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 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 ...

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. At the time we did nothing about this, so just stopped using this feature of our build monitors. ...

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. In the next phase of the project we need to test accessing this service via RDP/Terminal Server so I wanted to add a VM to act in this role to the environment. ...

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. This is because I found one of the most useful features of the phone app was reading in bed without the need for a light. ...

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. ...