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: Exception Message: There was no endpoint listening at http://controller.mydomain.co.uk:9191/Build/v3.0/Services/Controller/1 that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details. (type EndpointNotFoundException) ...

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.

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). To try out Windows 8 I added a new boot device, a boot from VHD partition. This edited the PC’s master boot record (MBR) and bitlocker did not like it. It thought the PC had a root kit or something similar to prompted me to enter a my bitlocker recovery key (which is 48 characters long) when I tried to boot to Windows 7. However, once this is done my bitlocker’ed Windows 7 partition worked find, but on each reboot I had to type the key in, bit of pain. Removing the new VHD boot entry did not help, the MBR has still be edited, so bitlocker complained ...

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 ...

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. ...

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. Today a lie detector using facial analysis and a new cancer treatment to name just the ones I remember. Now I went to Bradford and I know it is world leader in biomedical science, but I do wonder if they have been saving press released to get the biggest bang. Or is it the BBC and other media outlets are in Bradford at the festival so it is easy to get Bradford stories? ...

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. ...

If you look on the Black Marble web site you will find listing of the free events we are running up to the end of the year and into the new year. This year our events include 12 Oct 2011 [Re-Build – IT ](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Re-Build - IT)[Re-Build – Dev](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Re-Build - Dev) Black Marble will bring you the key announcements and developments from Microsoft Build about Windows 8 17 Nov 2011 [Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint) ...

I have in the past posted about developing SharePoint web parts without having to use a SharePoint server by using Typemock Isolator. This technique relies on using Cassini or IIS Express as the web server to host the aspx page that in turn contains the webpart. This is all well and good for SharePoint 2007, but we get a problem with SharePoint 2010 which seems to be due to 32/64bit issues. ...

I am doing a free webinar on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 3:00 PM BST with the title “Using Typemock Isolator to speed the development of SharePoint Web Parts”. For more details have a look at http://www.typemock.com/webinars the details should be up soon