I don’t normal do posts that are just re-posts of TFS announcements, it is much better to get the information first hand from the original post, but this one is significant for us in Europe… Up to now there has been a barrier to adoption of VSO that the underlying data will be hosted in the USA. Now there are all the …

The HDMIPI screen I supported on KickStarter arrived this week. After a bit of a false start with a driver board that failed after a couple of minutes it is now all up and running. The replacement board arrived in 48Hours – great support service Now to get down to some projects – that toy robot does look like it needs …

There has for a long time been an issue that when you try to add a new activity to the toolbox when editing a TFS build workflow Visual Studio can crash. I have seen it many times and never got to the bottom of it. It seems to be machine specific, as one machine can work while another supposedly identical will fail, …

If you have a custom PowerShell script you wish to run you can create a tool in release Management (Inventory > Tools) for the script which deploys the .PS1, PSM files etc. and defines the command line to run it. The problem we hit was that our script failed, but did not fail the build step as the PowerShell.EXE …

Yesterday was the ever great DDDNorth. Huge thanks to everybody who came,helped, spoke and organised a great event, what a great bunch of people. I must also thank the University of Leeds for their support in providing accommodation for the event. A greater bunch of people where the self selecting bunch who came to …

In a beautiful synchronicity the ALM Rangers DevOps guidance for PowerShell DSC has been release at at the same time as I am doing my DDDNorth session ‘What is Desired State Configuration and how does it help me?’ This Rangers project has been really interesting to work on, and provide much of the core of my session …

Whilst configuring a Release Management 2013.3 system I came across a confusing error. All seemed OK, the server, client and deployment agents were all installed and seemed to be working, but when I tried to select a build to deploy from both the Team Projects and Build drop downs were empty. A check of the Windows …

If you want to get your TFS build process to product SSRS RDL files you need to call the vsDevEnv custom activity to run Visual Studio (just like for SSIS packages). On our new TFS2013.3 based build agents this step started to fail, turns out the issue was not incorrect versions of DLLs or a some badly applied update, …

I have trying to update a Azure hosted SQL DB using Release Management and the SSDT SQLPackage tools. All worked fine on my test Azure instance, but then I wanted to deploy to production I got the following error 1*** An error occurred during deployment plan generation. Deployment cannot continue. 2Failed to import …

Black Marble is hosting a free Microsoft ALM event at our offices on the 26th of November. For once I will not be speaker, Giles and Colin from the Microsoft UK Visual Studio Team are coming up to deliver the session. For more details and registration see http://bit.ly/ALMLeeds