The 2013 editions of existing TFS books are now available Also well worth a look is ‘Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization’ by Gordon Beeming. A great look at all the extension points in TFS A longer list of books can be found in my reading list

I have had a Surface 2 for about six months. It is great for watching videos on the train, or a bit of browsing, but don’t like it for note taking in meetings. This is a shame, as this is what I got it for; a light device with good battery life to take to meetings. What I needed was something I could hand write on in …

With Visual Studio 2012 there were changes in the way Web Publishing worked; the key fact being that the configuration was moved from the .csproj to a .pubxml in the properties folder. This allows them to be more easily managed under source control by a team. This does have some knock on effects though, especially when …

While I have been pootling about updating machines at home I received an Error: 0x80070070 for _KB2919355 patch. After some digging the problem and a bit of trial and error was the need for 4.5 Gb of free space to be available which on some of our smaller tablets was a challenge. But simple enough, clear the space and …

Updated 20 Oct 2014 – With notes on using an Action for cross domain authentication In my previous post I described how to get a network isolated environment up and running with Release Management, it is all to do with shadow accounts. Well getting it running is one thing, having a useful release process is another. …

When working with web applications we tend to use MSDeploy for distribution. Our TFS build box, as well as producing a _PublishedWebsite copy of the site, produce the ZIP packaged version we use to deploy to test and production servers via PowerShell or IIS Manager To create this package we add the MSBuild Arguments …

To make sure all our Word documents are consistent we use a Word template that include VSTO action pane. This allow us to insert standard blocks of text, T&C and the like, and also makes sure document revisions and reviews are correctly logged. We have used this for years without any issues, but I recently needed …

Day one at Build brought a lot of anticipated announcements with a great mix of surprises and totally awesome demo’s. The main overall push was the One Microsoft, in essence Microsoft has managed to bring all of their eco-systems into sync, the bottom line developer code can be used and reused across Windows 8, Windows …

TFS 2013.2 got RTM’d last night and is available on MSDN; interestingly Visual Studio 2013.2 is still only an RC, we have to wait for that to RTM. As we had a good proportion of our team at Build 2014 I took the chance to do the upgrade today. It went smoothly, no surprises, though the installation phase (the middle …

Just been renewed as an MVP once again! Great way start Build :)