For testing and demonstrations I have a basic installation of TFS2010 installed on my Windows 7 boot. Whist demonstrating the branching within TFS to a customer I came across an error when attempting to branch a folder by label: Branching by label is something I do frequently in our production TFS environment so I was …

Robert Hancock, another one of Black Marble’s ALM consultants, has started blog technical tips on this blog server. You can find Robert’s new blog here or the aggregate feed of all Black marble bloggers here

If you use Visual Studio Database Projects you may be familiar with the VSDBCMD utility to control the deployment of a database project. Whilst testing a custom Team Foundation Server 2010 build template which included an activity to deploy a database project using the VSDBCMD, I came across the following error: *** …

When using TFS2010 It is possible for a build agent to appear to be ready (or so the status label says) but the icon stays in the off state. This is usually due to a couple of broad categories of error, you can find out which by checking the Windows event log. The build agent cannot communicate with the controller In …

At the Build conference today the preview of TFS on Windows Azure was announced. All the attendees of the conference have been given access codes for the preview. If you did not make it to Build have a look at Brian Harry’s blog for details of how everyone else can get access to the preview.

My development laptop is bitlocker’ed, and yours should be too. It provides a great and non-invasive way (assuming you have a TPM chip) to protect you and your clients data on a machine that is far to easy to steal or loose. However, whilst fiddling with Windows 8 I did trip myself up. I have my PC setup for a boot to …

I tried to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on my Lenovo W520 laptop as a VHD boot. All seemed to go well following the same process as for windows 7. I got a nice new blue Window 8 boot partition choice screen (which went back to the Windows 7 DOS like one after I made Windows 7 my default partition). If I selected …

If you are editing a TFS process template you have the choice editing XML files or using the Process Template Editor within the TFS 2010 PowerTools. Unfortunately neither is fool proof. You can make errors than means the revised template does not fully work. The worst of these errors will be picked up when upload the …

Over the weekend I took my son to the excellent ‘Bang goes the Theory’ Live road show which is part of the Festival of Science in Bradford. If a similar event is near you I recommend you go along, fun for all the family even if science is not really your thing. The whole event makes the subject very accessible to all. …

If you use the database unit testing feature of VS2010 there is a good chance you will want to run these tests on more than one PC and probably the build server. The issue is that these different PC will need different deployment paths and SQL connection strings. Luckily there is a feature to address this, as detailed …