As part of my on-going experiments to see what pieces of personal electronics can be put through a washing machine on 40C wash, I can confirm the headset off my Nokia phone has survived.

Yesterday I upgraded our production 2012.2 TFS server to update 3. All seemed to go OK and it completed with no errors, it was so much easier now that the update supports the use of SQL 2012 Availability Groups within the update process, no need to remove the DBs from the availability group prior to the update. However, though there were no errors it did reported a warning, and on a quick check users could not connects to the upgraded server on our usually https URL....

We use a VSTO based Word template to make sure all our documents have the same styling and are suitably reformatted for shipping to clients e.g revision comments removed, contents pages up to date etc. Normally we will create a new document using this template from our SharePoint server and all is OK. However sometimes you are on the road when you started a document so you just create it locally using a locally installed copy of the template....

Really pleased to say I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM. It great to be involved with such as activity community as the ALM crowd, can’t wait for the next summit in November.

The next DDDNorth event is to be held at Sunderland University on the 12th October. Session submission has now opened so why not get your session proposal in?

The way most big conferences manage to virtually live stream everything is very impressive. I started watching the stream of yesterdays Microsoft Build keynote on the office’s big projection screen with everyone else at Black Marble. I have always said the best way to enjoy a keynote is on the comfy sofa with a beer at the end of the day. So much better than an early queue then a usually over air conditioned hall with 10,000 close friends....

After last nights release of new TFS and Visual Studio bits at the Build conference I spent this morning upgrading my demo VMs. Firstly I upgraded to TFS 2012.3 and then snapshotting before going onto 2013 Preview. So by changing snapshot I can now demo either version. In both cases the upgrade process was as expected, basically a rerun of the configuration wizard with all the fields bar the password prefilled....

Just wasted a bit of time trying to find the build tab on a TFS Team Project hosted on the hosted http://tfs.visualstudio.com using a Git repository. I was looking on team explorer expecting to see something like But all I was seeing the the Visual Studio Git Changes option (just the top bit on the left panel above). It took to me ages to realise that the issue was I had cloned the Git repository to my local PC using the Visual Studio Tools for Git....

Background if you use Twitter in any web you will probably have noticed that they have switched off the 1.0 API, you have to use the 1.1 version which is stricter over OAUTH. This meant the Twitter feeds into our blog server stopped working on the 10th of June. The old call of http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=blackmarble did not work and just change 1 to 1.1 did not work. So I decided to pull down a different widget for BlogEngine....

An interesting change with Lab Management 2012 and SCVMM 2012 is that templates become a lot less useful. In the SCVMM 2008 versions you had a choice when you stored VMs in the SCVMM library. … You could store a fully configured VM or a generalised template. When you added the template to a new environment you could enter details such as the machine name, domain to join and product key etc....