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. ...

I did a post a year or so ago about setting up TFS Labs and mentioned command C:Program FilesMicrosoft Team Foundation Server 2010Tools>tfsconfig lab /hostgroup /collectionName:myTpc ?/labenvironmentplacementpolicy:aggressive /edit /Name:“My hosts group” This can be used tell TFS Lab Management to place VMs using any memory that is assigned stopped environments. This allowed a degree of over commitment of resources. As I discovered today this command only works for SCVMM 2010 based system. if you try it you just get a message saying not support on SCVMM 2012. There appears to be no equivalent for 2012. ...

My son is really taken with Kerbal Space Program. This great games allows you to design your own space craft and so run your own on-going space program, all with a realistic physics engine. What is particularly nice is that this cross platform Mono based application is being built in a very agile manner with a new release most weeks, each adding features as well as bug fixes. There also seems to be an active community of people building plug-ins for extra space craft components and rovers. ...

Using the Typemock TFS 2012 Build activity I created I had started seen the error TF900548: An error occurred publishing the Visual Studio test results. Details: ‘The following id must have a positive value: testRunId.’ I thought it might be down to having patched our build boxes to TFS 2012 Update 1, maybe it needed to be rebuild due to some dependency? However, on trying the build activity on my development TFS server I found it ran fine. ...

Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Chapter of the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp taking place in several locations globally on the April 27th, 2013. This free community organised event is one day deep dive class where you will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Windows Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. ...

I have been battling setting up a DB deployed via the SQL 2012 DAC tools and Powershell. My environment was a network isolated pair of machines DC – the domain controller and SQL 2012 server IIS – A web front end As this is network isolated I could only run scripts on the IIS server, so my DB deploy needed to be remote. So the script I ended up with was ...