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

I have been playing around with the idea of using a DD-WRT-V router on a Hyper-V VM to connect my local virtual machines to the Internet as discussed by Martin Hinshlewood in his blog post. I learned a few things that might be of use to others trying the same setup. What I used to do Prior to using the router I had …

We have for a long time used the TFSVersion custom build activity to stamp all our TFS builds with a unique version number that matches out build number. However, this only edits the AssemblyInfo.cs file. As we are now building more and more Windows 8 Store Apps we also need to edit the XML in the Package.appxmanifest …

Last night I upgraded this blog server to BlogEngine.NET 3.1. I used the new built in automated update tool, in an offline backup copy of course. It did most of the job without any issues. The only extra things I needed to do was Removed a <add name="XmlRoleProvider" …> entry in the web.config. I have …

We have recently swapped the Word template we use to make sure all our proposals and other documents are consistent. The changes are all cosmetic, fonts, footers etc. to match our new website; it still makes use of the same VSTO automation to do much of the work. The problem was I needed to swap the .DOTX file within …

Whilst developing our new set of websites we have been using MSDeploy to package up the websites for deployment to test and production Azure accounts. These deployments were being triggered directly using Visual Studio. Now we know this is not best practice, you don’t want developers shipping to production from their …

I am speaking at PreEmptive’s event on Application Analytics in at Microsoft’s office in London on the 30th of September. There are various speakers from PreEmptive, Microsoft and Black Marble at this free event. There are still spaces available, just follow the link: Application Analytics with Visual Studio and …

Whilst developing a new Release Management pipeline I did hit a problem that a component that published MSDeploy packages to Azure started to fail. It had been working then suddenly I started seeing ‘communication with the deployer was lost during deployment’ messages as shown below. No errors were shown in any logs I …

As part of our IT refresh we have decided to move this BlogEngine.NET server from a Hyper-V VM in our office to an Azure website. BlogEngine.NET is now a gallery item for Azure website, so a few clicks and your should be up and running. However, if you want to use SQL as opposed to XML as the datastore you need to do a …

Using the process in my previous post you can get a TFS build to create the .CSCFG and .CSPKG files needed to publish a Cloud Service. However, you hit a problem if your solution contains more that one Cloud Service project; as opposed to a single cloud service project with multiple roles, which is not a problem. The …