SharePoint in my opinion is a better home for a Word or Visio requirements document than TFS. You can use all the SharePoint document workspace features to allow collaboration in the production of the document. When you have done enough definition to create your projects user stories or requirement then you can create them in TFS using whatever client you wish e.g. Visual Studio, Excel, Project etc. You can add a Hyperlink from each of these work items back to the SharePoint hosted document they relate to, so you still retain the single version of the source document. The thing to note here is that you don’t have to link to the last version of the document. If SharePoint’s revision control is enabled for the document library you can refer to any stored version. Thus allowing the specification document to continue evolving for future releases whilst the development team are still able to reference the specific version their requirements are based on. ...

It was announced at DDDSW that there will be a DDD event on the 8th October 2011 in Sunderland, DDD North. As of today, session submission is now open. Why not proposes one yourself?

Every time I add the Typemock Isolator custom activity to a TFS 2010 build I learn something new that eases the process. In the past I have posted on the basic process to get the activity into your build, and I would also draw your attention to the ALM rangers guide to build customisation, which provides loads of useful information on this front. Today, when I added the activity to a build I made the following improvements to the settings to make life a bit easier. This build is one used wildcard scanning for assemblies containing test with a test configuration file (this is the red usage in the documentation, it will make sense if you read the documentation) ...

I have been having a on-going project to run multiple build controllers on a single VM. Today I needed to reconfigure a on of the controllers to point at a different TPC. You have to do this the correct way to avoid problems. My error log was full of _Http communication failure: _Exception Message: Cannot listen on pipe name ’net.pipe://build/ServiceHost/1’ because another pipe endpoint is already listening on that name. (type AddressAlreadyInUseException) ...

When I plugged my WP7 LG-E900 today it told me there was a update. When I tried to install this it failed, twice. So I changed USB cable and plugged it directly into a port on my laptop, not my usually phone syncing cable plugged into my laptops docking station, and it worked. So not sure if it a USB cable quality issue, or a USB port issue, just something to remember. ...

When I plugged my WP7 LG-E900 today it told me there was a update. When I tried to install this it failed, twice. So I changed USB cable and plugged it directly into a port on my laptop, not my usually phone syncing cable plugged into my laptops docking station, and it worked. So not sure if it a USB cable quality issue, or a USB port issue, just something to remember. ...

Thanks to everyone who came to my session at NxtGen in Southampton last night, and congratulation to the people who won Typemock Isolator licenses kindly provided by Typemock. The session was meant to be based on TDD and Mocking, quite a big subject for 90 minutes. I of course had to gloss over some areas that are interesting around the edges of this subject. As I mentioned there are videoes of related sessions on this blog; also here are links on other subjects I touched on… ...

I presented last night at the West Yorkshire BCS and received a number of comments that it was great to see free training being available. This for me is one of the most important areas of our community, and an area we are very lucky with. There are plenty of opportunities to access knowledge….. Of late we have seen that the big vendor conferences (such as Microsoft’s TechEd, PDC and MIX) and the platform independent developer conferences (such as NDC) streaming their sessions live for free and also have their sessions available for free download within a few days. Microsoft’ Channel 9 is also an excellent resource of conference sessions and specially made material on a vast range of subjects from language design to scheduling of the buses on Microsoft campus. Or if you prefer to listen to something whist your drive why not try the .Net Rocks podcast. There are plenty more specialist resources out there on the web. ...

[Updated 1 mar 2012 - This should only effect you if Eclipse is unzipped into your ‘c:program files’ folder structure) During my new laptop build I have had to reinstall Eclipse, so I took the chance to upgrade to the Indigo release. When I tried to install the TFS 2010 Team Explorer Everywhere SP1 plug-in I got the error Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found. Software currently installed: Shared profile 1.0.0.1308118925849 (SharedProfile_epp.package.java 1.0.0.1308118925849) Missing requirement: Shared profile 1.0.0.1308118925849 (SharedProfile_epp.package.java 1.0.0.1308118925849) requires ‘org.maven.ide.eclipse [1.0.0.20110607-2117]’ but it could not be found ...

I have had my Lenovo W520 a week now and must say I am very happy with it. I am still hitting the wrong keys a good deal of the time, the only problem being the Fn and Ctrl keys are reversed in position from my old Acer, it is a good job Fn-V and Fn-C does nothing dangerous!. The keyboard is very nice to type on, a far more solid feel than any previous laptop I have had. ...