I am pleased to announce details of the Black Marble Virtual Pet Sanctuary! It has been estimated that in the EU alone over 2.1 billion virtual pets/avatars or other cyber creatures, are rotting away due to neglect. Soon to be enacted EU Regulations, the European Virtual Pet Law (2014) about the long term treatment and …

Looking forward to speaking at Techorama in May, great range of speakers and subjects. Hope to see you there, for ticket details see http://www.techorama.be/tickets/

Our testing environments are based on TFS Lab Management, historically we have managed deployment into them manually (or at least via a PowerShell script run manually) or using TFS Build. I thought it time I at least tried to move over to Release Management. The process to install the components of Release Management …

It’s a busy week. I’m speaking at the [Black Marble-hosted GWAB2 event](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event= Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2) this Saturday, along with Steve Spencer and Andy Westgarth. Richard and Robert will also be on hand which means between us we should be able to cover questions on much …

Background The TFS Community Build Extensions provide many activities to enhance your build. One we use a lot is the one for StyleCop to enforce code consistency in projects as part of our check in & build process. In most projects you will not want a single set of StyleCop rules to be applied across the whole …

The good people over at SyncFusion have taken it upon themselves to provide the Microsoft development community with a great set of books to bootstrap you into different Microsoft development technologies. To find these little gems head over to http://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks you have to register …

Rik has just done a post on upgrading our SCVMM 2012 instance we use with Lab Management to 2012 R2, a good few gotchas in there as you might expect. Well worth a read

Last week I moved our SCVMM from 2012 with service pack 1 to 2012 R2. Whilst the actual process was much simpler than I expected, we had a pretty big constraint imposed upon us by Lab Manager that largely dictated our approach. Our SCVMM 2012 deployment was running on an aging Dell server. It had a pair of large hard …

I have just had a guest blog post published on the Microsoft UK Developers site ‘Migrating a TFS TFVC based team project to a Git team project retaining as much source and work item history as possible’. It discusses alternatives to using TFS Integration Platform to migrate source code and associated work items.

This is part 4 of a series of posts building powershell functions to create and modify Azure Virtual Networks. Previous posts have covered functions to create virtual networks and then delete them. In this part, I’m going to show you functions that will define local networks and configure site-site VPN connectivity …