IIS Express is a great addition to the tools for .NET web developers; it allow a slightly cut down copy of IIS 7.5 to be run without administrative privileges on a developer’s PC. This means we can hopefully get away from the problems associated by either Using Cassini – which is not IIS and does not do any clever …

I got round to installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on my laptop last night; well I started last night via the Web Platform Installer method. It downloaded the bits fast but sat for ages on the first step, installing the actual service pack. There was no obvious activity on the CPU or disk. In the end I gave waiting and …

If you try to create an automated TFS build of a Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application on a ‘default installed’ build agent you will see errors along the lines of The imported project "C:Program FilesMSBuildMicrosoftSilverlight for Phonev4.0Microsoft.Silverlight.WindowsPhone.Overrides.targets" was not …

For those who have not noticed, DDD Scotland’s registration is now open at http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/scotland2011/Default.aspx. Sad to say my proposed session did not get accepted, but that just means I have the chance to see more sessions myself!

At the end of the month I will be speaking at a series of free Microsoft events in Belfast and Dublin. There going to be two session at each location Managing application lifecycle “From requirements to retirement” with Team Foundation Server 2010 Dublin - 31/03/2011 (AM): …

Further to yesterdays post on new bits for VS and TFS 2010, there is now some guidance to what order to apply SP1 to server and clients.

I am doing some work on VS2008 at present and I when I started my VS2008, which I had not used for a while, I was plagued by errors along the lines of "The operation could not be completed". These occurred when running major features such as: Loading LINQ to SQL Designer Running the SQL 2008 Project Wizard …

Today we have seen the release of the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and the TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack. Both are available on the MSDN download site. As well was the new downloads they have announced a change to licensing over Load Test Agent. This gives Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN users the ability to …

Many development teams hit the problem that they have dependencies on libraries that they do not want to have as part of their solutions. If these dependencies are open source projects then there are options using technologies like NuGet or OpenWrap. However, in many cases the dependency is to an internal project, such …

The March 2011 version of the TFS Power Tools has been released. There are plenty of fixes and enhancements, especially to the TFS backup tool. For more details have a look at Brian Harry’s blog.