Typemock have released a new version of Isolator (7.3) that addresses some problems they have been having with Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 Resolved all issues concerning the breaking MS update Boosted performance across the board (up to 44% faster) Enhanced SmartRunner UI Improved mocking capabilities Better integration with .NET development ecosystem You can download this release, or a free trial if you don’t have an Isolator license, from the Typemock site

On the 17th of April I will be speaking at VISUG Conference in Antwerp. Looks to be an interesting day with 3 tracks, Win8, Web and ALM. I am on the ALM track with Martin Woodward and Neno Loje.

The new Windows 8 ALM Readiness Treasure Map application is available on the store. This is a great way to navigate a whole range of resources available for anyone involved in ALM work.

I recently wrote a post that discussed how the contributor rights had been stripped off areas in TFS 2012 server when QU1 was applied, this included details on the patches to apply the manual steps to resolve the problem. Well today I found that it is not just in the area security you can see this problem. We found it too in the main source code repository. Again the [Team project]contributors group was completely missing....

Microsoft have release Windows Phone 7.8 in the last few days. As usual the rollout appears to be phased, I think based on serial number of your phone. As with previous versions you can force the update, so jumping the phased rollout queue. The process is Put the phone in flight mode (so no data connection) Connect it to your PC running Zune, it will look to see if there is an OS update....

The Git support was not the only announcement for TFS at the ALM Summit last week. On Brian Harry’s blog you can see more on the new features either in the TFS/VS 2012.2 (Update 2) CTP or planned to appear in later CTPs. The list is long, but the ones that caught my eye beyond that of Git support are Microsoft Fakes moves from the Ultimate SKU to Premium, thus making it a ‘free’ option for many corporate developers as they already have that SKU Easier customisation of the Kanban board Tagging of workitems to allow flexible filtering Testing visibility in the web admin pages … and many other improvements....

I spent much of the weekend at the Imagine Cup North East Hackathon; for those of you who don’t know the Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s world wide student competition. This event was to help students in the North East of England to get there entries kick started before their regional final in a few weeks, which lead to the UK finals and for one team the worlds in Russia in July....

At the ALM Summit yesterday Brian Harry made some major TFS and Visual Studio announcements Git support for the hosted visualstudio.com, this allows you to choose if you want a centralised (existing TFS) source control repository or DVSC (using Git). There is also new tools with VS2012 to make using Git easier. Read more as to why Microsoft have made this addition to their offering in his blog. For those of you using on premises TFS you will have have to wait for the next major release of TFS, don’t expect to see this in a quarterly update....

[Updated 4 Fe 2013 See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/02/01/hotfixes-for-tfs-2012-update-1-tfs-2012-1.aspx for the latest on this ] One of the side effects of the problems we had with TFS 2012 QU1 was that when we created a new team within a team project contributors had no rights to the teams default Area. The workaround was that we had to add these rights manually, remembering to add these as you would expect is something you forget all the time, so it would be nice to fix the default....

If you are at a loose end next Thursday and in Leeds, why not check out the Coding Dojo at the Leeds Sharp user group. Unfortunately looks like I am on a client visit, but it does sound interesting