I have been trying to script the installation of all the tools and SDKs we need on our TFS Build Agent VMs. This included BizTalk. A quick check on MSDN showed the setup command line parameter I need to install the build components was 1 2 3/ADDLOCAL ProjectBuildComponent So I ran this via my VMs setup PowerShell …

Had an interesting issue during and upgrade from TFS 2012 to 2013.2 today. The upgrade of the files proceeded as expect and the wizard ran. It picked up the correct Data Tier, found the tfs_configuration Db and I was able to fill in the service account details. However, when I got to the reporting section it found the …

Having installed my TFS Alert DSL today onto a client’s TFS 2013.2, I have realised some of the documentation was a little unclear. So I have have just updated the download page to provide an easy means to get The actual DSL implementation (without rebuilding the source) A command line tool to create an event source in …

The problem Today I found I had a problem when trying to associate a Release Management 2013.2 release pipeline with a TFS build. When I tried to select a team project the drop down for the release properties was empty. The strange thing was this installation of Release Management has been working OK last week. What …

Robert unexpectedly (gotta love him!) gave me a surprise present in the form of a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I’ve now been using it for a week and I thought it was time to put my thoughts into words. You’ll pry it out of my cold, dead hands Overall, this is a fantastic bit of kit and it’s the device I have used most at …

I have just submitted a session for DDDNorth 2014, which is at the University of Leeds on Saturday 18 October. There is still time for you to submit yours Session submission

Rik recently posted about the work we have done to automatically provision TFS build agent VMs. This has come out of us having about 10 build agents on our TFS server all doing different jobs, with different SDKs etc. When we needed to increase capacity for a given build type we had a problems, could another agent run …

This is a relatively quick post. There’s a fair bunch of stuff written about creating columns in SharePoint 2013 that use Managed Metadata termsets. However, some of it is a pain to find and then some. I have had to deal with two frustrating issues lately, both of which boil down to poor sharepoint documentation. …

Richard and I have been busy this week. It started with a conversation about automating the installation of new build servers. Richard was looking at writing PowerShell to install and configure the TFS build agent, along with all the various SDKs that we use across all out projects. Our current array of build servers …

I am currently rebuilding our TFS build infrastructure, we have too many build agents that are just too different, they don’t need to be. So I am looking at a standard set of features on a build agent and the ability to auto provision new instances to make scaling easier. More on this in a future post… Anyway whilst …