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. Sometimes using the hardware Wifi switch on the front left of the PC helps, sometimes switching into Windows 8 airplane mode and back out does, but not always. Often I need to restart the PC. ...

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. Brian Harry’s Blog – all announcements on TFS can be found here Also a couple of people asked by about TFS and Eclipse, which I only mentioned briefly at the end. For more on Team Explorer Everywhere look at the video I did last year on that very subject ...

I have been out to a number of sites recently where there are C++ developers. We often get talking about package management and general best practices for shared libraries. The common refrain is ‘I wish we had something like Nuget for C++’. Well it was released in Nuget 2.5 and there is a video on Channel9 all about it.

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 Tuesday, May 28 2013: 4:00 – 5:00 pm (UK Time) ...

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. ...