Follow up to todays Typemock Webinar

Thanks to any one who attended my Typemock Isolator session today, hope you found it useful. In due course the video will be up on the Typemock site. But of you want to read more on using Isolator with SHarePoint have a look at Mocking Sharepoint for Design with Typemock Isolator Mocks SP2010 64bit Assemblies with Typemock Isolator

September 21, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Stupid gotchas on a SQL 2008 Reporting Services are why I cannot see the Report Builder Button

There is a good chance if you are using TFS that you will want to create some custom reports. You can write these in Reporting Services via BI Studio or Excel, but I wanted to use Report Builder, but could not see the Report Builder button on this Reporting Services menu The problem was multi-levelled First I had to give the user access to the Report Builder. This is done using folder property security....

September 21, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Another ALM/TFS focused blogger at Black Marble

Robert Hancock, another one of Black Marble’s ALM consultants, has started blog technical tips on this blog server. You can find Robert’s new blog here or the aggregate feed of all Black marble bloggers here

September 19, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

What to do when your TFS build agent says it is ready, but the icon says it is not

When using TFS2010 It is possible for a build agent to appear to be ready (or so the status label says) but the icon stays in the off state. This is usually due to a couple of broad categories of error, you can find out which by checking the Windows event log. The build agent cannot communicate with the controller In the event log you see something like Service ‘Default Agent - win7’ had an exception:...

September 17, 2011 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

TFS on Windows Azure preview announced at Build

At the Build conference today the preview of TFS on Windows Azure was announced. All the attendees of the conference have been given access codes for the preview. If you did not make it to Build have a look at Brian Harry’s blog for details of how everyone else can get access to the preview.

September 14, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Bitlocker keeps asking for my recovery key after a change in my disk’s MBR

My development laptop is bitlocker’ed, and yours should be too. It provides a great and non-invasive way (assuming you have a TPM chip) to protect you and your clients data on a machine that is far to easy to steal or loose. However, whilst fiddling with Windows 8 I did trip myself up. I have my PC setup for a boot to Windows 7 from a bitlocker’ed drive C with a non bitlocker’d drive D used to boot to Windows 2008 for demos (and hence no production data)....

September 14, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

First try with Windows8 and it won’t boot (updated with notes on a solution)

I tried to install Windows 8 Developer Preview on my Lenovo W520 laptop as a VHD boot. All seemed to go well following the same process as for windows 7. I got a nice new blue Window 8 boot partition choice screen (which went back to the Windows 7 DOS like one after I made Windows 7 my default partition). If I selected Windows 8 it tried to but but ended up with the error...

September 14, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Why can’t I see my custom work item types in Team Explorer?

If you are editing a TFS process template you have the choice editing XML files or using the Process Template Editor within the TFS 2010 PowerTools. Unfortunately neither is fool proof. You can make errors than means the revised template does not fully work. The worst of these errors will be picked up when upload the process template to a Team project Collection as during this process the XML is validated....

September 14, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Bradford the centre of all scientific advance (at least this week)

Over the weekend I took my son to the excellent ‘Bang goes the Theory’ Live road show which is part of the Festival of Science in Bradford. If a similar event is near you I recommend you go along, fun for all the family even if science is not really your thing. The whole event makes the subject very accessible to all. Even if I had not known this was on I might have guessed something as afoot in Bradford as virtually every Radio 4 news program has had a short article on some new scientific advance from Bradford University....

September 13, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

‘Expected to find an element’ error when running VS2010 Database unit tests

If you use the database unit testing feature of VS2010 there is a good chance you will want to run these tests on more than one PC and probably the build server. The issue is that these different PC will need different deployment paths and SQL connection strings. Luckily there is a feature to address this, as detailed on MSDN. Basically the test runner swaps in a different config file based on either the PC name or user running the tests....

September 12, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell