sharing centre, change adaptor settings).

At first I thought this was helping, but I found if my PC screen locks due to inactivity I got a blue screen of death when I login again – with a watchdog timer error. So I switched the power save management back on and this seems to have fixed this problem.

So with the new drivers I now get a new set of behaviours.

• The PC seems to come out of sleep OK
• However, whilst streaming BBC IPlayer over the weekend to watch the triathlon (well done Non and Jonny) my Wifi link kept dropping and only getting a limited connection as it reconnected. This happened with two different systems, my Netgear N600 based BT ADSL and another on Virgin Cable with one of their Superhub (also Netgear based) at another house. Interestingly once I swapped from the 5Ghz to a 2.4GHz Wifi on my home N600 ADSL system I had no further problems with disconnects. Maybe a router problem here as opposed to the PC? But I did check there were no router firmware updates and no errors reported.

It then occurred to me to think what the different between my PC and my colleagues?  I had a Hyper-V virtual switch configured to use Wifi. I tried deleting this, but it appears to have no effect on the 5Ghhz problem. So maybe a read herring.

So now I think my system is more stable, but only time will tell if it is working well enough. The biggest test will be the Lync based webinar I am doing on DevOps in a couple of weeks.

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 can be found here

Also a couple of people asked by about TFS and Eclipse, which I only mentioned briefly at the end. For more on Team Explorer Everywhere look at the video I did last year on that very subject

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.