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 …

The Build Customisation project was not the only ALM Rangers release over the weekend. The Lab Management Guide was also shipped. This provides scenario based and hands-on guidance for the planning, setup, configuration and usage of Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by custom VM Template automation for reference …

For those of you have have not spotted it the TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 is now available. This is a roll up of all the fixes that have be released since TFS 2010 SP1. This form of cumulative release is going to be the way forward for TFS, so it will be easier to know what to install on a server without reading …

I am really please to say that the first ALM Rangers project I have been involved with, the Build Customization Guidance, has shipped. The project had the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on lab guidance for the customization and deployment of Team Foundation Build 2010 activities such as versioning, …

My WP7 LG-E900 decided to do a factory reset last night. It locked while playing the XBox Live GEODefense game on a particular busy level I had just lost (so lots of graphic processing). The phone paused for a while then restarted and ran the first use wizard, in German. This is because it is one of the PDC units that …

Have you ever thought ‘I know that you get the Team ribbon in Excel to manage TFS work items, and I can use Excel to as a SQL/OLAP client to run reports from the TFS warehouse but I want to do more….’? Have you every considered using VSTO to create an ActionPane that uses the TFS .NET API? In this example I have …