After applying SP1 to a SharePoint 2010 farm we found we were unable to run any macros in an Access Services site, it gave a –4002 error. We had seen this error in the past, but the solutions that worked then did not help. As this site was critical, as a workaround, we moved the site to a non-patched SP2010 instance. This was done via a quick site collection backup and restore process. This allowed us to dig into the problem at our leisure. ...

[Also see http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/post/2013/01/22/More-on-HDD2-boot-problems-with-my-Crucial-M4-mSATA.aspx] I have just reinstalled Windows 8 (again) on my Lenovo W520. This time it was because I moved to a Crucial m4 256Gb 2.5” internal SSD as my primary disk. There is a special slot for this type of drive under the keyboard, so I could also keep my 750Gb Hybrid SATA drive to be used for storing virtual machines. I had initially planned to backup/restore my previous installation using IMAGEX as I had all I needed in my PC, but after two days of fiddling I had got nowhere, the problems being ...

A video has just be uploaded that I did on the new unit testing features in Visual Studio and TFS 2012. This is quick 10 minute introduction to some of the material I will be covering at DDDNorth next weekend. Hope you find it useful

Whilst setting up new a new SC-VMM based lab environment I managed to find some new ways to fail above and beyond the ones I have found before. We needed to build a new environment for testing CRM application, this needed to have its own DC, IIS server and a CRM server. The aim was to have this as a network isolated environment, but you have to build it first as the various VMs. ...

I started working today on a solution I had not worked on for a while. It makes use of an ASP.NET web application as a site to host SharePoint webparts (using Typemock to mock out any troublesome calls). The problem I had was that when I opened this VS2010 solution in VS2012 I could not run up this test web site. As the test web pages have WebpartManager controls it needs an ASPNETDB in the AppData folder to persist the settings data. This is usually auto created when SQLExpress is installed, problem is with VS2012 you get the newer LocalDB and I am trying to avoid installing SQLExpress ...

I posted last week on the problems I had had getting the test agents and controller in a TFS2012 Standard environment talking to each other and a workaround. Well after a good few email with various people at Microsoft and other consultants at Black Marble I have a whole range of workarounds solutions. First a reminder of my architecture, and note that this could be part of the problem, it is all running on a single Hyper-V host. Remember this is a demo rig to show the features of Standard Environments. I think it is unlikely that this problem will be seen in a more ‘realistic’ environment i.e. running on multiple boxes ...

Updated 1st October – See the Part 2 post which provides more workaround solutions Whilst setting up a TFS 2012 Standard Lab Environment for an upcoming demo I hit a problem. Initially my environment had worked fine, I could deploy to my server VM in the environment without error. However, after a reboot of the TFS server (which has the build and test controllers on it) and the single server VM in the environment, the test agent on the VM could not connect to the test controller on the TFS SERVER. The VM’s event log showed ...

Some great news today from Typemock, there is now a free basic edition of Typemock Isolator. The addresses a key historic problem with Isolator, that of its cost when you don’t need the advanced features of Isolator all the time. Now if you need the cool advanced mocking features of Isolator, such as mocking sealed private classes, then the cost is not really a factor, you buy the product or don’t get the features. However what do you do if you just want to do just do ‘normal mocking’ in a project ? e.g. mock out an interfaces. Do you use Typemock as you already have it, or swap to a different mocking framework, only using Typemock when you have to use its advanced features? ...

I have recently had to do some work on a MVC 1 application and thought it sensible to bring it up to MVC 3, you don’t want to be left behind if you can avoid it. This was a simple data capture application written in MVC1 in Visual Studio 2008 and never needed to be touched since. A user fills in a form, the controller then takes the form contents and stores it. The key point to note here is that it was using the Controller.UpdateModel Method (TModel, IValueProvider) method, so most of the controller actions look like ...

After I installed Windows 8 RTM I still had two devices missing drivers. I have made a little progress Base System Device - was the Ricoh PCIe SDXC/MMC Host controller I used this Win 8 beta driver Unknown driver – seems to be the Lenovo Power Management devices. However the Win 8 Beta driver fails to install. I had to use the Windows 7 driver, installed OK and seems to show the right information in the tool tray, but in Device Manager it still says the unknown driver. I guess I really need to wait until Lenovo ship their release drivers ...