In case you had not noticed, our MD and Connected Systems MVP Robert Hogg posted about the new Patterns & Practices Architecture Track he is hosting on Day 1 of the Microsoft Future Decoded event next month in London. This track is an additional track to the now full Future Decoded. If you are interested in attending then get in touch with enquiries@blackmarble.com, for the attention of Linda, and she can help you out with a special code (if there are still any left)....

Whilst working with a vNext Release Management pipeline I started seeing the error Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Common.Helpers.OperationFailedException: New deployment is not allowed as an another deployment is in progress. Retry the deployment after sometime. Problem was I could not see any blocked or paused deployment releases. All Internet searches mentioned multiple pipelines that share components, but this was not the issue. Eventually I found the issue, my release pipeline included a step that ran CodedUI tests via TCM, hence a previous running of this template had triggered the test via TCM, but they had stalled....

The agenda for our 8th annual Black Marble Architecture Forum is firming up. Just confirmed is our keynote from Martin Woodward the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation, discussing open source adoption within Microsoft There are still spaces for this free event, so why not register? The event is on the 15th of December in Leeds.

This article was first published on the Microsoft’s UK Developers site as Running nUnit and Jasmine.JS unit tests in TFS/VSO vNext build With the advent of vNext build in TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Online running unit tests that are not MSTest based within your build process is far more straightforward than it used to be. No longer do you have to use custom XAML build activities or tell all your TFS build controllers where the test runner assemblies are....

When doing TFS upgrades it is useful to know roughly how long they will take. The upgrade programs give a number of steps, but not all steps are equal. Some are quick, some are slow. I have found it useful to graph past updates so I can get a feel of how long an update will take given it got to ‘step x in y minutes’. You can do this by hand, noting down time as specific steps are reached....

Pleased to say my session on SonarQube has been accepted for DDDNorth. And it seems that registration has opened and closed today, there is a wait list up now Good to see the DDD events still popular after 10 long years

The title says it all, I have been using a Microsoft Band for a few months now and have found it a great tool for running and cycling as long as you are going out for less than about 5 hours. I tried to use for the first time Triathlon race at at the Leeds Triathlon over the weekend. As it it not water proof it was not an option for the swim (unlike my old Polar HR monitor), so I put it on in T1 (swim to bike), don’t think it wasted too much time!...

Updated 22 Mar 2016 This task is available in the VSTS Marketplace) Typemock Isolator provides a way to ‘mock the un-mockable’, such as sealed private classes in .NET, so can be a invaluable tool in unit testing. To allow this mocking Isolator interception has to be started before any unit tests are run and stopped when completed. For a developer this is done automatically within the Visual Studio IDE, but on build systems you have to run something to do this as part of your build process....

Voting for DDD North Sessions is now open - http://bit.ly/DDDNorth15Sessions Vote on what you would like to see at this community conference

I have been trying to parameterise the SQL DB connection string used by nLog when it is defined in a web.config file of a web site being deployed via Release Management and WebDeploy i.e. I wanted to select and edit the bit highlighted of my web.config file <configuration> <nlog xmlns="[http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd"](http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd") xmlns:xsi="[http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"](http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance")\> <targets async="true"> <target xsi:type="Database" name="SQL" dbProvider="System.Data.SqlClient" connectionString="Data Source=myserver;Database=mydb;Persist Security Info=True;Pooling=False" keepConnection="true" commandText="INSERT INTO \[Logs\](ID, TimeStamp, Message, Level, Logger, Details, Application, MachineName, Username) VALUES(newid(), getdate(), @message, @level, @logger, @exception, @application, @machineName, @username)"> <parameter layout="${message}" name="@message"></parameter> ……....