Update 23rd Aug 2012: This blog post was produced testing against the 2012RC, seems it does not work against the 2012 RTM release. I am seeing the error in my build logs _ TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Executor process exited._ I am looking into this, expect to see a new blog post soon Update 24th Aug 2012: I have fixed the issues with TFS2012RTM, the links to zip containing a working version of the activity in this post should now work....

I have been really pleased with Windows 8 RP on my Lenovo W520, I have had no major problems. I have seen the issues with slow start-up of networking after a sleep as others have seen, but nothing else. However today I tried to do a Lync audio call with Lync 2013 Beta and found I had no audio. Up to now I had just used the drivers Windows 8 installed which had seemed OK....

Updated 30th Aug 2012: This post is specific to TFS/VS 2012 RC - for details on the RTM see this updated post Whilst moving over to our new TFS2012 system I have been editing build templates, pulling the best bits from the selection of templates we used in 2010 into one master build process to be used for most future projects. Doing this I have hit a couple of problems, turns out the cure is the same for both...

I am pleased to say that Black Marble will be doing a session at the Leeds Sharp User group on the evening of the 30th of August on the [Samsung SUR40 with Microsoft PixelSense (what used to be call a Surface2)](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Specialisations&subsection=Samsung SUR40 (Surface 2)). Should be an interesting session as we will be bringing one of our rental units along for everyone to have a go on.

DDD10 registration opens today, and probably closes about 10 minutes later (server overloads allowing) from past experience. If you can’t make the date, or the don’t fancy the trip down south to TVP remember DDDNorth in October at Bradford University has many of the same speakers and is located in a far more convenient Yorkshire location.

Whilst moving all our older test Hyper-V VMs into a new TFS 2012 Lab Management instance I have had to address a few problems. I already posted about the main one of cross domain communications. This post aims to list the other workaround I have used. MTM can’t communicate with the VMs When setting up an environment that includes existing VMs it is vital that the PC running MTM |(Lab Center) can communicate with all the VMs involved....

I don’t know about your systems but historically we have had VMs running in test domains that are connected to our corporate LAN. Thus allowing our staff and external testers to access them from their development PCs or through our firewall after providing suitable test domain credentials. These test setups are great candidates for the new TFS Lab Management 2012 feature Standard environments. It does not matter if they are hosted as physical devices, or on Hyper-V or VMware....

I installed Office 2013 customer preview yesterday and all seemed good. Today I needed to create a new document using one of our company standard templates. I opened Word, went to the new document section and was presented with a list of great looking templates, but not my custom ones. The page suggested I used search to find more templates, it did find more templates from the Internet, but did not find my locally stored ones....

When I installed Office 2013 customer preview all seemed good, loads of new metro look Office features. However when I tried to load my previously working Visual Studio 2012RC I got the error “The procedure entry point _atomic_fetch_sub_4 could not be located in the dynamic link library devenv.exe”. This is a known issues with the C++ runtime and a patch was release last week, install this and all should be OK

On site recently I had a problem that I could not access the site settings in reporting services if I used Internet Explorer from an client PC. IE worked fine on the server and other browsers were OK on the client, just not IE. Initially I though it was just rights, but that was not the case Turns out this is down to Kerberos negotiation as discussed in the MSDN article....