Mid May is a busy time for me presenting-wise: On the 12th/13th I am presenting at Techorama in Belgium And on the 14th I will be presenting at a Microsoft/GreyMatter event at Microsoft’s Reading office. And after that there are also the Black Marble Re:Build and Re:Ignite events. I am sure I will be involved at those, but we have to wait for a couple of week until after Build and Ignite to find out what we will be talking about. ...

I have worn a Polar s610 heart rate monitor as my watch for years (probably 15+), as I write it needs another battery swap, which means sending it to Polar, something I have done a couple of times in the past for servicing The batteries in the watch last 5 years or so, in the associated heart rate monitor strap maybe a bit more depending on usage. The point is I am used to having a device that ‘can’ give heart rate information, it seems normal, but I do need to remember to put on the heart rate strap, something I would only usually do for a race or specific training set. Now don’t get me wrong having the s610 does not mean I am a talented athlete, but I do have good idea of my heart rate for any given sporting activity ...

Updated 6 Feb 2016 - See the newer post about the new vNext build task I have written to do the same job Virtually any automated build will require some customisation beyond a basic compile. So as part of my upcoming Techorama session on TFS 2015 vNext build I need a demo of using a custom script as part of the build process. Two common customisations we use are version stamping of assemblies and running code analysis tools. For vNext build there is already a sample of version stamping, so I thought getting StyleCop running would be a good sample. ...

All change again on Visual Studio SKU licensing, have a look at the blog post on new SKUs for the 2015 release and also the 2015 product site. Basically it is a simplification. You can find the detailed feature break down on the comparison site

I have been preparing for my Techorama session on TFS vNext build. One of the demo’s I am planning is to use the Node based cross platform build agent to build something on a Linux VM. Turns out this takes a few undocumented steps to get this going with the CTP of TFS 2015 The process I followed was: I installed a Mint 17 VM On the VM, I installed the Node VSOAgent as detailed in the npm documentation (or I could have built it from from source from GitHub to get the bleeding edge version) I created a new agent instance vsoagent-installer I then tried to run the configuration, but hit a couple of issues _ node vsoagent_ URL error The first problem was I was told the URL I provided was invalid. I had tried the URL of my local TFS 2015 CTP VM ...

Black Marble are hosting, at our offices, a Microsoft event on the 18th March on ALM with Visual Studio & TFS 2013. This is a repeat of the sell out event we hosted in the autumn. For details of the event and registration see the booking site

A couple of weeks ago I presented on DSC and Release Management as part of the Microsoft UK TechDays Online 2015 event. All the sessions from this three day event are now available on demand at TechDays Online 2015 on-demand sessions. You do seem to have to register/login to see the content, so I can’t deep link to my session, but browsing the catalogue is a good idea there are some great sessions ...

We use my TFS Alerts DSL to perform tasks when our TFS build complete, one of these is a job to increment the minor version number and reset the version start date (the value that generates third field – days since a point in time) if a build is set to the quality ‘release’ e.g. 1.2.99.[unique build id] where 99 is the days count since some past date could change to 1.3.0.[unique build id] (see this old post on how we do this in the build process) ...

Speaker registration for DDD South West has opened, problem is the event is the same weekend as the Maker Faire in Newcastle, don’t think I can do both. Both are great options though, good to have choices

Seem Windows 10 will be an option on the new Raspberry PI 2, that provides some more nice IoT options. It will be interesting to see which tools Microsoft look to target onto this board, I guess remote development from a PC as per their Galileo board. But there might be enough power for a bit more, we shall see