I have been out to a number of sites recently where there are C++ developers. We often get talking about package management and general best practices for shared libraries. The common refrain is ‘I wish we had something like Nuget for C++’. Well it was released in Nuget 2.5 and there is a video on Channel9 all about …

A key requirement for any DevOps strategy is the reporting on how your solution is behaving in the wild. PreEmptive Analytics™ for Team Foundation Server (TFS) can provide a great insight in this area, and there is a good chance you are already licensed for it as part of MSDN. So why not have a look on the UK MSDN site …

On a recent TFS consultancy job, I was asked to monitor how long some builds spent waiting in the Build queue before Starting. My plan was to use the TFS API to query all builds with a status of ‘Queued’ and monitor the wait times. I wrote the code and everything seemed to work fine. However, after capturing a number …

Why is everything so complex to get going with Wix, then so easy in the end when you get the syntax correct? If you want to allow your MSI installer to upgrade a previous version then there are some things you have to have correct if you don’t want the ‘Another version of this product is already installed’ dialog …

I recently needed to upgrade a DNN V5 site to V7 (yes I know I had neglected it, but I was forced to consider a change due to an ISP change). Now this is a documented process, but I had a few problems. There are some subtleties the release notes miss out. This is what I found I had to do to test the process on a …

If you look at the labels tab in the source control history in Visual Studio 2012 you could be confused by the changeset numbers. How can all the labels added by my different builds, done over many days, be associated with the same changeset? If you look at the same view in VS 2010 the problem is not so obvious, but …

Had an interesting issue on one of our WPF applications that is using MVVM Lite. This application is a front end to upload and download folder structures to TFS. On my development PC all was working fine i.e. when we upload a new folder structure to the TFS backend the various combo’s on the download tab are also …

Right now I am putting the finishing touches to my deck for an event Black Marble are running at Cardinal Place next week. As many of you will know, for the past ten years we have run the annual Tech Update covering moves and changes across the entire Microsoft spectrum of products. Until now that has only taken place …

Look what the stork delivered to Robert! He has bought himself a robot, and brought it in to the office to show to everyone today

Today I have been setting up a cross domain TFS proxy. The developers are in one domain and the TFS server in another. Given there is no trust between these domains you have use a trick to get it to work. So I created a local user tfsproxy.local on both the TFS server and proxy with the same password on each. At the …