Just completing the second reinstall of Windows 8 on my Lenovo W520 in 10 days due to my new SSD failing and needing to be replaced. To try to ease the process I though I would try putting on the miscellaneous tools I use such as 7Zip, Filezilla etc. using Chocolatey. I have to say first impressions are good, one …

Today at Build 2012 it was announced that https://tfspreview.com has RTM'd as Team Foundation Service on https://tfs.visualstudio.com. Up until now there has been no pricing information, which had been a barrier to some people I have spoken to as they did not want to started using something without knowing the future …

We have an internal Nuget Server we use to manage our software packages. As part of our upgrade to TFS2012 this needed to be moved to a new server VM and I took the chance to upgrade it from 1.7 to 2.1. The problem Now we had had a problem that we could publish to the server via a file copy to its underlying Packages …

If you are looking for a nice introduction to the new features of Visual Studio 2012, I can heartily recommend Richard Banks 'Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook'. This book covers a wide range of subjects including the IDE, .NET 4.5 features, Windows 8 development, Web development, C++, debugging, async and TFS 2012. This is …

After applying SP1 to a SharePoint 2010 farm we found we were unable to run any macros in an Access Services site, it gave a –4002 error. We had seen this error in the past, but the solutions that worked then did not help. As this site was critical, as a workaround, we moved the site to a non-patched SP2010 instance. …

[Also see http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/post/2013/01/22/More-on-HDD2-boot-problems-with-my-Crucial-M4-mSATA.aspx] I have just reinstalled Windows 8 (again) on my Lenovo W520. This time it was because I moved to a Crucial m4 256Gb 2.5” internal SSD as my primary disk. There is a special slot for this …

A video has just be uploaded that I did on the new unit testing features in Visual Studio and TFS 2012. This is quick 10 minute introduction to some of the material I will be covering at DDDNorth next weekend. Hope you find it useful

Whilst setting up new a new SC-VMM based lab environment I managed to find some new ways to fail above and beyond the ones I have found before. We needed to build a new environment for testing CRM application, this needed to have its own DC, IIS server and a CRM server. The aim was to have this as a network isolated …

I started working today on a solution I had not worked on for a while. It makes use of an ASP.NET web application as a site to host SharePoint webparts (using Typemock to mock out any troublesome calls). The problem I had was that when I opened this VS2010 solution in VS2012 I could not run up this test web site. As …

I posted last week on the problems I had had getting the test agents and controller in a TFS2012 Standard environment talking to each other and a workaround. Well after a good few email with various people at Microsoft and other consultants at Black Marble I have a whole range of workarounds solutions. First a reminder …