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Visual Studio 2010 provides many new features to aid Application Lifecycle Management. Learning its capabilities can be a bit daunting, especially if you are new to Team Foundation Server. So enter the new book ‘Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010: with Team Foundation Server 2010’ by Mickey Gousset, Brian Keller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy and Martin Woodward. This provides a great overview of all the the key features of Visual Studio and TFS 2010, presented with a view as to how TFS gives an end to end delivery of an ALM process. ...

Got time today to start our proper internal TFS 2010 rollout. This involves linking up the new TFS to our SharePoint 2010 farm and merging in the contents from 2008 TFS and 2010 RC servers. All went fairly well, our SharePoint farm caused a few problems with its rather nice redirection feature. This allows you to gradually move SharePoint content from an older server to a new one. A page is requested from the new server, if it is there it is used, if it is not the content on the old server is used. This caused a couple of problems during the install of TFS that content was not on the new SharePoint server so it redirected to the old one. However, the correct response was that the content was not there and TFS need to install or configure it. Once we realised this was going on there were no major issues with the TFS 2010 installation. ...

A while ago I blogged about the problems I was having with 403 error when trying to use my HTC phone as a 3G modem or using Opera or IE on the phone itself. When I initially complained Vodafone refunded my data fee for the month and said engineers were onto this known intermittent issue. No grief, Ok I did not want to see 403 errors but I was happy with the customer service, fast and no quibble. ...

After upgrade TFS 2010 RC to RTM you might see a problem when you try to create a new team project. The creation fails with error: Module: Engine Event Description: TF30162: Task “Queries” from Group “WorkItemTracking” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: TF237195: The following user name is not supported: [SERVER]$$PROJECTCOLLECTIONADMINGROUP$$ The answer is simple, but I had missed it! Make sure that you are creating your new team project from a copy of the 2010 RTM version of Team Explorer. If you use the RC version you will see the error. ...

I have an article posted on the Typemock Insider blog about the Typemock Academy I attended.

I recently did an in-place upgrade of a TFS 2010 RC to RTM box. All appeared to be going fine, all the verification in the upgrade wizard passed, but when I hit configure the first step failed. It said there was a missing dbo.sysobjects in the warehouse DB. I then had to resort the configuration DB as it was partly upgraded to try again as the DB was left partially upgraded. ...

I have a basic installation of TFS 2010 running on my Windows 7 laptop. This is really useful for testing build customisation and the like, a great new feature for 2010. Today I got around to trying to upgrade it from RC to RTM, but on the verification test I got the error [ Configuration Database ] TF255407: An error occurred while attempting to validate the configuration database. Error message: TF246064: No database could be found for the following host: TestCollection. The host has the following ID: eaf3c572-8657-4268-9852-3d73a799cdf5. To fix this problem, use the TFSConfig RemapDBs command-line tool and make sure that you specify the SQL Server instance that contains this database. ...

A PDF version of my slides for my session at the Typemock Academy on SharePoint testing with Typemock are available on the Black Marble site.

I am off to Oslo, for the first time, for the Typemock Academy this week. The event has managed to survive the disruption of the Icelandic volcano. A great chance to meet a pile of people I have only spoken toon the phone or via email in the past. Looking forward to it.

In my previous post I talked about using Isolator to mock Sharepoint to aid the speed of the development process. I find this a productive way of working, but it does not really help in the realm of automated testing. You need a way to programmatically explore a webpart, preferably outside of SharePoint to check its correctness. You could use the methods in my previous post and some form of automated web test, but this does mean you need to spin up a web server of some descriptions (IIS, Cassini etc. and deploy to it) An alternative is look at the Typmock addin Ivonna. This a creates a fake web server to load you page and tools to explore it. ...