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....

I posted recently about my experiences in upgrading DotNetNuke 5 to 7, what fun that was! Well I have now had to do the move for real. I expected to follow the same process, but had problems. Turns out the key was to go 5 > 6 > 7. Once I did this the upgrade worked, turns out this is the recommended route. Why my previous trial worked I don’t know?...

Martin Hinshelwood did a recent post on moving source code between TFS servers using git tf. He mentioned that you could use the --deep option to get the whole changeset check-in history. Being fairly new to using Git, in anything other than the simplest scenarios, it took me a while to get the commands right. This is what I used in the end (using the Brian Keller VM for sample data) …...

With Visual Studio 2012 have you missed the automated unit test generation tools that were present in Visual Studio 2010? If you have then the ALM Rangers have produced the ‘Unit Test Generate VS Extension’. The first beta of this is now available on the VSGallery. Why not download it and try out so you can provide feedback to the team?

I have been doing some editing of the standard scrum TFS 2012 Sprint Burndown report in SQL 2012 Report Builder. When I ran the report after editing the MDX query in the dsBurndown DataSet to return an extra column I got an error: on a remote PC it just said error with dsBurndown dataset on the server hosting reporting services, or in Report Builder, I got a bit more information, it said the TaskName parameter was not defined....

Just watched a good session from TechEd USA 2013, it was billed as Agile Software Development with Microsoft Visual Studio ALM but has little that was specifically TFS based; no demos just war stories from Aaron Bjork and Peter Provost It is a good discussion of the problems, experiences and solutions the Microsoft Visual Studio team went through when trying to move to agile development, including Sprint lengths, be consistent across teams Retrospectives, do you actually act on them?...

If running an Ubuntu guest VM on Windows 8 Hyper-V you have a problem if you want to make use of a wireless network on the host machine. DHCP does not seem to work. Firstly you have to create a virtual switch in Hyper-V and connect it to your wireless card you can then connect a Network Adaptor on the Ubuntu guest VM to the new switch. Now for most operating systems this is all you need to do....

Today at TechEd USA Brian Harry announced Visual Studio 2013, have a look at his blog for details of the new ALM features. These include… Agile Portfolio Management Git source control on premises Revised team explorer including pop out windows Improvements in code editing and annotation Improvement in web based test management Team Room – chat like collaboration Cloud based web load testing The start of addition of release management to TFS via the purchase of InRelease For more info see the various sessions up on Channel 9

My Windows 8 based Lenovo W520 has an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wifi chipset, it has been giving me problems with this for a while. The most usual problem is that if I sleep or hibernate the PC when I restart it, in a different location, there is a chance I cannot connect to Wifi networks. I can see them, get a limited connection but no IP address as DHCP fails....

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on ‘TFS for Developers’ at the Grey Matter’s ‘Building Applications for the Future’ event today. As you will have noticed my session was basically slide free, so not much to share there. As I said at the end of my session to find out more have a look at Brian Keller’s TFS 2012 VM – ready to run demo VM with plenty of hands on labs Team Foundation Service – the free hosted version of TFS – go on give it a try....