Rik recently posted about the work we have done to automatically provision TFS build agent VMs. This has come out of us having about 10 build agents on our TFS server all doing different jobs, with different SDKs etc. When we needed to increase capacity for a given build type we had a problems, could another agent run the build? what exactly was on the agent anyway? An audit of the boxes made for horrible reading, there were very inconsistent. ...

I am currently rebuilding our TFS build infrastructure, we have too many build agents that are just too different, they don’t need to be. So I am looking at a standard set of features on a build agent and the ability to auto provision new instances to make scaling easier. More on this in a future post… Anyway whilst testing a new agent I had a problem. A build that had worked on a previous test agent failed with the error ...

Whilst working on an automated build where I needed to target a specific project I hit a problem. I would normally expect the MSBuild argument to be /t:MyProject:Build Where I want to build the project Myproject in my solution and perform the Build target (which is probably the default anyway). However, my project was in a solution folder. The documentation says the you should be able to use for form ...

If you are doing any work with Azure Cloud Applications there is a very good chance you will want your automated build process to produce the .CSPKG deployment file, you might even want it to do the deployment too. On our TFS build system, it turns out this is not a straight forward as you might hope. The problem is that the MSbuild publish target that creates the files creates them in the $(build agent working folder)sourcemyprojectbindebug folder. Unlike the output of the build target which puts them in the $(build agent working folder)binaries folder which gets copied to the build drops location. Hence though the files are created they are not accessible with the rest of the built items to the team. ...

All teams have ‘Stakeholder’, the people the are driving a project forward, who want the new system to be able to do their job; but are often not directly involved in the production/testing of the system. In the past this has been an awkward group to provide TFS access for. If they want to see any detail of the project they need a TFS CAL, expensive for the occasional casual viewer. ...

My Channel9 Guy has a new MVP badge

Nice post by Riccardo Viglianisi, one of Black Marble’s Testers, about his experiences with CodeUI and Windows Store Apps published on the MSDN UK Visual Studio blog. Well worth a read if you are looking at this technology.

I am really happy to say that I have had my MVP for Visual Studio (ALM) re-awarded, so am an MVP for the 7th time. It is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.

Back in January I did a post How long is my TFS 2010 to 2013 upgrade going to take? I have now done some more work with one of the clients and have more data. Specially the initial trial was 2010 > 2013 RTM on a single tier test VM; we have now done a test upgrade from 2010 > 2013.2 on the same VM and also one to a production quality dual tier system. ...

DDD North is coming to the University of Leeds on Saturday 18 October. It is now open for Session submission