I am now going to speaking on the DevOps track at Future Decoded. I’ll be channelling Richard to talk about how our dev-release pipeline is constructed at Black Marble and how the various Microsoft tools that we use could be swapped out for alternatives in a heterogeneous environment. Whilst this isn’t an area that I …

It's been a long but interesting week, and no let up on the last day! Had a great time in some great sessions. Went along to one about Kinect, and one on Windows for IoT devices. Everyone is talking about IoT, so it was good to hear more about it. Also went along to a session on Windows 8.1 programming with C# and Xaml …

I have posted before about using Release Management with Lab Management network isolation. They key is that you must issue a NET USE command at the start of the pipeline to allow the VMs in the isolated environment the ability to see the TFS drops location. I hit a problem today that a build failed even though I had …

Last night I attended my first Country Party at a conference, which was held on the beach! It was funny wearing a t-shirt, and hanging around on a beach during the evening in October! My sessions today covered a security talk for Windows 10, which is interesting. Security and dealing with Cyber Threats is important. …

Whilst working on a SSRS based report I had hit a sort order problem. Entries in a main report tablix needed to be sorted by their OrderNumber but this was in the form 1.2.3; so a neither a numeric or alpha sort gave the correct order i.e. a numeric sort fails as 1.2.3 is not a number and an alpha sort worked but give …

After a tiring but interesting Day One, I was looking forward to Day Two. Attended a session that was an introduction into developing apps for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. It was really interesting, but most of my efforts are still on Windows Programming. But I know I'm going to be doing some cloud based …

Today I arrived in Barcelona to attend TechEd Europe, thanks to the great people at Microsoft! Barcelona is a beautiful place, lots of sunshine. Had an interesting day of sessions and exploring the venue, and spent time doing labs on Power BI (BI means business intelligence, and allows people to generate interesting …

I don’t normal do posts that are just re-posts of TFS announcements, it is much better to get the information first hand from the original post, but this one is significant for us in Europe… Up to now there has been a barrier to adoption of VSO that the underlying data will be hosted in the USA. Now there are all the …

The HDMIPI screen I supported on KickStarter arrived this week. After a bit of a false start with a driver board that failed after a couple of minutes it is now all up and running. The replacement board arrived in 48Hours – great support service Now to get down to some projects – that toy robot does look like it needs …

There has for a long time been an issue that when you try to add a new activity to the toolbox when editing a TFS build workflow Visual Studio can crash. I have seen it many times and never got to the bottom of it. It seems to be machine specific, as one machine can work while another supposedly identical will fail, …