I have trying to update a Azure hosted SQL DB using Release Management and the SSDT SQLPackage tools. All worked fine on my test Azure instance, but then I wanted to deploy to production I got the following error \*\*\* An error occurred during deployment plan generation. Deployment cannot continue. Failed to import target model \[dbname\]. Detailed message Unable to reconnect to database: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. Unable to reconnect to database: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. The wait operation timed out Turns out SQLPackage.exe was connecting OK, as if I entered an invalid password it gave a different error, so it had made the connection and then died. ...

Black Marble is hosting a free Microsoft ALM event at our offices on the 26th of November. For once I will not be speaker, Giles and Colin from the Microsoft UK Visual Studio Team are coming up to deliver the session. For more details and registration see http://bit.ly/ALMLeeds

I have been playing around with the idea of using a DD-WRT-V router on a Hyper-V VM to connect my local virtual machines to the Internet as discussed by Martin Hinshlewood in his blog post. I learned a few things that might be of use to others trying the same setup. What I used to do Prior to using the router I had been using three virtual switches on my Windows 8 Hyper-V setup with multiple network adaptors to connect both my VMs and host machine to the switches and networks ...

We have for a long time used the TFSVersion custom build activity to stamp all our TFS builds with a unique version number that matches out build number. However, this only edits the AssemblyInfo.cs file. As we are now building more and more Windows 8 Store Apps we also need to edit the XML in the Package.appxmanifest files used to build the packages too. Just like a Wix MSI project it is a good idea the package version matches some aspect of the assemblies it contains. We need to automate the update of this manifest as people too often forget to increment the version, causing confusion all down the line. ...

Last night I upgraded this blog server to BlogEngine.NET 3.1. I used the new built in automated update tool, in an offline backup copy of course. It did most of the job without any issues. The only extra things I needed to do was Removed a <add name=“XmlRoleProvider” …> entry in the web.config. I have had to do this before on every install. Run the SortOrderUpdate.sql script to add the missing column and index (see issue 12543) Once done and tested locally I upload the tested site to my production server. Just a point to note, that the upgrade creates some backup ZIPs of your site before the upgrade, you don’t need to copy these around as they are large. ...

We have recently swapped the Word template we use to make sure all our proposals and other documents are consistent. The changes are all cosmetic, fonts, footers etc. to match our new website; it still makes use of the same VSTO automation to do much of the work. The problem was I needed to swap the .DOTX file within the VSTO Word Add-in project, we had not been editing the old DOTX template in the project, but had created a new one based on a copy outside of Visual Studio. ...

Whilst developing our new set of websites we have been using MSDeploy to package up the websites for deployment to test and production Azure accounts. These deployments were being triggered directly using Visual Studio. Now we know this is not best practice, you don’t want developers shipping to production from their development PCs, so I have been getting around to migrating these projects to Release Management. I wanted to minimise change, as we like MSDeploy, I just wanted to pass the extra parameters to allow a remote deployment as opposed to a local one using the built in WebDeploy component in Release Management ...

I am speaking at PreEmptive’s event on Application Analytics in at Microsoft’s office in London on the 30th of September. There are various speakers from PreEmptive, Microsoft and Black Marble at this free event. There are still spaces available, just follow the link: Application Analytics with Visual Studio and PreEmptive Analytics for more details and registration.

Whilst developing a new Release Management pipeline I did hit a problem that a component that published MSDeploy packages to Azure started to fail. It had been working then suddenly I started seeing ‘communication with the deployer was lost during deployment’ messages as shown below. No errors were shown in any logs I could find, and no files appeared on the deployment target (you would expect the files/scripts to be deployed to appear on the machine running a RM Deployment client in the C:users[account]localtempRM folder structure). ...

As part of our IT refresh we have decided to move this BlogEngine.NET server from a Hyper-V VM in our office to an Azure website. BlogEngine.NET is now a gallery item for Azure website, so a few clicks and your should be up and running. However, if you want to use SQL as opposed to XML as the datastore you need to do a bit more work. This process is well documented in the video ‘Set BlogEngine.NET to use SQL provider in Azure’, but we found we needed to perform some extra steps due to where our DB was coming from. ...