I am always being asked when at events for details of books I have recommended. So I have added a list of books I have found useful to this blog, it can be found at http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/pages/reading-list.aspx. Thus far I have added the ones I have been looking at recently, but will add more as …

Microsoft as ever have been busy with new drops and SP1 refreshes of technology for us all to embrace and here is a summary update for this month The Microsoft F# (2.0.0.0), April 2011 Community Technology Preview is available here While not all new if you are looking at F# I would suggest keeping an eye on F# …

[Updated 27th April 2011 Also see How to use the TFS 2010 Community StyleCop Build Actvity (Addendum)] The Codeplex Community TFS Build Extensions contains a StyleCop activity, but the way to use it is less than obvious. This is not helped by the complexity in using any custom activity within TFS 2010 builds. In this …

A while ago I posted on my experiences running multiple instances of 2010 build service on a single VM. Well a couple more experiences as now one of my VM is running 3 instances. Firstly it seems to work OK, you have to have the right build profile i.e. fairly low load but a need to support many Team Project …

Over the weekend we have released Black Marble’s WP7 TFS Phone client to the WP7 Marketplace. This app allows the user of a WP7 phone to access their TFS server to perform common operations. They can: See recent builds and drill into the results Queue new builds View and add work items This client talks via a custom …

When trying to create a new Team Project on TFS2010 from a client PC I got the following error Event Description: TF30162: Task "UploadStructure" from Group "Classification" failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF205029: No …

Whist configuring a new TFS2010 server I got the error TF255115: The following service did not start: TfsJobAgent. Cannot start service TfsJobAgent on computer ''. This was identical to the thread on MSDN and it turned out my problem was similar. I was installing TFS onto drive D:APPS, not the usual C:PROGRAM FILE. The …

When your PC reaches the point that MSI cannot connect to the Install Service you know it is time to repave the PC. This is the time to you have to try remember what you installed on the PC, your license codes and how you actually got things to work. So going through this process this week all went OK until I tried to …

I am speaking at the BCS group in Edinburgh on the 11th of May in Agile and Lean Methods. For more details see http://edinburgh.bcs.org.uk/events/2010-11/110511.htm

across the two keynotes of the 2011 Microsoft have demonstrated and released a IE10 Preview is now out, it has a nice set of enhanced features (faster etc). more importantly Microsoft are continuing with dev preview and a sensible cadence of 8-12 weeks, get it here The ASP.NET MVC 3 Tooling Update which contains lots …