Whilst running tests as part of a Release Management deployment I started seeing the error ‘The build directory of the test run either does not exist or access permission is required’, and hence all my tests failed. It seems that there are issues that can cause this problem, as mentioned in the comments in Martin Hinshelwood’s post on running tests in deployment, specially spaces in the build name can cause this problem, but this was not the case for me. ...

If you are using Webdeploy you might wish to alter the connection string the for the LocalSQLServer that is used by the ASP.NET provider for web part personalisation. The default is to use ASPNETDB.mdf in the APP_Data folder, but in a production system you could well want to use a ‘real’ SQL server. If you look in your web config, assuming you are not using the default ‘not set’ setting, will look something like ...

Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post ‘WebDeploy and Release Management – The Proper Way’ explains how to pass parameters from Release Management into MSDeploy to update Web.config files. On the system I am working on I also need to do some further web.config translation, basically the WCF section is different on a Lab or Production build as it needs to use Kerberos, whereas local debug builds don’t. In the past I dealt with this, and editing the AppSettings, using MSDeploy web.config translation. This worked fine, but it meant I built the product three time, exactly what Colin’s post is trying to avoid. The techniques in the post for the AppSettings and connection strings are fine, but don’t apply so well for the large block swapouts, as I need for WCF bindings section. ...

I have been using Release Management to update some of our internal deployment processes. This has included changing the way we roll out MSDeploy packages; I am following Colin Dembovsky’s excellent post of the subject. I hit an interesting issue today. One of the configuration variable parameters I was passing into a component was a password field. For my initial tests had just let this be a clear text ‘standard’ string in the Release Management. Once I got this all working I thought I better switch this variable to ‘encrypted’, so I just change the type on the Configuration Variables tab. ...

I have been running Windows Phone 8.1 Update for a couple of weeks now and have to say I like. I have not suffered the poor battery life others seem to have suffered. Maybe this is an feature of the Nokia 820 no needing as many firmware updates from Nokia (which aren’t available yet) note having such power hungry features as the larger phones. The only issue I have had is that I lost an audio channel when using a headset. Initially I was unsure if it was a mechanical fault on the headphone socket, but I checked the headset was good, it sounded as if the balance was faded to just one side as you could just hear something faint on the failing side. Anyway as often is the case in IT, a reboot of the phone fixed the issue. ...

A significant blocker for some of my customers moving to Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012 previously) has been the removal of Visual Studio Setup Projects; my experience has been confirmed by UserVoice. Well Microsoft have addressed this pain point by releasing a Visual Studio Extension to re-add this Visual Studio 2010 functionality to 2013. This can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery. Given this release, the question now becomes should you use it? Or should you take the harder road in the short term of moving to Wix, but with the far greater flexibility this route offers going forward? ...

My Nokia 820 phone is now updated to 8.1 with the developer preview. The actual upgrade was straight forward, the only issue was that the Store was down last night so updating apps could not be done until this morning. This was made more of an issue by the fact I had had to remove all my Nokia Maps and the iPodcast application (and downloaded podcasts) to free up space on the phone to allow the upgrade. Both these apps could only store data on the phone (not the SDcard) thus blocked the upgrade. This lack of space on the actual phone has been a constant issue for me on the Nokia 820. ...

The 2013 editions of existing TFS books are now available Also well worth a look is ‘Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization’ by Gordon Beeming. A great look at all the extension points in TFS A longer list of books can be found in my reading list

I have had a Surface 2 for about six months. It is great for watching videos on the train, or a bit of browsing, but don’t like it for note taking in meetings. This is a shame, as this is what I got it for; a light device with good battery life to take to meetings. What I needed was something I could hand write on in OneNote, an electronic pad. The Surface 2 touch screen is just not accurate enough. ...

With Visual Studio 2012 there were changes in the way Web Publishing worked; the key fact being that the configuration was moved from the .csproj to a .pubxml in the properties folder. This allows them to be more easily managed under source control by a team. This does have some knock on effects though, especially when you start to consider automated build and deployment. Up to now we have not seen issues in this area, most of our active projects that needed web deployment packages had started in the Visual Studio 2010 era so had all the publish details in the project and this is still supported by later versions of Visual Studio. This meant that if we had three configurations debug, lab and release, then there were three different sets of settings stored in different blocks of the project file. So if you used the /p:DeployOnBuild=True MS Build argument for your TFS build, and built all three configurations you got the settings related to the respective configuration in each drop location. ...