Updated 28 Feb 2015 – Added bit on static addresses When using a DD-WRT virtual router, I have realised it is worth setting static a MAC address in Hyper-V and DHCP lease on the router for any server VMs you want access to from your base system OS. In my case this is TFS demo VM a connect to all the time. If you don’t do this the address of the VM seems to vary more than you might expect. So you keep having to edit the HOSTS file on your base OS to reference the VM by name. ...

I posted in the past on my experience with DD-WRT router running in Hyper-V to allow my VMs internet access. A couple of months on I am still using it and I think have got around the worst of the issues. The big problem is not with the DD-WRT router, but the way Hyper-V virtual switches use WiFi for some operating systems. Basically the summary is DHCP does not work for Linux VMs. ...

Whenever I tried to load an Office 2013 document from our SharePoint 2010 instance I kept ending up in the Office Web Application, the Office application was not being launched. If I tried the use the ‘Open in Word’ context menu I got the following error (and before you ask yes I was in IE, IE11 in fact, and Office 2013 was installed) My PC has been build of our standard System Center managed image, others using the same best image seemed OK, so what had gone wrong for me? ...

I am really pleased to be speaking at Techorama again this year. This is a great friendly conference that covers a wide range of subjects. Like last year the conference is in Mechelen, Belgium on the 12 and 13th of May. Hope to see some of you there

In preparation for my Techdays session next month, I have been sorting demos using the various Release Management clients. When I tried to create a release from within Visual Studio using the ‘Release Management tools for Visual Studio I found I could not add my Azure subscriptions. I saw the error ‘An unexpected error occurred. Close the windows and try again’ I could download and import the subscription file, it showed the available storage accounts, but when I pressed save I got the rather unhelpful error ‘Object reference not set to an instance of an object’ ...

If the reason you have not been using VSO was concern over where it is hosted, then last week Microsoft made an announcement that could ease some of your worries, or at least your legal departments. VSO now has ISO 27001 Certification and European Model Clauses; for more details see Brian Harry’s blog. This added to the fact that since the end of last October you have been able to choose to host your VSO instance in Europe could well make VSO a more compelling option for many organisations who don’t want to have their own TFS servers on premises ...

One of my blog posts has been re-posted on the Microsoft UK Developers blog Resolving the DCS two-step - Release Management vNext deployment This post covers part of what I will be talking about at Microsoft Techdays on the 5th of February . You can register here for this free online event

On the 5th of February I will be presenting at Microsoft’s online Techdays event. My session is entitled ‘How are you going to deploy that? A look at configuration as code’ “It does not matter what platform you are developing for, you are going to have to deploy your product in the end. Too often in the past the question of deployment has been an afterthought. But it need not be this way, there are tools available that can help with deployment of your code and importantly the provisioning the underlying systems they need too. In this session we will look at Visual Studio Release Management’s vNext release pipeline seeing how it can leverage Desired State Configuration to provision environments and deploy applications” ...

I have posted in the past that we have a number of agent based deployments using Release Management 2013.4 that point to network isolated Lab Management environments. Over Christmas we did some maintenance on our underlying Hyper-V servers, so everything got fully stopped and restarted. When the network isolated environment were restarted their DHCP assigned IP addresses on our company domain all changed (maybe we should have had longer DHCP lease times set?) ...

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies. In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of the DSC module the error was “cannot be loaded because you opted not to run this software now”. The other project just suffered mixed .NET assembly loading errors. ...