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. I had to re-add it manually. Once this was done all was OK for the users ...

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. If it finds it great, let it do the upgrade If it does not find it, select the settings menu (top right in Zune) You need to select the update menu option on the left menu Zune will check for an update, about a second or two after it starts this process disconnect the PC from the Internet. This should allow Zune to get a list of updates, but not the filter list of serial numbers. So it assume the update is for you. You should get the update available message, reconnect the internet (it needs to download the file) and continue to do the upgrade You will probably have to repeat step 5 a few times to get the timing correct ...

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. Have a look at the blog posts, or even better pull down the CTP for a look. Also remember if you want to see new TFS features why not try them via a Team Foundation Server account? ...

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. The event seemed a great success, everyone seemed to enjoy it and we mentors saw huge progress in the entries of all the teams. Not just in new code written, but arguably the more important areas of better team working and presentation skill. ...

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. Also he outline what is to be in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, loads of tool enhancements. Have a look the posts to find out more ...

[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

Thanks to everyone who came along to the Microsoft event today at Modern Jago. I hope you all found it useful. I got feedback from a few people that my tip on not trusting company WIFI when trying to do remote debugging of Windows RT devices was useful (or any other type of device for that matter). I have seen too many corporate level Wifi implementation, and a surprising number of home ASDL/Wifi routers, doing isolation between WiFi clients. So each client can see the internet fine, but not any another Wifi devices. My usual solution is as I did today, use a MiFi or phone as a basic Wifi hub, they are both too dumb to try anything as complex as client isolation. Or look on your Wifi hub to check if you can disable client isolation. ...

I have been battling my Crucial M4-mSATA 256Gb SDD for a while now. The drive seems OK most of the time, but if for any reason my PC crashes (i.e. a blue screen, which I have found is luckily rare on Windows8) the PC will not start-up giving a ‘HDD2 cannot be found’ error during POST. I had not had this problem for a few months, so though it was fixed, then BANG yesterday Windows crashed out the blue (I was writing a document in Word whilst listening to music, not exactly a huge load for Core i7) and I hit the start-up problem. Of course I had been working on the document all afternoon and was relying on auto-save, not doing a real Ctrl S save to a remote network drive, so I expected to have lost everything. ...