I am getting sick of the fact that the Samsung 500T tablet running Windows 8.1 I am installing applications on keeps going into sleep mode to save power. I start the install, leave it to run, look back later it has been saving power, started and stopped Wifi and I have one very confused install. It is not as if it is …

I recently tried to get the free HP ALM Synchronizer to link to Microsoft’s TF Service, the summary is it does not work. However, it took me a while to realise this. The HP ALM Synchronizer was designed for TFS 2008/2010 so the first issue you hit is that TF Services is today basically TFS 2013 (and is a moving goal …

Just done the update of my Windows 8 Media Center to 8.1. First issue was I looked in the store and could not see the update. I was looking for an ‘update’ in the top right not a huge application entry in the middle of the screen. Strange how you can miss the obvious The download took about 30 minutes which worked in …

I have been changing the mocking framework used on a project I am planning to open source. Previously it had been using Typemock to mock out items in the TFS API. This had been working well but used features of the toolset that are only available on the licensed product (not the free version). As I don’t like to …

DDD North 2013 was a fantastic community conference but sadly I didn’t get chance to deliver my grok talk on Generation 2 virtual machines. A few people came up to me beforehand to say they were interested in the topic, and a few more spoke to me afterwards to ask if I would blog. I had planned to write a post anyway, …

it has been a general gripe in the developer community that preview updates for Windows Phone are carrier dependant and to say the least the Windows Phone team rarely allowed early access. But this has changed, the latest update (Update 3) is available as a preview for developers (FEEL THE LOVE) through the new …

Thanks to everyone who came to my DDDNorth session ‘Automated Build Is Not The End Of The Story’, the links to the tools I discussed are as follows Visual Studio Lab Management MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997438.aspx ALM Rangers best practice guidance http://vsarlabman.codeplex.com/ Building …

Black Marble is a supporting DDD North - the premier Developer Community event running in the North of England. Taking place at the University of Sunderland on Saturday 12 October, it has 400+ attendees, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors converging to hear their peers talk technical. Always free, thanks in the main to …

Whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to 2012 I had a problem that a build was showing in the queue as active after the upgrade. This build was queued in January, 10 months ago, so should have finished a long long time ago. This build had the effect that it blocked any newly queued builds, but the old build did not appear …

I have previously posted about when TFS build controllers don’t start properly. Well I saw the same problem today whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to TFS 2012.3. The client did not want to immediately upgrade their build processes and decided to keep their 2010 build VMs just pointing them at the updated server …