There is a call for speakers for DDD South West on the 17th of May in Bristol. I have submitted as proposal, are you going to? For more details see http://www.dddsouthwest.com/ 

There have been significant changes in the DB schema between TFS 2010 and 2013. This means that as part of an in-place upgrade process a good deal of data needs to be moved around. Some of this is done as part of the actual upgrade process, but to get you up and running quicker, some is done post upgrade using SQL SPROCs. Depending how much data there is to move this can take a while, maybe many hours. This is the cause the SQL load. ...

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. I suspect this was the fact the new patch had been download onto the phones main storage, but this was a bit full of content from iPodcast (the otherwise excellent app I use for podcasts can’t store to my SD card). Just to be on the safe side I uninstalled iPodcast, did the GDR3 update and then reinstalled iPodcast. As I have the premium version I could easily restore my podcast lists, including what I had and had not listened to, from the cloud. ...

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 would then decide on an individual build agent VM basis what to do, probably upgrading the build agents and connecting them to the new controller. There seems to be no good reason to rebuild the whole build agent VMs with the specific SDKs and tools they each need. ...

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. ...