A key requirement for any DevOps strategy is the reporting on how your solution is behaving in the wild. PreEmptive Analytics™ for Team Foundation Server (TFS) can provide a great insight in this area, and there is a good chance you are already licensed for it as part of MSDN. So why not have a look on the UK MSDN site for more details the free Microsoft hosted event. MSDN Webinar Improve Software Quality, User Experience and Developer Productivity with Real Time Analytics...

Why is everything so complex to get going with Wix, then so easy in the end when you get the syntax correct? If you want to allow your MSI installer to upgrade a previous version then there are some things you have to have correct if you don’t want the ‘Another version of this product is already installed’ dialog appearing. The Product Id should be set to * so that a new Guid is generated each time the product is rebuild The Product UpgradeCode should be set to a fix Guid for all releases The Product Version should increment on of the first three numbers, by default the final build number is ignored for update checking The Package block should not have an Id set – this will allow it to be auto generated You need to add the MajorUpgrade block to you installer So you end up with...

I recently needed to upgrade a DNN V5 site to V7 (yes I know I had neglected it, but I was forced to consider a change due to an ISP change). Now this is a documented process, but I had a few problems. There are some subtleties the release notes miss out. This is what I found I had to do to test the process on a replica web site …...

If you look at the labels tab in the source control history in Visual Studio 2012 you could be confused by the changeset numbers. How can all the labels added by my different builds, done over many days, be associated with the same changeset? If you look at the same view in VS 2010 the problem is not so obvious, but that is basically due to the column not being shown....

Had an interesting issue on one of our WPF applications that is using MVVM Lite. This application is a front end to upload and download folder structures to TFS. On my development PC all was working fine i.e. when we upload a new folder structure to the TFS backend the various combo’s on the download tab are also updated. However, on another test system they were not updated. After a bit of tracing we could see in both cases the RefreshData method was being called OK, and the CollectionViews recreated and bound without errors....

Look what the stork delivered to Robert! He has bought himself a robot, and brought it in to the office to show to everyone today

Today I have been setting up a cross domain TFS proxy. The developers are in one domain and the TFS server in another. Given there is no trust between these domains you have use a trick to get it to work. So I created a local user tfsproxy.local on both the TFS server and proxy with the same password on each. At the proxy end I made this local user a local admin....

Interested in some tutor delivered training on TFS 2012? Well Anthony Borton, the TFS trainer and ALM MVP, is over in the UK running his excellent set of the TFS/VS 2012 focused courses. TFS 2012 Configuration and Administration 10th – 12th June 2013 | Course Outline Software testing with Visual Studio 201213th- 14th June 2013 | Course Outline TFS 2012 Developer Fundamentals 17th – 18th June 2013 | Course Outline Interestingly these courses can be taken in the room with the trainer or via Quicklearn’s Remote Classroom Instruction (RCI), so you can take the course in real time with the other students from the comfort of your own home/desk, but with all the benefits of a tutor classroom environment...

If you want to know the health of the TFS server there are a number of options from a full System Center MOM pack downwards. A good starting point are the performance reports and administrative report pack produced by Grant Holiday. Though the performance pack is designed for TFS 2008 they work on 2010 and 2012, but you do need to do a bit of editing. As the installation notes state, create a new shared data source called “TfsActivityReportDS” Set the connection string to: Data Source=[your SQL server];Initial Catalog=Tfs_[your TPC name] - this is the big change as it this used to point to the tfs_ActivityLogging DB, this (as of TFS 2010) is now all rolled into you Team project Collection DB, so you need to alter the connection string to match your TPC....

If you are using the TFS 2012 Java API it is important you read the release notes. It is not enough to just reference the com.microsoft.tfs.sdk-11.0.0.jar file in your classpath as you might expect. You also have to pass a Java system property that associates com.microsoft.tfs.jni.native.base-directory with the location of the native library files that provide platform specific implementation for method calls. The command line for this is done in the form...