Microsoft UK have been running technical events around the UK for a couple of years now, and it’s a great thing. Too many events are focused in the south of England and there are lots of IT pros north of the M25! Starting on Monday, the latest series of events kicks off. The People-Centric IT roadshow content is being …

My X220 is a stalwart machine. It’s built like a tank and can be upgraded in a numb of ways. Mine now has 16Gb of RAM and two SSDs which allow me to run multi-VM environments for development and demo. Unfortunately, however, there is no USB 3 on the laptop. That’s a pain if I need to copy stuff on and off via USB, or …

Richard and I spend a good deal of time talking about Lab Manager and our environments. I’ve written here before about our migration to the latest versions of the various components of Lab and both Richard and I have delivered sessions at user groups and conferences. Richard was in Belgium last week for Techorama, …

Lets get the disclaimer out of the way first: What I’ve done is absolutely unsupported by Microsoft. Just because it works for me does not guarantee it will work for you and I am not in any way recommending that you follow my lead! I use a great many virtual machines for both customer work, internal projects and just …

Seven whole years ago I wrote about re-reading [corrected – getting old and forgetful not William Gibson’s it was] Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and how it compared to his then new book JPod. And how they both reflected the IT world at their time. Speculative fiction always says more about the time they are written …

After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each …

If you use TFS then it is well worth a look at Brian Harry’s Teched2014 session ‘Modern Application Lifecycle Management’. It goes through changes and new features with TFS both on-premise and in the cloud, including Migrating Your Data from TFS to Visual Studio Online with New Free Utility from OpsHub Authentication …

A very common question I am asked at clients is “Is it possible for a parent TFS work item to be automatically be set to ‘done’ when all the child work items are ‘done’?”. The answer is not out the box, there is no work item state roll up in TFS. However it is possible via the API. I have modified my TFS Alerts DSL …

Whilst running tests as part of a Release Management deployment I started seeing the error ‘The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required’, and hence all my tests failed. It seems that there are issues that can cause this problem, as mentioned in the comments in Martin …

If you are using Webdeploy you might wish to alter the connection string the for the LocalSQLServer that is used by the ASP.NET provider for web part personalisation. The default is to use ASPNETDB.mdf in the APP_Data folder, but in a production system you could well want to use a ‘real’ SQL server. If you look in your …