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 ...

You don’t half get strange errors when building a test environment if when you run SYSPREP’d each copy of your VM base image you forget to check the ‘generalize’ box If you forget this, as I did, each VM has a different name but the same SID. Basically the domain/AD is completely confused as who is what. The commonest error I saw was that I could not setup application (Report Services, SP 2010 and TFS 2012) with domain service accounts. In all cases I got messages about missing rights or cannot communicate with domain controller. ...

With Microsoft Fakes moving to the Premium SKU of Visual Studio in 2012.2 (CTP4 is now available) more people will be looking at using them. I have just installed CTP4 and have seen a behaviour I don’t think I have not seen in the previous version of Visual Studio (I need to check because as well as CTP4 I have recently installed the new version of Typemock Isolator 7.3.0 that addresses issues with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012). ...

Worth noting that when you create a new TPC in TFS 2012, when the TFS configuration DB and other TPC DBs are in SQL 2012 availability groups, the new TPC DB is not placed in this or any other availability group. You have to add it manually, and historically remove it when servicing TFS. Though the need to remove it for servicing changes with TFS 2012.2 which allows servicing of high availability DBs ...

Whilst upgrading our Lab Management system we lost the SC-VMM DB. This has meant we needed to recreate environments we already have running on Hyper_V hosts but were unknown to TFS. If they were not network isolated this is straight forward, just recompose the environment (after clear out the XML in the VM descriptions fields). However if they are network isolated and running, then you have do play around a bit. ...

Another post from Rik Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force following our Lab Management upgrade