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. ...

Updated 20 Oct 2014 – With notes on using an Action for cross domain authentication In my previous post I described how to get a network isolated environment up and running with Release Management, it is all to do with shadow accounts. Well getting it running is one thing, having a useful release process is another. For my test environment I needed to get three things deployed and tested A SQL DB deployed via a DACPAC A WCF web service deployed using MSDeploy A web site deployed using MSDeploy My environment was a four VM network isolated environment running on our TFS Lab Management system. ...

When working with web applications we tend to use MSDeploy for distribution. Our TFS build box, as well as producing a _PublishedWebsite copy of the site, produce the ZIP packaged version we use to deploy to test and production servers via PowerShell or IIS Manager To create this package we add the MSBuild Arguments **/p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:IsPackaging=True ** This was been working fine, until I upgraded our TFS build system to 2013.2. Any builds queued after this upgrade, that builds MSDeploy packages, gives the error ...

To make sure all our Word documents are consistent we use a Word template that include VSTO action pane. This allow us to insert standard blocks of text, T&C and the like, and also makes sure document revisions and reviews are correctly logged. We have used this for years without any issues, but I recently needed to make some changes to the underlying Word .dotx template and I had to jump through a couple of hoops to get it rebuilding in Visual Studio 2013 for Office 2013 (previously it had been built against Visual Studio 2008 generation tools) ...

TFS 2013.2 got RTM’d last night and is available on MSDN; interestingly Visual Studio 2013.2 is still only an RC, we have to wait for that to RTM. As we had a good proportion of our team at Build 2014 I took the chance to do the upgrade today. It went smoothly, no surprises, though the installation phase (the middle bit after the copy and before the config wizard) took a while. On our build agents, they all seemed to want reboot (or two) at this point, the TFS server did not, but took a good few minutes with no progress bar movement when I assume it was updating libraries. ...

Looking forward to speaking at Techorama in May, great range of speakers and subjects. Hope to see you there, for ticket details see http://www.techorama.be/tickets/