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

Rik has done a post on creating VMs for Lab management to follow up on the one I did yesterday on our Lab upgrade.

Background We have been successfully using our TFS Lab Management system for a while. However, we have noticed an issue that when deploying environments the performance of the system slowed. This was down to I/O congestion between our servers and the SAN that provided their main VM storage because the library store and the hyper-v host servers all shared the same SAN. Also we had the need to start to create environments using Windows 8 and Server 2012. This is not possible using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 or Hyper-V hosted on earlier than Windows 2012. ...

Yesterday two new ALM Ranger projects shipped, practical guidance on the use of Microsoft Fakes (which I worked on) and for Team Foundation Server (TFS) Disaster Recovery avoidance, planning and step-step recovery walkthroughs for the worst case scenarios. Also updates for the Coded UI test tooling guide and the TFS Upgrade guide were released.. For more details see below to follow the links to the Ranger blogs and CodePlex to download the materials. ...

About a year ago I wrote a post ‘Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint?’. Well this discussion becomes relevant for more people as with Visual Studio 2012.2 (currently available as a CTP) the Microsoft Fakes move from the Ultimate SKU to the Premium SKU. From my experience the Ultimate SKU is not present on too many developer’s PCs. It is most commonly found on the PCs of the team leads, software architects or test developers (managing coded UI/load testing etc. efforts). If a team was historically going to use Microsoft Fakes then they had to buy more Ultimate SKUs; as what is the point of a unit test using a mocking framework that only part of the team can run? ...

Whilst at the MVP Summit in Redmond last week there were MVP2MVP sessions, these are much like DDD conferences we have in the UK, sessions delivered by MVPs on their experiences and products they offer. One of the most interesting I saw last week was VS Anywhere. This is an extension to Visual Studio that allows distributed pair programming. This far more than desktop sharing in Skype or Lync, think more like the concurrent document editing in Office 365. ...