The registration has opened for DDDNorth 2 (In Bradford) where I will be speaking on Unit testing in VS2012 Also my Raspberry PI has just arrived – after only 6 months of waiting, but I don’t think I can work it into my DDDNorth session

I posted previously on getting Typemock 7.x running in a TFS 2012 RC build process . Well it seems the activities I previously published did not work on the TFS 2012 RTM build i.e if you do nothing other than upgrade your TFS server from RC to RTM a previously working build fails, no attempt was made to run any tests and I got the unhelpful error TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Executor process exited....

We have just completed the upgraded of our TFS2012 server from RC to RTM. All went smoothly, just a few comments worth mentioning The install of TFS2012 (after the removal of the RC) required three reboots, 2 for C++ components and one for .NET 4.5. So if seeing reboots don’t worry too much. When running the upgrade wizard we got a verify warning over port 443 already being used (we had manually configured via IIS manager for our server to use 8080 and 443)....

I have been away over the weekend seeing family, and as anyone who is in IT (or is a medical doctor I suspect) would expect I had the standard experience – everyone wanted me to show me something they were worried about that turned to be virus related. This trip I did one operating system upgrade, one network printer installation and de-virused three PCs. So nothing out of ordinary. The one thing I would mention was how useful I found the contents of Mark Russinovich’s TechEd Session ‘Malware Hunting with the Sysinterals Tools’....

First I thought I could do an in-place upgrade of my Windows 8RC PC, turns out you can’t (not sure if it would have been wise anyway) so it was format disk time. I had hoped for a seamless install of Windows 8, but it hung after detecting devices. It seems it was the ‘old problem’ down to Lenovo/Nvidia Optimus graphics drivers issues. So I checked my bios settings which were set to Nvidia Optimus mode disabled (the only way I could get the RC to install), and changed it to Optimus mode enable and the install all worked without an issue....

If like me you listen to many podcasts, then swapping the PC your Phone7 syncs to collect the podcasta is a real pain. The problem being as far as I can see Zune has no podcast subscription export/import, so you are left with a lot of copy typing to re-enter them. Whilst rebuilding my PC with Windows 8 today I have at least found a work around On your old Pc open you ‘c:user[user]My Podcasts’ folder (shown in Windows Explorer as the ‘Podcast’ folder)....

Overnight Visual Studio and TFS 2012 became available on MSDN for download; I really pleased to say that the ALM Rangers also SIM shipped all our 2012 guidance at the same time. I have been working on two of the Ranger project for the past year and have to say I have learnt a lot working with such a great crowd of Microsoft and external TFS experts. Some stuff I learnt was about the 2012 release it is true, but there was plenty on working with a a globally distributed team with a whole host of logistical and time constraints....

Whilst moving over to our new TFS 2012 installation I got the following error when a build tried to run tests TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.’. This was a new one on me, and nothing of much use on the web other than a basic MSDN page. Turns out the immediate fix is to just restart the build controller....

At last my Nokia Lumia 800 gets its firmware upgrade to allow tethering. The 8773 update seems to be made up of three updates, two operating system ones (which I managed to force down in the usual way), but this Nokia firmware one has taken weeks to get to me, forcing did not help. I had to wait. I don’t think I am alone in not being too impressed with the update process....

In my last post I discussed the process I needed to go through to get Typemock Isolator running under TFS 2012. In this process I used the Auto Deploy feature of Isolator. However this raised the question of how to manage the references within projects. You cannot just assume the Typemock assemblies are in the GAC, they are not on the build box using auto deploy. You could get all projects to reference the auto deployment location in source control....