Updated 19th Nov 2014 Every few months I find a PC needs to be re-paved – just too much beta code has accumulated. I reached this point again on my main 4 year old Lenovo W520 recently. Yes it is getting on a bit in computer years but it does the job; the keyboard is far nicer than the W530 or W540’s we have and until an ultrabook is shipped with 16Gb of memory (I need local VMs, too many places I go to don’t allow me to get to VMs on Azure) I am keeping it....

Microsoft are running a free web-based event Connect() on the 12th and 13th of November. Should be well worth a watch to see the planned direction of developer tooling.

I have posted before about using Release Management with Lab Management network isolation. They key is that you must issue a NET USE command at the start of the pipeline to allow the VMs in the isolated environment the ability to see the TFS drops location. I hit a problem today that a build failed even though I had issued the NET USE. I got the error Package location ‘\storedropsSabs.Main.CISabs.Main.CI_2.5.178.19130\’ does not exist or Deployer user does not have access....

Whilst working on a SSRS based report I had hit a sort order problem. Entries in a main report tablix needed to be sorted by their OrderNumber but this was in the form 1.2.3; so a neither a numeric or alpha sort gave the correct order i.e. a numeric sort fails as 1.2.3 is not a number and an alpha sort worked but give the incorrect order 1.3, 1.3.1, 1.3.10, 1....

I don’t normal do posts that are just re-posts of TFS announcements, it is much better to get the information first hand from the original post, but this one is significant for us in Europe… Up to now there has been a barrier to adoption of VSO that the underlying data will be hosted in the USA. Now there are all the usual Azure Microsoft guarantees about data security, but this has not been enough for some clients for legal, regulatory or their own reasons....