Where did that email go?

We use the TFS Alerts system to signal to our teams what state project build are at. So when a developer changes a build quality to ‘ready for test’ an email is sent to everyone in the team and we make sure the build retention policy is set to keep. Now this is not the standard behaviour of the TFS build alerts system, so we do all this by calling a SOAP based web service which in turn uses the TFS API. ...

September 10, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Maybe I should have got the Nokia 925

I was at Jodrell Bank to see Sigur Ros last Friday. I could have really done with the low light features of Nokia 925 as opposed to my 820. The shots I took of the projected light show onto the radio telescope disk were not as good as I hoped. But the panorama earlier in the evening worked well

September 1, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

DDDNorth registration is now open

DDDNorth registration is now open, and I am sure will soon close and move to a wait list. So if you want to attend I would get in early

August 29, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Review of ‘Software Testing using Visual Studio 2012’ from Packt Publishing

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? ...

August 28, 2013 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

A week with a Nokia 820

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’ ...

August 21, 2013 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

DDDNorth session voting is now open

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

August 15, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Why is my TFS Lab build picking a really old build to deploy?

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 had a problem with my code build that means a test was failing (a custom build activity on my build agent was the root cause if the issue). Once I fixed my build box so the code build did not fail the lab build was able to pickup the files I expected and deploy them ...

August 1, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for ‘Cannot install test agent on these machines because another environment is being created using the same machines’

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’ ...

July 29, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Making the drops location for a TFS build match the assembly version number

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 ...

July 27, 2013 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

I can never remember the command line to add use to the TFS Service Accounts group

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’. ...

July 26, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell