Whilst getting integration tests running as part of a Release Management pipeline within Lab Management I hit a problem that TCM triggered tests failed as the tool claimed it could not access the TFS build drops location, and that no .TRX (test results) were being produced. This was strange as it used to work (the RM …

Whilst over at the MVP Summit I had the chance to do a Scaled Agile Framework workshop. I am pleased to say I passed the assessment. Certainly has some interesting ideas in scaling Agile to larger teams working on a single product stream where a simple Scrum of Scrums is not enough.

I have been setting up some integration tests as part of a release pipeline. I am using TCM.EXE to trigger tests from the command line. Something along the lines 1TCM.exe run /create /title:"EventTests" /collection:"http://myserver:8080/tfs” /teamproject:myteamproject …

I have a few old Visual Studio Online (VSO) accounts (dating back to TFSPreview.com days). We use them to collaborate with third parties, it was long overdue that I tidied them up; as a problem historically has been that all access to VSO has been using a Microsoft Accounts (LiveID, MSA), these are hard to police, …

Whilst repaving my Lenovo W520 I had some issues with video cards. During the initial setup of Windows the PC hung. I rebooted, re-enabled in the BIOS the problematic video card and I thought all was OK. The installation appeared to pickup where it left off. However, I started to get some very strange problems. My …

Updated 19th Nov 2014 Every few months I find a PC needs to be re-paved – just too much beta code has accumulated. I reached this point again on my main 4 year old Lenovo W520 recently. Yes it is getting on a bit in computer years but it does the job; the keyboard is far nicer than the W530 or W540’s we have and until …

Microsoft are running a free web-based event Connect() on the 12th and 13th of November. Should be well worth a watch to see the planned direction of developer tooling.

I am now going to speaking on the DevOps track at Future Decoded. I’ll be channelling Richard to talk about how our dev-release pipeline is constructed at Black Marble and how the various Microsoft tools that we use could be swapped out for alternatives in a heterogeneous environment. Whilst this isn’t an area that I …

I have posted before about using Release Management with Lab Management network isolation. They key is that you must issue a NET USE command at the start of the pipeline to allow the VMs in the isolated environment the ability to see the TFS drops location. I hit a problem today that a build failed even though I had …

Whilst working on a SSRS based report I had hit a sort order problem. Entries in a main report tablix needed to be sorted by their OrderNumber but this was in the form 1.2.3; so a neither a numeric or alpha sort gave the correct order i.e. a numeric sort fails as 1.2.3 is not a number and an alpha sort worked but give …