[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. ...

[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. ...

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’. Now this you have to say looks like a URL/binding issue, the tools cannot find an end point. ...

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. Our migration plan contained some team project collection detach/attach steps hence getting into the area this hotfix addresses. ...

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

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) I had suspected a problem with the logged as I was not seeing anything in DebugView, but it all took a while to track down as i did not seem to get any logging output. ...

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. However, after reading the comments I should have a look at XBMC too as it now has PVR features. Though it does look a bit more complex too setup! ...