But it works on my PC!

Post by one of our Testers about experiences with CodeUI and Windows Store Apps on the MSDN blog

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.

Re-awarded Microsoft MVP for the 7th Year

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.

How long is my TFS 2010 to 2013 upgrade going to take – Part 2

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. ...

Submissions open for DDDNorth 2014

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

List of TFS Widgets

The ALM Rangers are again producing a list of useful tools and widgets for TFS. It can be found at aka.ms/widgets and should be updated regularly

Cloning tfs repository with git-tf gives a "a server path must be absolute"

I am currently involved in moving some TFS TFVC hosted source to a TFS Git repository. The first step was to clone the source for a team project from TFS using the command git tf clone --deep [http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection](http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection) ‘$My Project’ localrepo1 and it worked fine. However the next project I tried to move had no space in the source path git tf clone --deep [http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection](http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection) ‘$MyProject’ localrepo2 This gave the error git-tf: A server path must be absolute. Turns out if the problem was the single quotes. Remove these and the command worked as expected ...

‘The Circle’ a good read

Seven whole years ago I wrote about re-reading [corrected – getting old and forgetful not William Gibson’s it was] Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and how it compared to his then new book JPod. And how they both reflected the IT world at their time. Speculative fiction always says more about the time they are written than the future they predict. I have just read ‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers which in many ways is a similar book for our social media, big brother monitored age. I will leave it to you to decide if it a utopian or dystopia but it is well worth a read ...

Our TFS Lab Management Infrastructure

After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each has a pair of mirrored disks for the OS and RAID5 group of disks for data. We use SQL 2012 Enterprise Always On for replication to keep the DBs in sync. The servers are part of a Windows cluster (needed for Always On) and we use a VM to give a third server in the witness role. This is hosted on a production Hyper-V cloud. We have a number of availability groups on this platform, basically one per service we run. This allows us to split the read/write load between the two servers (unless they have failed over to a single box). If we had only one availability group for all the DBs one node would being all the read/write and the other read only, so not that balanced. ...

What new in TFS from Teched 2014?

If you use TFS then it is well worth a look at Brian Harry’s Teched2014 session ‘Modern Application Lifecycle Management’. It goes through changes and new features with TFS both on-premise and in the cloud, including Migrating Your Data from TFS to Visual Studio Online with New Free Utility from OpsHub Authentication with your corporate Active Directory account via AAD (planned for Summer 2014) New API is based on REST, OAUTH, Json and Service Hooks Release Management, PowerShell DSC, ability to link Azure VMs including client OS for dev/test Application Insights available inside Visual Studio Azure vNext portal – bring it all together Not all these features are in 2013.2 (which was released during the conference). However, in the session they said Visual Studio 2013.3CTP is going to be available next week, so not long to wait if you want a look at the latest features. ...

New release of TFS Alerts DSL that allows work item state rollup

A very common question I am asked at clients is “Is it possible for a parent TFS work item to be automatically be set to ‘done’ when all the child work items are ‘done’?”. The answer is not out the box, there is no work item state roll up in TFS. However it is possible via the API. I have modified my TFS Alerts DSL CodePlex project to expose this functionality. I have added a couple of methods that allow you to find the parent and child of a work item, and hence create your own rollup script. ...