Recently I posted on How to use the TFS 2010 Community StyleCop Build Activity and I am sure it all sounded very awkward and complex, well it did to me. The point I should have made is that you don’t have to follow this process every time you want to make use of the custom activity. As long as the build process template is the same between to builds you can just copy it, you only need to follow the method in the post the first time. ...

Over the holiday I have been reading Professional Foundation Server 2010 by Ed Blankenship, Martin Woodward, Grant Holiday and Brian Keller, yes I know how to have time off and have fun! So who is this book for? It is a comprehensive guide to TFS 2010, the components and their usage, but this does not mean the book is only for teams new to TFS or people planning to take certification exams. Spread throughout there are useful little titbits of information where you find yourself going ‘I never know that’ or ‘arr.. that explains so much’ ...

I am always being asked when at events for details of books I have recommended. So I have added a list of books I have found useful to this blog, it can be found at http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/pages/reading-list.aspx. Thus far I have added the ones I have been looking at recently, but will add more as I go along. Hope you find them as useful as I have

[Updated 27th April 2011 Also see How to use the TFS 2010 Community StyleCop Build Actvity (Addendum)] The Codeplex Community TFS Build Extensions contains a StyleCop activity, but the way to use it is less than obvious. This is not helped by the complexity in using any custom activity within TFS 2010 builds. In this post I will try to show how to get going with the StyleCop activity, which might shed some light on using other custom assemblies. ...

A while ago I posted on my experiences running multiple instances of 2010 build service on a single VM. Well a couple more experiences as now one of my VM is running 3 instances. Firstly it seems to work OK, you have to have the right build profile i.e. fairly low load but a need to support many Team Project Collections. This is not a solution for a highly loaded build environment. At Black Marble we run a TPC per client model and tend to have fair few projects on the go at any one time, so need plenty of build controllers. However, in general the builds are small, taking minutes not hours If we have a seriously long running build I would still create a dedicated build service VM. ...

Over the weekend we have released Black Marble’s WP7 TFS Phone client to the WP7 Marketplace. This app allows the user of a WP7 phone to access their TFS server to perform common operations. They can: See recent builds and drill into the results Queue new builds View and add work items This client talks via a custom web service to a TFS 2008 or 2010 server, which are available from Black Marble. But if you just want a quick look to see what it can do we have setup a demo web service so you can trial the application, just use the default account details stored in the application. These are ...

When trying to create a new Team Project on TFS2010 from a client PC I got the following error _Event Description: TF30162: Task “UploadStructure” from Group “Classification” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Inner Exception Details:_ Exception Message: TF205029: No catalog resource type exists with the following identifier: 41c8b6db-39ec-49db-9db8-0760e836bfbe. (type CatalogResourceTypeDoesNotExistException) However if I did the create on the TFS console all was fine. Turned out the problem was due to the caching done by Team Explorer in Visual Studio. Exiting the copy of VS2010 on the client and reloading it fixed the problem as the updated team process settings will cached locally. ...

Whist configuring a new TFS2010 server I got the error TF255115: The following service did not start: TfsJobAgent. Cannot start service TfsJobAgent on computer ‘’. This was identical to the thread on MSDN and it turned out my problem was similar. I was installing TFS onto drive D:APPS, not the usual C:PROGRAM FILE. The problem was the User group did not have the default Read & Execute, List Folder Contents and Read rights on the D:APPS directory and sub directory, the right all users have on C:PROGRAM FILES. ...

When your PC reaches the point that MSI cannot connect to the Install Service you know it is time to repave the PC. This is the time to you have to try remember what you installed on the PC, your license codes and how you actually got things to work. So going through this process this week all went OK until I tried to remember how I handled bitlockered VHDs. ...

I am speaking at the BCS group in Edinburgh on the 11th of May in Agile and Lean Methods. For more details see http://edinburgh.bcs.org.uk/events/2010-11/110511.htm