DevOps seems to be the new buzz role in the industry at present. People who can bridge the gap between the worlds of development and IT pros. Given my career history this could be a description of the path I took. I have done both, and now sit in the middle covering ALM consultancy where I work with both roles. You can’t avoid a bit of development and a bit of IT pro work when installing and configuring TFS with some automated build and deployment. ...

When trying to run a newly created manual test in MTM I got the error dialog ‘You cannot run the selected tests, Object reference not set to an instance of an object’. On checking the windows event log I saw Detailed Message: TF30065: An unhandled exception occurred. Web Request Details Url: http://……/TestManagement/v1.0/TestResultsEx.asmx So not really that much help in diagnosing the problem! Turns out the problem was I had been editing the test case work item type. Though it had saved/imported without any errors (it is validated during these processes) something was wrong with it. I suspect to do with filtering the list of users in the ‘assigned to’ field as this is what I last remember editing, but I might be wrong, it was on a demo TFS instance I have not used for a while. ...

I have just published some documentation on theTFS2010 community build extensions RoboCopy activity

I have just published updated documentation on the SharePoint build activity for the Community TFS build extensions.

My Lenovo W520 is the best laptop I have owned, but I have had one major issue with it, external projectors. The problem is it does not like to duplicate the laptop screen output to a projector, it works fine if extending the desktop, not duplicating. Every time I have tried to use it with a projector I either end up only showing on the projector and looking over my shoulder, or fiddling for ages until it suddenly works, usually at a low resolution, I don’t know what I did to get to this point so I don’t dare fiddle any more so use it anyway. A bit of a problem given the number of presentations I do. A quick search shows I am not alone in this problem. ...

Recently I have had a problem with my LG E900 Windows Phone 7 running Mango. Whenever I try to make a purchase on marketplace I was getting the error “There has been a problem completing your request. Try again later” and seeing the error code 0x80070490. A search on the web, asking around everyone I thought might have an answer and placing a question on Microsoft Answers got me no where. ...

We have all done it, opened Word typed all morning, not bothering to save the file as we go along and then for some mad reason exited Word say you did not want to save. So you loose the mornings work. Now we know that Word does an auto save, but if you are stupid enough to say yes on exit without saving how do you get the auto backup file? Does Word even keep a backup if you never saved the file for the first time? ...

Background I have recently moved this blog server from using Community Server 2007 (CS2007) to BlogEngine.NET. We started blogging in 2004 using .Text, moving through the free early versions of Community Server then purchased Community Server Small Business edition in 2007. This cost a few hundred pounds. We recently decided that we had to bring this service up to date, if for no other reason, to patch the underling ASP.NET system up to date. We checked how much it would cost to bring Community Server to the current version and were shocked by the cost, many thousands of dollars. Telligent, the developers, have moved to only servicing enterprise customers, they have no small business offering. So we needed to find a new platform. ...

Hopefully you should not notice, but we have moved this Blog Server from using Community Server 2007 to BlogEngine.NET. We have been busy bring over all the content so any search should still return the same page, but it might take a few days. I will be posting on my experiences as soon as I have my notes sorted. THE MAIN CHANGE YOU MIGHT SEE IS THAT THE BM-BLOGGERS AGGREGRATE FEED HAS MOVED TO http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/syndication.axd ...

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning had a section on children not being taught computer science. so says a variety of employers who cannot find the staff they need. It seems entry to Computer Sciences degrees has been dropping over the years and the current ICT course at school are to blame. I was at school in the first generation to get access to computers. I did Computer Sciences O level (1982 I think, it is a while ago) and we learnt about flowcharts, CPU, memory and programmed in BASIC on a teletype and sent 5 hole punch paper tape off to a local Polytechnic for processing and a week or so later got back a printout saying error on line 10 (and my staff today complain about their slow PCs!). During the course we did at least move onto a Tandy TRS80 so it did get a bit more immediate. ...