This months meeting of the XPClub is on Wednesday. It is a general group chat about refactoring, branching and merging. This is a free event, usually with a few free beers, at the usual time & location, 7pm at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds, so hope to see you there

I have posted in the past about my efforts to write a user facing bug tracking interface for TFS to integrate with our SharePoint based customer portal. I have had some mixed success, but the end point is that I am just not happy with what I have written. Historically we have used our own home grown call tracking system (started as an Access DB, went via VB6 to ASP then ASP.NET, now is web service based) which our clients know (and love?). This give a far richer audit trail for the actions performed on a support call than is possible with a work item in TFS. In the end this simple fact is what has forced me to conclude that TFS work items are not the thing to expose to end user/help desk staff for bug tracking. ...

It really good to see so many submissions for the DDD7, and many new names, always a good sign of a the community working well. I just got round to putting one in myself on integrating testing into MSBuild. There is still time for more though. So have a think and put in a session proposal - trust me it is great fun.

Found out last night that I have just been made an MVP for Team System, is that cool or what!

Martin Woodward posted a few weeks ago about his build bunny. Now this is something I had tried a while ago for DDD4, but hit the same problem Martin had that the old Nabaztag API was too slow and messages could take hours to arrive, making it useless in the real world. Inspired by Martin and the new faster API I have been working on a new Team Build status monitor for the office. ...

For those who are interested, I am speaking on Visual Studio for Database Professionals at the Leeds SQL user group on the 16th July. This is a free event, for more details see the event web site.

I have been setting up a new Team Build server today. All our projects are being set to do code analysis (FXCop) after the build. For one project this worked on the developer PC but failed on the build machine. The CA0055 error means ‘file not found’ or ‘could not load’ the assembly to be analysed. Firstly I suspected there was a problem with path names being over 256 characters (both the assemblies and solutions names were long) which can be a problem MSBuild, but this was not the case. ...

Good session at the Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club last night. Chris Mills of Opera spoke on the mobile web. If this, or the general issue of standards in web development are of interest http://dev.opera.com is well worth a look.

When you create a build type for a team project on TFS you can enable testing using MSTest by saying ‘run any tests that are found in a given DLL’. I used this today to create a CI build for a project, I am looking at using Team Build as opposed to CruiseCrontrol as we have done historically. I hit a problem that the tests were running but the build was failing (or in Team build speak - partial succeeding i.e. compiling but not passed testing). On looking in the build log I saw the error was: ...

This Wednesday, the 11th, is the rescheduled XPClub meeting ‘Exploring Mobile Web Development’ with Chris Mills developer relations manager for Opera This is a free event and open to all, hope to see you there.