I have had my Lenovo W520 a week now and must say I am very happy with it. I am still hitting the wrong keys a good deal of the time, the only problem being the Fn and Ctrl keys are reversed in position from my old Acer, it is a good job Fn-V and Fn-C does nothing dangerous!. The keyboard is very nice to type on, a far …

I have just replaced my old Acer laptop with a rather nice Lenovo W520. This has plenty of memory and is able to run Hyper-V. In the past for TFS demos I had used boot from VHD to boot the Acer into Windows 2K8, as the Acer could not run Hyper-V due to lack of hardware virtualisation support in the bios. So I had a …

Next week I am speaking at: The West Yorkshire BCS on “Application Lifecycle Management - supporting the software development process from inception to retirement” , Wednesday 20 July 2011, 6.30pm (refreshments available from 5.45pm) at NTI Leeds, Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9EN. and NxtGen …

Whist on the road I have had need to access our Lab Management system via our TMG firewall through which we expose our TFS 2010 for remote users (via SSL). When I load Microsoft Tests Manager (MTM) I can connect to the TFS server, as expected, and go into ‘Lab Center’ mode. I can see my project’s environment and can …

When trying to create a new Team Project on my test TFS 2010 basic installation I got the error Time: 2011-07-05T11:43:36 Module: Engine Event Description: TF30162: Task "BuildTask" from Group "Build" failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: Multiple …

The first stable release of the Community TFS Build Extensions has been shipped. It contains around 100 activities. It is hoped that this project will be be shipping on a 2 to 3 month cycle in the future. So have a look, this project provides many ways to extend your build process. And if you have ideas for more …

I am really pleased to say I have been re-awarded as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM for 2011, this is my fourth year. I am looking forwarded to another year of working with such a great crowd of people.

Thanks to everyone who came today’s ISV session at TVP. You can find all the slides from the event at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukisvdev/archive/2011/06/27/slides-and-links-from-alm-and-visual-studio-2010-event-on-the-27th-june-2010.aspx

The videos from the various Microsoft UK Techdays events can now be viewed at the UK TechDays site. This includes my session on ‘Virtualisation of the Test Environment’ and the joint one I did with James Mann on the new experience for developing SharePoint solutions in VS2010 from the Leeds event.

I will be speaking at Microsoft UK’s ‘Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors’ event next Monday. I am one of four speakers, between us well all address a variety of subjects within ALM Modern Software Delivery: The continuous delivery of high quality software - Colin Bird Driving Quality …