Today Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Global Windows Azure Bootcamp event. To see what is happening check out the photos on our Facebook gallery and the #GlobalWindowsAzure Twitter hashtag

I have been trying to get SQL 2012 SSIS packages built on a TFS2012.2 build system. As has been pointed out by many people the problem is you cannot build SQL SSIS packages with MSBuild. This means you have to resort to call Visual Studio DevEnv.exe from within your build. Jakob Ehn did a great post on this subject, but it is a little dated now due the release of VS 2012 and SQL 2012 ...

I have just upgrade our Blog Server from BlogEngine.NET 2.7 to 2.8, all seems to have gone well, basically it is just file copies as there is no DB schema change, so… backup your blogs folder delete it’s contents copy in the the new release from the zip fix the SQL connection string copy around a few files as detailed in the release notes, basically any customisation you have done, That that seems to be it, just a case now of swapping themes to get the new look, if you want it ...

Thanks to everyone who attended my webinar session today in TFS Lab Management, I hope the audio issues were not too much of a problem and you found the session useful. We are looking into the causes of the audio problem so hopefully the next webinar will not need people dialling in via the phone unless they want to. A number of people asked for the slides, you can find a copy of them here. ...

If you are interested finding out more about TFS Lab Management why not come to the [Black Marble Bite size webinar](http://blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Tips for Visual Studio Lab Management (Black Marble Byte Size Webinar)) next Tuesday (23rd April). I will be giving a basic overview of the product and discussing some of our experiences implementing it.

I have mentioned in past posts the issues we had doing our first quarterly update for TFS 2012. Well today we had scheduled our upgrade to 2012.2 and I am please to say it all seems to have worked. Unlike the last upgrade, this time we were doing nothing complex such as moving DB tier SQL instances; so it was a straight upgrade of a dual tier TFS 2012.1 instance with the DB being stored on a SQL2012 Availability Group (in previous updates you had to remove the DBs from the availability group for the update, with update 2 this is no longer required). ...

I had a great time yesterday at the VISUG Conference in Antwerp, thanks to everyone involved in event. The ALM track organiser Pieter and all the speakers, myself, Martin and Neno, were really pleased to see how full our room was all day. There certainly seems to be more interest in ALM than ever before. If you want to find out more on areas of TFS I was talking on i.e connecting from environments other than Visual Studio, why not look at a very similar session I recorded last year, it can be found on Channel9. ...

Whist testing an upgrade of TFS 2010 to TFS 2012.2 I was getting a number of verification errors in the TFS configuration upgrade wizard. They were all TF400129 based such as TF400129: Verifying that the team project collection has space for new system fields but also mention models and schema. A quick search threw up this thread on the subject, but on checking the DB tables I could see my problem was all together more basic. The thread talked of TPCs in incorrect states. In my case I had been provided with an empty DB, so TFS could find not tables at all. So I suppose the error message was a bit too specific, should have been ‘DB is empty!!!!’ error. Once I got a valid file backup restored for the TPC in question all was ok. ...

I am often asked how well TFS it can be integrated within a company’s larger management processes. This is an especially common question in companies where developing software is not their primary business, it is just a means to enable the business’s core business. A really nice discussion on this question can be found on a recent .Net Rocks about Columbia Sportswear, well worth a listen.

This is a follow up to my older post on a similar subject When composing a new Lab Environment from running VMs the PC you are running MTM on needs to be able to connect to the running VMs. It does this using IP so at the most basic level you need to be able to resolve the name of the VM to an IP address. If your VM is connected to the same LAN as your PC, but not in the same domain the chances are that DNS name resolution will not work. I find the best option is to put a temporary entry in your local hosts file, keeping it for just as long as the creation process takes. ...