I recently tried to get the free HP ALM Synchronizer to link to Microsoft’s TF Service, the summary is it does not work. However, it took me a while to realise this. The HP ALM Synchronizer was designed for TFS 2008/2010 so the first issue you hit is that TF Services is today basically TFS 2013 (and is a moving goal post as it is updated so often). This means when you try to configure the TFS connection in HP ALM Synchronizer it fails because it cannot see any TFS client it supports. This is fairly simple to address, just install Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 and patch it up to date so that it can connect to TF Service (you could go back to the 2008 and achieve the same if you really needed to) ...

Just done the update of my Windows 8 Media Center to 8.1. First issue was I looked in the store and could not see the update. I was looking for an ‘update’ in the top right not a huge application entry in the middle of the screen. Strange how you can miss the obvious The download took about 30 minutes which worked in background whilst I was using Media Center. It then did a reboot, the main install of files took about 30 minutes too. It seemed to sit at 85% for a long time, then another reboot. A few ‘preparing devices’ messages and ‘getting ready’ for a good 10 minutes, then ‘Applying PC settings’, another reboot then ‘setting up a few more things’ . I then had to accept some licenses, and login with a LiveID, and eventually it started, and everything was working. ...

I have been changing the mocking framework used on a project I am planning to open source. Previously it had been using Typemock to mock out items in the TFS API. This had been working well but used features of the toolset that are only available on the licensed product (not the free version). As I don’t like to publish tests people cannot run I thought it best to swap to Microsoft Fakes as there is a better chance any user will have a version of Visual Studio that provides this toolset. ...

Thanks to everyone who came to my DDDNorth session ‘Automated Build Is Not The End Of The Story’, the links to the tools I discussed are as follows Visual Studio Lab Management MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997438.aspx ALM Rangers best practice guidance http://vsarlabman.codeplex.com/ Building Environments SC-VMM http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610610.aspx ALM Rangers VM Factory http://vsarvmfactory.codeplex.com/ Chef http://www.opscode.com/chef/ Puppet http://puppetlabs.com/ Deployment ALM Rangers Test Infrastructure Guidance http://tig.codeplex.com/ ALM Rangers DevOps Workbench Express Edition http://vsardevops.codeplex.com/releases/view/111294 Octopus Deploy http://octopusdeploy.com/ Buildmaster http://inedo.com/buildmaster/overview InRelease http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/inrelease/

Whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to 2012 I had a problem that a build was showing in the queue as active after the upgrade. This build was queued in January, 10 months ago, so should have finished a long long time ago. This build had the effect that it blocked any newly queued builds, but the old build did not appear to be running on any agent – a zombie build. ...

I have previously posted about when TFS build controllers don’t start properly. Well I saw the same problem today whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to TFS 2012.3. The client did not want to immediately upgrade their build processes and decided to keep their 2010 build VMs just pointing them at the updated server (remember TFS 2012.2 and later servers can support either 2012 or 2010 build controllers). The problem was that when we restarted the build service the controller and agents appeared to start, but then we got a burst of errors in the event log and we saw the controller say it was ready, but have the stopped icon. ...

CPC who managed to send two resistor-capacitor balances for LED lights, which as about 1cm in size in a box as shown here Other than loads of that inflatable packing material there was a huge CPC catalogue, with the interesting sticker So an online electronics company, that provides free shipping (a really good thing when the components were only a couple of £s), chose to also send a very heavy catalogue that they know is out of date, when I have already used their quick and easy web site. ...

I have recently been automating TFS admin processes such as creating a new team within an existing team project. The TFS team is now our primary means we use to segment work so we need to create new teams fairly often, so automation makes good sense. As far as I can see, there are no command line tools, like TF.EXE or WITADMIN.EXE, to do most of the team operations. They are usually browser based. So I have been using PowerShell and the TFS API for the automation. ...

I posted a while ago about the problems with DHCP using a Hyper-V virtual switch with WIFI and an Ubuntu VM, well I never found a good solution without hard coding IP addresses. I recently tried using Mint 15 and was please to see this did not suffer the same problems, it seems happy with DHCP over Hyper-V virtual switches. I think I will give it a go a do a while for any cross platform TEE demos I need for a while. ...

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. ...