We have been building ‘standard’ environments for our TFS Lab Management system. Environments that can be used for most of the projects we are involved in without too much extra setup e.g. a small domain controller VM and a Server VM with SQL and SharePoint. These environments have a series of snapshots so it can be …

If you want to hear a bit more detail on some of the common security issues we discussed at yesterdays SDL event why not listen to Troy Hunt Secures ASP.NET recent show on .NET Rocks or download his PDF ‘OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers’

Thanks to everyone who attended our SDL event today. Here are a few links to information we mentioned Microsoft SDK home page, full of downloads, links and training videos TFS Build extensions for CAT.NET, showing how to add SDL validation to a TFS build And there are selection of links to books on SDL on my blog’s …

Do you enjoy our Black Marble events, but can’t always make it in person? Busy day at the office, mean you can’t attend a full or even a half day event? From 30 January 2012, we are introducing a series of online seminars – running most Mondays though to the end of June, we are covering a range of topics in bite-size …

A new 1.3.0.0 release of the Community TFS Build Extensions has been published today. This contains some fixes and two new activities SPDisposeChecker – checks for SharePoint best practice CatNetScan – checks for common security issues

For many years Black Marble has run free events on a wide range of technologies. Originally we only ran these locally in Yorkshire, but as time progressed we have run them across the UK and Eire. They are a great way to help your staff whether technical or managerial get up to speed with new developments in our …

A common cause of the TF266026 error is because when the build agent tries to start (it is the build agent that runs the workflows in Lab Management) it cannot access the custom assemblies folder as defined for its parent build controller. Obviously this problem only occurs if you have set a custom assemblies path for …

Whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 build today to the new 1.2 release of the Community TFS Build Extensions we hit an issue. All seemed to go OK until the build tried to use the StyleCop activity, which failed with the error Showing a modal dialog box or form when the application is not running in UserInteractive mode is not …

It can be a bit confusing to get work out which tools to use at which stages required to get a lab environment up and running in TFS. Here is a basic workflow showing what you need to do in System Center Virtual Machine Manager prior to starting in MTM Lab Center Note: if you want to copy environments between TFS Team …

I got a TF260073, incompatible architecture error when trying to deploy a new virtual lab environment using a newly created VM and template. I found the fix in a forum post. The issue was that when I had build the VMs, I had installed the Lab Management agents using a VMprep DVD ISO and mounted it using ‘share image …