I have seen a few tweets after my Techdays session on Lab Management that it sounded expensive. It is true that Lab Management is an extra license to purchase over and above Visual Studio. However under the new licensing model for VS you have to remember that as an MSDN subscriber you are already licensed for a TFS CAL and Server and if you have VS2010 Ultimate you are licensed for the Test Professional tools. With this collection of tools you can do much of the bits I showed in my session: ...

Now that VS2010 has launched the branding of ‘Team System’ has gone; so I am no longer a MVP (Team System) but a MVP (Visual Studio ALM).

I am down in London for the first two days of the Microsoft TechDays event. First day has been very interesting, there seems to be a good buzz over the new testing features. So it looks good for my session tomorrow when I will be presenting on Lab Manager hope to see you there.

When I tried to run a working Ivonna test, previously targeted at .NET 3.5, against .NET 4 I found my test failing with the error -—– Test started: Assembly: Webpart.Tests.dll —— Bad Request Setup information Physical Web path: C:ProjectsTestTypeMockSampleTestWebSite Actual path: C:UsersfezAppDataLocalTempTemporary ASP.NET Filesroot156567f2 Turns out that the fix to simple, you have to use an absolute path i.e. the / in front of the BasicTest.aspx is vital \[TestMethod, Isolated\] public void LoadWebPage\_HelloWorldWebPart\_NoError() { TestSession session = new TestSession(); //Start each test with this WebRequest request = new WebRequest("/BasicTest.aspx"); //Create a WebRequest object WebResponse response = session.ProcessRequest(request); //Process the request System.Web.UI.Page page = response.Page; //Check the page loaded Assert.IsNotNull(page); } So this is a temporary work around for now, for me it is not an issue having to use a absolute path. I understand from the [writer of Ivonna](http://www.sm-art.biz/Ivonna.aspx) that this issue will be further investigated now that .NET 4.0 has RTM’d

Whilst preparing for my session at Techdays I have upgraded my 2010 Beta2 Lab Manager to RC. I am pleased to say the process is far more straight forward than the initial install. Again I used the Lab Manager team blog as my guide, they have revised ‘Getting started with Lab Management 2010 RC’ Parts 1, 2 ,3 and 4 posts to help. I was able to skip through the initial OS/VMM setup as this has not altered. I chose to throw away my TestVM (with its Beta agents) and create a new one. I upgraded my TFS 2010 instance to RC. The only awkward bit was that I had to extract the RC version of the Lab Build Template from a newly created RC Team Project Collection and load it over my existing Beta2 version. I then recreated the Lab E2E build – and it just worked. My basic sample created for Beta2 build and tested OK. ...

I was at the AIC 2010 conference yesterday, which I enjoyed more than last year. The most interesting session was Ivar Jacobson. He discussed how immature our industry is, with its disjoint between software engineers and academic computer scientists. Something I have commented on before when discussing if our industry should be licensed. He discussed how we need to build our industry upon commonly agreed kernel of simple best practice activities, not upon some currently fashionable process whether it be Waterfall, CMMI, Agile, Lean etc. We must identify what are the best practices from all process (and all processes have something to offer) and teach them to students at University as this kernel of activities, as well as teaching how to compose them into more complex practices and hence whole development processes. Thus providing new entries to our industry with the base of reusable techniques that the can use for their whole career, irrespective of fashion. The key idea being that any current process model can be build by composing these kernel of basic activity. ...

In 2008 I wrote a post Running Fitnesse.NET tests using MSTest. Recently I had need to us this technique on a VS2010 project, and as is so often the issue the code that worked then does not seem to work now. All I can assume is that the Fitnesse API had altered, but I thought I was using the same assemblies! So I pulled down the code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fitnessedotnet/ and had a poke about. Basically I seemed to be using the command line switches wrong. The listing below shows what I found is the working usage: ...

I my previous post I discussed how the DB label was not used for TPC Dbs in 2010. As I was working on a setup where a central SQL box was the DT for two virtualised TFS AT instances, I therefore needed to create my TPC databases manually if I wanted TPCs of the same name on each TFS instance. I won’t go over the [old post again](I had to create a TPC Dbs manually ), but in essence I was trying to create a TPC with the name ABC on a TFS instance with a database label of RC. So I tried to create the DB TFS_RC_ABC manually and pointed the TPC create process at this. It passed the verify but I then got a ...

When I said will our internet bits were back I was not quite right. I had forgotten that I had not re-pointed m own richardfennell domains to put to my blog. These are now done, so I hope all search results to my blog should resolve OK.

If your application has a dependency on an assembly built in .NET 2 you will see the error below if you try to run your application when it has been built in.NET 4. Mixed mode assembly is built against version ‘v2.0.50727’ of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information. This can be important in VS2010 testing, as test projects must be built as .NET 4, there is no option to build with an older runtime. I suffered this problem when trying to do some development where I hosted a webpart that make calls into SharePoint (that was faked out with Typemock Isolator) inside a ASP.NET 4.0 test harness ...