The lovely people in the IT Pro team have announced their IT Pro Honours list and I am privileged to be on it. http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet/archive/2015/01/05/new-year-s-honours-list-2015.aspx A great set of professionals and Me and Rik. Me an IT Pro who would have thought. I suddenly feel the urge to help Rik …

I have been very fortunate to get hold of a Microsoft Band. Bands are currently in short supply, but thanks to an Angel in Minnesota I have one. Currently there is no expected release date for the UK, but a quick look at EBay will turn up enough units to buy, remember the retail price is $199. CAUTION – Check The Band …

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies. In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of …

If you are trying to use Release Management or any deployment tool with a network isolated Lab Management setup you will have authentication issues. Your isolated domain is not part of your production domain, so you have to provide credentials. In the past this meant Shadow Accounts or the simple expedient of running a …

The DCS two step When working with DSC a difficult concept can be that your desired state script is ‘compiled’ to a MOF file that is then ‘run’ by the desired state manager on the target machine. This is a two step affair and you have no real input on the second part. This is made more complex when Release Management …

Don’t worry, Nokia are not planning to revive 70s nostalgia aftershave, Denim is the new update for Lumia's providing better low level support of the hardware. Denim offers several key updates Camera – for the 830/930/1520 updates specifically for HDR, Dynamic flash and 4k video and speed fixes for the 1520. as a user …

Whilst helping a Java based team (part of larger organisation that used many sets of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools) to migrate from Subversion to TFS I had to tackle their Jenkins/Ant based builds. They could have stayed on Jenkins and switched to the TFS source provider, but they wanted to at least look at …

This week is Computer Science Education week (CSEW) and I am really exited that Computer Science is being seen for what it is, A gateway to an amazing future. The Hour of Code is upon us and urge everybody to look at helping children and adults do their first hour. Microsoft have been promoting the Hour of Code and the …

As with many concepts it is not the the idea that is hard but it’s application. ‘Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories’ by Gojko Adzic and David Evans provides some great tips to apply the concept of user stories to real world problems. Highlighting where they work and where they don’t, and what you can do …

Whilst building a new TFS build agent VM using our standard scripts I hit a problem that SSDT projects would not build, but was fine on our existing agents. The error was C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftVisualStudiov12.0SSDTMicrosoft.Data.Tools.Schema.SqlTasks.targets (513): The "SqlBuildTask" task failed …