Twas the night before Christmas and…. To cut a long story short the PC that runs my Window Media Center (MCE) got switched on and off at the wall twice whilst Christmas tree lights were being put up. Now the PC is running WIndows 8.1 on modern hardware, so it should have been OK, and mostly was. However I found a problem that MCE was not showing any music, video or pictures in its libraries but the recorded TV library was fine. I suspected the issue was that my media is on an external USB3 RAID unit, so there was a chance that on one of the unintended reboots the drives had not spun up in time and MCE had ‘forgotten’ about the external drive. ...

If you are using the TFS API to get a list of user who have rights in a given version control folder you need to be careful as you don’t get back the domainuser name you might expect from the GetPermissions(..) call. You actually get the display name. Now that might be fine for you but I needed the domainuser format as I was trying to populate a peoplepicker control. ...

My Arc mouse started behaving strangely today, very jumpy. Felt like the cursor was being pulled left. Turns out the problem was a tiny hair caught in the led sensor slot You could see there was a problem as the led was flashing a lot, when it is normally solidly on if turn over the mouse you look into the slot. Once I got it out all was fine again ...

Thanks to anyone who came to my session ‘TFS is not just for Visual Studio users’ at the Visual Studio 2013 at NDC London yesterday. Hope you found it useful and are now thinking of TFS as a tool for heterogeneous teams, not just developers using Visual Studio. As I discussed there are many options: Developers can work within their IDEs Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 Any IDE based on Eclipse ...

The TFS 2013 Brian Keller demo VM is available at http://aka.ms/vs13almvm

Whilst in the USA last week I bought a Surface 2 tablet. Upon boot it ran around 20 updates, as you expect, but unfortunately one of these seemed to remove its ability to play MP4 videos, giving a 0xc00d36b4 error whenever you try. A bit of a pain as one of the main reasons I wanted a tablet was for watching training videos and PluralSight on the move. After a fiddling and hunting on the web I found I was not alone, so I added my voice to the thread, and eventually an answer appeared. It seems the Nvidia Audio Enhancements seem to be the problem. I guess they got updated within the first wave of updates. ...

Are you interested in building your own release pipeline using only the tools within TFS 2012 (or 2013)? If so why not have a look at the Microsoft Patterns & Practice publication Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012 it provides great background and a full work through via its hands-on-lab.

A guest post I wrote has just been published on the UK MSDN blog titled ‘How VPNs can help you use your MSDN Azure benefits with TFS Lab Management’

I have just published a new project to CodePlex http://tfsalertsdsl.codeplex.com/. Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) provides an alerting model where given a certain condition, such as a check-in, work item edit or build completion, an email can be sent to an interest party or a call made to a SOAP based web service. Using this SOAP model it is possible to provide any bespoke operations you wish that are triggered by a change on the TFS server. ...

Whilst testing a WCF web service I got the error The authentication schemes configured on the host (‘IntegratedWindowsAuthentication’) do not allow those configured on the binding ‘BasicHttpBinding’ (‘Anonymous’). Please ensure that the SecurityMode is set to Transport or TransportCredentialOnly. Additionally, this may be resolved by changing the authentication schemes for this application through the IIS management tool, through the ServiceHost.Authentication.AuthenticationSchemes property, in the application configuration file at the element, by updating the ClientCredentialType property on the binding, or by adjusting the AuthenticationScheme property on the HttpTransportBindingElement. Now this sort of made sense as the web services was mean to be secured using Windows Authentication, so the IIS setting was correct, anonymous authentication was off ...