Whilst working on an automated build where I needed to target a specific project I hit a problem. I would normally expect the MSBuild argument to be /t:MyProject:Build Where I want to build the project Myproject in my solution and perform the Build target (which is probably the default anyway). However, my project was …

If you are doing any work with Azure Cloud Applications there is a very good chance you will want your automated build process to produce the .CSPKG deployment file, you might even want it to do the deployment too. On our TFS build system, it turns out this is not a straight forward as you might hope. The problem is …

All teams have ‘Stakeholder’, the people the are driving a project forward, who want the new system to be able to do their job; but are often not directly involved in the production/testing of the system. In the past this has been an awkward group to provide TFS access for. If they want to see any detail of the project …

My Channel9 Guy has a new MVP badge

Nice post by Riccardo Viglianisi, one of Black Marble’s Testers, about his experiences with CodeUI and Windows Store Apps published on the MSDN UK Visual Studio blog. Well worth a read if you are looking at this technology.

With the announcement of an upgrade to the webjobs service in Microsoft Azure service bus triggers to Topics and Queues were added. This got me thinking about how they could be used and there are a lot of scenarios where events need to trigger simple actions as well as running things off of a timer. Utilising Service …

I am really happy to say that I have had my MVP for Visual Studio (ALM) re-awarded, so am an MVP for the 7th time. It is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.

One of the things we learn early in our SharePoint careers was not to manually edit the web.config files of a web application. SharePoint involves multiple servers and has its own mechanisms for managing web.config updates. Previously, I’ve created xml files with web.config modifications and copied those to each WFE. …

Back in January I did a post How long is my TFS 2010 to 2013 upgrade going to take? I have now done some more work with one of the clients and have more data. Specially the initial trial was 2010 > 2013 RTM on a single tier test VM; we have now done a test upgrade from 2010 > 2013.2 on the same VM and also one to …

DDD North is coming to the University of Leeds on Saturday 18 October. It is now open for Session submission