If you are trying to use Release Management or any deployment tool with a network isolated Lab Management setup you will have authentication issues. Your isolated domain is not part of your production domain, so you have to provide credentials. In the past this meant Shadow Accounts or the simple expedient of running a …

The DCS two step When working with DSC a difficult concept can be that your desired state script is ‘compiled’ to a MOF file that is then ‘run’ by the desired state manager on the target machine. This is a two step affair and you have no real input on the second part. This is made more complex when Release Management …

Don’t worry, Nokia are not planning to revive 70s nostalgia aftershave, Denim is the new update for Lumia's providing better low level support of the hardware. Denim offers several key updates Camera – for the 830/930/1520 updates specifically for HDR, Dynamic flash and 4k video and speed fixes for the 1520. as a user …

Whilst helping a Java based team (part of larger organisation that used many sets of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools) to migrate from Subversion to TFS I had to tackle their Jenkins/Ant based builds. They could have stayed on Jenkins and switched to the TFS source provider, but they wanted to at least look at …

The other workshop I took part in at the Inspiring Students event yesterday was a Gadgeteer one with Paul Foster (Microsoft). We made a set of traffic lights using the kits. When it was red, it beeped when you pressed a button. There was a display with a Christmas tree on it! I really enjoyed it, I liked plugging …

In the Inspiring Students event I went to yesterday, I took part in a workshop with David Grey from the University of Hull. It was very interesting, and I loved the 3D printer. I was scanned using Kinect, and then printed like I was in carbonite! It was fun :)

oday I went along to an event run by a local software company, Black Marble, where they get professional speakers to speak to local A Level students, and try to get them to keep studying Computing. It was an early start, but it was worth it; a really fun and interesting day. First up was Robert Hogg, the MD of Black …

This week is Computer Science Education week (CSEW) and I am really exited that Computer Science is being seen for what it is, A gateway to an amazing future. The Hour of Code is upon us and urge everybody to look at helping children and adults do their first hour. Microsoft have been promoting the Hour of Code and the …

As with many concepts it is not the the idea that is hard but it’s application. ‘Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories’ by Gojko Adzic and David Evans provides some great tips to apply the concept of user stories to real world problems. Highlighting where they work and where they don’t, and what you can do …

Whilst building a new TFS build agent VM using our standard scripts I hit a problem that SSDT projects would not build, but was fine on our existing agents. The error was C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftVisualStudiov12.0SSDTMicrosoft.Data.Tools.Schema.SqlTasks.targets (513): The "SqlBuildTask" task …