While I have been on holiday there have been a few ALM Rangers releases. I am particularly happy to see the Lab Management Guide … v3 update guidance is available, as this was a project I was working on. The big change from previous editions is that it covers setting up Lab Management to make use of Azure IaaS resources. So if you use TFS have a look at http://aka.ms/vsarsolutions for a full list of resources

Update 2/4/2014 – Added notes about using service accounts as opposed to machine accounts for the AppPool running the web service In the past I have posted on how to get Kerberos running for multi tier applications. Well as usual when I had to redeploy the application onto new hardware I found my notes were not as clear as I would have hoped. So here is what is meant to be a walkthrough for getting our application working in our TFS lab environment....

I am speaking at Gravitas’s Tech Talk #3 - “TFS & Visual Studio 2013 vs The Rest” on Tuesday march the 4th about “Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle product has had a lot of changes in the past couple of years. In this session will look at how it can be used provide a complete solution from project inception through development, testing and deployment for project both using Microsoft and other vendor technologies”...

The GDR3 update for my Nokia 820 has at last arrived. As my phone is a developer unit it is at the end of the automated update list. I suppose I could have pulled it down by hand, but I was not in a major rush as I am not doing WP8 development at present. The update seems to have gone on OK. Only strange thing was I was getting low space warnings prior to the upgrade....

All has been going well since our upgrade from TFS 2012 to 2013, no nasty surprises. As I had a bit of time I thought it a good idea to start the updates of our build and lab/test systems. We had only upgraded our TFS 2012.3 server to 2013. We had not touched our build system (one 2012 controller and 7 agents on various VMs) and our Lab Management/test controller. Our plan, after a bit of thought, was to so a slow migration putting in new 2013 generation build and test controllers in addition to our 2012 ones....

We are testing the ‘social publish’ plugin for BlogEngine. Rik’s post has the details on what needs to be done to get it working with the current Twitter APIs

Update 27 Jun 2013 See update version of post with more data I seem to be involved with a number of TFS 2010 to 2013 upgrades at present. I suppose people are looking at TFS 2013 in the same way as they have historically looked at the first service pack for a product i.e: the time to upgrade when most of the main issues are addressed. That said TFS 2013 is not TFS 2012 SP1!...

We have eventually got around to the 2013 upgrade of our production TFS server. It had been put off due to some tight delivery deadlines around Christmas. The upgrade went fine, unlike out some previous ones we have had. The upgrading of our team process templates, to add the new features, was greatly eased by using Feature4Tfs tool on CodePlex. This meant one command line call and all the projects were done (we had no significant process customisation) as opposed to visiting in team project in the admin console....

I am upgrade an internal system from .NET 4.0 to 4.5 so that I can use the Team API features in TFS. The system is based around a WCF web service that links our customer help desk system to TFS to keep bug reports in sync. It uses Entity Framework to access our help desk SQL DB. When I changed the targeted .NET framework for the WCF project, I started to get warning to update the Nuget managed references for EF, which I did....

Just had a problem with a TFS 2012 Lab Management deployment build. It was working this morning, deploying two web sites via MSDeploy and a DB via a DacPac, then running some CodedUI tests. However, when I tried a new deployment this afternoon it kept failing with the error: The deployment task was aborted because there was a connection failure between the test controller and the test agent. If you watched the build deployment via MTM you could see it start OK, then the agent went off line after a few seconds....