The ALM Rangers are again producing a list of useful tools and widgets for TFS. It can be found at aka.ms/widgets and should be updated regularly

The output window in Visual Studio shows lots of useful information; but it doesn't link it to the time. Sharepoint deployments take ages and I’m quite often distracted and forget whether I have triggered the deploy or not. I want to quickly check the output window and see when I last triggered the deploy. I found 2 …

I am currently involved in moving some TFS TFVC hosted source to a TFS Git repository. The first step was to clone the source for a team project from TFS using the command 1git tf clone --deep http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection ‘$My Project’ localrepo1 and it …

Microsoft UK have been running technical events around the UK for a couple of years now, and it’s a great thing. Too many events are focused in the south of England and there are lots of IT pros north of the M25! Starting on Monday, the latest series of events kicks off. The People-Centric IT roadshow content is being …

My X220 is a stalwart machine. It’s built like a tank and can be upgraded in a numb of ways. Mine now has 16Gb of RAM and two SSDs which allow me to run multi-VM environments for development and demo. Unfortunately, however, there is no USB 3 on the laptop. That’s a pain if I need to copy stuff on and off via USB, or …

Richard and I spend a good deal of time talking about Lab Manager and our environments. I’ve written here before about our migration to the latest versions of the various components of Lab and both Richard and I have delivered sessions at user groups and conferences. Richard was in Belgium last week for Techorama, …

Lets get the disclaimer out of the way first: What I’ve done is absolutely unsupported by Microsoft. Just because it works for me does not guarantee it will work for you and I am not in any way recommending that you follow my lead! I use a great many virtual machines for both customer work, internal projects and just …

Seven whole years ago I wrote about re-reading [corrected – getting old and forgetful not William Gibson’s it was] Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and how it compared to his then new book JPod. And how they both reflected the IT world at their time. Speculative fiction always says more about the time they are written …

After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each …

Near Field Communication has been seen demonstrated in two ways. Firstly scanning an NFC enabled card which can be programmed to perform a number of different actions such as take your device to a specific url, transfer contact details, start an app or take you to the store to install the app and a number of other …