My session today at Modern Jago

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....

January 23, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More on HDD2 boot problems with my Crucial M4-mSATA

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....

January 22, 2013 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

TF237111 errors when trying to add work items to the backlog after TFS 2012 QU1 is applied

[Updated 4 Feb 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 ]_ I posted earlier in the week about my experiences with the post TFS 2012 QU1 hotfix. When I posted I thought we had all our problems sorted, we did for new team projects, but it seems still had an issue for teams on our team projects that were created prior to the upgraded from RTM to QU1. As I said in the past post we got into this position due to trying to upgraded a TPC form RTM to QU1 by detaching from the 2012 RTM server and attaching to a 2012 QU1 server – this is not the recommended route and caused us to suffer the problem the KB2795609 patch addresses....

January 18, 2013 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Incorrect IIS IP Bindings and TFS Server Url

By default the TFS server uses http://localhost:8080/tfs as it’s Server URL, this is the URL used for internal communication, whereas the Notification Url is the one TFS tells client to communicate to it via. Both these Urls can be changed via the Team Foundation Server Console, but I find you do not usually need to change the Server Url, only the notification one. I hit a problem recently on a site where if you tried to edit the Team Project Collection Group Membership (via the web or TFS admin console) you got a dialog popping up saying ‘HTTP 400 error’....

January 15, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Experiences applying TFS 2012 QU1 and it subsequent hotfix

Brian Harry posted last week about a hotfix for TFS 2012 QU1 (KB2795609). This should not be needed by most people, but as his post points out does fix issues for a few customers. Well we were one of those customers. When upgrading from 2012 RTM to 2012 QU1 we had attempted what with hindsight was an over ambitious hardware migration too. This involved swapping our data tier from a SQL 2012 instance to a new 2012 availability group and merging team project collections from different server as well as applying the QU1....

January 14, 2013 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking on Windows 8 development

On the 23rd of January I am doing a short presentation on the various options for Windows 8 development in Visual Studio 2012 as part of the Modern Jango ‘Tools for Windows 8 - Tips & Tricks on Visual Studio 2012 to inspire beautiful app development’ event. For more details check out the UK MSDN site

January 10, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Lost in nLog configuration files

I have been trying to track down a performance problem today on an ASP.NET MVC. It all turned out to be down to an incorrect connection string in a nLog.config file for logging to a SQL DB. As soon as I commented out the Db target for nLog my login to the web site was virtually instant as opposed to taking 30 seconds (what i assume is a SQL timeout)...

January 8, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

EPG for Windows Media Center is fixed

It seems that the EPG problem with Media Center has been fixed by Microsoft. The are publishing the EPG data again, so we don’t have to rely on the 7 day guide embedded within the TV signal. It is interesting to see the happy MCE users coming out the wood work on The Register’s comments section. We MCE users might not be too numerous, but the people who use it really seem to like it....

January 4, 2013 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More fun with Windows 8 Media Center

Signal Strength Since upgrading my Media Center PC to Windows 8, on the same hardware, I have seen that it seems to perform better that on Windows 7. However some channels seem to be dropping out, the usual digital pixilation or a message saying no signal (but often with some audio). As I had not changed any hardware I though this strange, but I have always seemed to have a borderline signal strength even though I can see my local terrestrial transmitter, it is about 15 miles away in direct line of sight....

January 3, 2013 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Why can’t I create an environment using a running VM on my Lab Management system?

With TFS lab management you can build environments from stored VM and VM templates stored in an SCVMM library or from VMs running on a Hyper-V host within your lab infrastructure. This second form is what used to be called composing an environment in TFS 2010. Recently when I tried to compose an environment I had a problem. After selecting the running VM inside the new environment wizard I got the red star that shows an error in the machine properties...

December 4, 2012 · 3 min · Richard Fennell