The HDMIPI screen I supported on KickStarter arrived this week. After a bit of a false start with a driver board that failed after a couple of minutes it is now all up and running. The replacement board arrived in 48Hours – great support service Now to get down to some projects – that toy robot does look like it needs automating via an IR transmitter and my PiFace

There has for a long time been an issue that when you try to add a new activity to the toolbox when editing a TFS build workflow Visual Studio can crash. I have seen it many times and never got to the bottom of it. It seems to be machine specific, as one machine can work while another supposedly identical will fail, but I could never track down the issue....

If you have a custom PowerShell script you wish to run you can create a tool in release Management (Inventory > Tools) for the script which deploys the .PS1, PSM files etc. and defines the command line to run it. The problem we hit was that our script failed, but did not fail the build step as the PowerShell.EXE running the script exited without error. The script had thrown an exception which was in the output log file, but it was marked as a completed step....

In a beautiful synchronicity the ALM Rangers DevOps guidance for PowerShell DSC has been release at at the same time as I am doing my DDDNorth session ‘What is Desired State Configuration and how does it help me?’ This Rangers project has been really interesting to work on, and provide much of the core of my session for DDDNorth. Well worth a look if you want to create your own DSC resources....

Whilst configuring a Release Management 2013.3 system I came across a confusing error. All seemed OK, the server, client and deployment agents were all installed and seemed to be working, but when I tried to select a build to deploy from both the Team Projects and Build drop downs were empty. A check of the Windows event log on the server showed the errors The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send...