I have just been reading Software Testing using Visual Studio 2012 by Subashni. S and Satheesh Kumar. N from Packt Publishing This book does what it says on the cover, it is a general introduction to the testing tools within the Visual Studio 2012 family. My comment is not about how well it is done, it is a clear enough introduction, but why produce a book that really just covers what is in MSDN, Channel9, numerous podcasts, blogs and ALM Rangers documentation?...

I have been using a Nokia 800 (Windows Phone 7.8) for a year or so and been happy with it. It does what I needed i.e. phone, email, media player mainly for podcasts. So given all the reported issues with WP8 and podcasts (no Zune client to manage the subscription/sync and you can only subscribe through the store if you are in the USA) I was not too keen to ‘upgrade’...

You can now vote for the sessions you wish to see at DDNorth2 Hope to see you there on Saturday 12th October 2013 in Sunderland

I was working on a TFS lab deployment today and to speed up testing I set it to pick the build of the TFS build that actually builds the code, as opposed to queuing a new one each time. It took me ages to remember/realise why it kept trying to deploy some ancient build that had long since been deleted from my test system. The reason was the build means the last successful build, not the last partially successful build....

I recently posted about adding extra VMs to existing environments in Lab Management. Whilst following this process I hit a problem, I could not create my new environment there was a problem at the verify stage. It was fine adding the new VMs, but the one I was reusing gave the error ‘Microsoft test manager cannot install test agent on these machines because another environment is being created using the same machines’...

A couple of years ago I wrote about using the TFSVersion build activity to try to sync the assembly and build number. I did not want to see build names/drop location in the format ‘BuildCustomisation_20110927.17’, I wanted to see the version number in the build something like ‘BuildCustomisation 4.5.269.17’. The problem as I outlined in that post was that by fiddling with the BuildNumberFormat you could easily cause an error where duplicated drop folder names were generated, such as...

I keep forgetting when you use TFS Integration Platform that the user who the tool (or service account is running as a service) is running as has to be in the “Team Foundation Service Accounts” group on the TFS servers involved. If they are not you get a runtime conflict something like Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Migration.Tfs2010WitAdapter.PermissionException: TFS WIT bypass-rule submission is enabled. However, the migration service account ‘Richard Fennell’ is not in the Service Accounts Group on server ‘http://tfsserver:8080/tfs’....

Background Back in 2008 Martin Woodward did a post on using a Nabaztag as a build monitor for TFS, ‘Brian the build bunny’. I did a bit more work on this idea and wired into our internal build monitoring system. We ended up with a system where a build definition could be tagged so that it’s success or failure caused the Nabaztag to say a message. This all worked well until the company that made Nabaztag went out of business, the problem being all communication with your rabbit was via their web servers....

If you are using network isolated environment in TFS Lab management there is no way to add another VM unless you rebuild and redeploy the environment. However, if you are not network isolated you can at least avoid the redeploy issues to a degree. I had a SCVMM based environment that was a not network isolated environment that contained a single non-domain joined server. This was used to host a backend simulation service for a project....

I wrote a post a while ago about ‘should I buy a Kindle’, well I put if off for over a year using the Kindle app on my WP7 phone, reading best part of 50 books and been happy enough without buying an actual Kindle. The key issue being poor battery life, but that’s phones for you. However, I have eventually got around to getting a Kindle device. They key was I had been waiting for something that used touch, had no keyboard, but most importantly worked in the dark without an external light....