Robert Hancock, another one of Black Marble’s ALM consultants, has started blog technical tips on this blog server. You can find Robert’s new blog here or the aggregate feed of all Black marble bloggers here

When using TFS2010 It is possible for a build agent to appear to be ready (or so the status label says) but the icon stays in the off state. This is usually due to a couple of broad categories of error, you can find out which by checking the Windows event log. The build agent cannot communicate with the controller In …

At the Build conference today the preview of TFS on Windows Azure was announced. All the attendees of the conference have been given access codes for the preview. If you did not make it to Build have a look at Brian Harry’s blog for details of how everyone else can get access to the preview.

My development laptop is bitlocker’ed, and yours should be too. It provides a great and non-invasive way (assuming you have a TPM chip) to protect you and your clients data on a machine that is far to easy to steal or loose. However, whilst fiddling with Windows 8 I did trip myself up. I have my PC setup for a boot to …

I tried to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on my Lenovo W520 laptop as a VHD boot. All seemed to go well following the same process as for windows 7. I got a nice new blue Window 8 boot partition choice screen (which went back to the Windows 7 DOS like one after I made Windows 7 my default partition). If I selected …

If you are editing a TFS process template you have the choice editing XML files or using the Process Template Editor within the TFS 2010 PowerTools. Unfortunately neither is fool proof. You can make errors than means the revised template does not fully work. The worst of these errors will be picked up when upload the …

Over the weekend I took my son to the excellent ‘Bang goes the Theory’ Live road show which is part of the Festival of Science in Bradford. If a similar event is near you I recommend you go along, fun for all the family even if science is not really your thing. The whole event makes the subject very accessible to all. …

If you use the database unit testing feature of VS2010 there is a good chance you will want to run these tests on more than one PC and probably the build server. The issue is that these different PC will need different deployment paths and SQL connection strings. Luckily there is a feature to address this, as detailed …

If you look on the Black Marble web site you will find listing of the free events we are running up to the end of the year and into the new year. This year our events include 12 Oct 2011 [Re-Build – IT ](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Re-Build - IT)[Re-Build – …

I have in the past posted about developing SharePoint web parts without having to use a SharePoint server by using Typemock Isolator. This technique relies on using Cassini or IIS Express as the web server to host the aspx page that in turn contains the webpart. This is all well and good for SharePoint 2007, but we get …