Posts

A slight change to the usually arrangement this month at Agile Yorkshire. The speaker will Martin Fowler who will be talking on “Software Design in the 21st Century”, but the meeting will be on the 17th March (which is a week later than usual) and at a new venue The Adelphi in Leeds. This promises to be a very interesting session. I saw Martin speak at a JavaOne conference, a good few years ago now, and it is still one of the best presentations I have seen at any conference. He is an engaging speaker with much to say about our industry. ...

Some DDD event news Registration has opened for DDD Scotland There is a call for speakers at DDD South West There is a call for speakers at SQLBits If you have never been to a DDD style event before why not give it a try; they are free and you are sure to learn something. Unlike the DDD events in Reading these ones don’t fill up so fast that you cannot register because you stupidly went to make a up of tea just before they opened registration and it was full before you got back. ...

I have been doing some more work integrating Typemock and VS 2010 Team Build. I have just wasted a good few hours wondering why my test results are not being published. If I looked at the build log I saw my tests ran (and pass or failed as expected) and then were published without error. But when I checked the build summary it said there were no tests associated with the build, it reporting “No Test Results” ...

I find one of the most often overlooked new features of 2010 is the Symbol Server. This is a file share where the .PDB symbol files are stored for any given build (generated by a build server, see Jim Lamb’s post on the setup). If you look on the symbol server share you will see directories for each built assembly with a GUID named subdirectory containing the PDB files for each unique build. ...

This year’s DDD South West has been announced for the 5th of June in Bristol, for details see the dddsouthwest.com site

Week after next I will be speaking at QCon London with Simon Thurman of Microsoft on “The Interoperable Platform”. So what does that title mean? Well for me, for this session, it will be about how you can use the ALM features of TFS even when using Eclipse for Java development. So it will be a demo led session on the Teamprise tools for Eclipse and how they can allow you to build a unified development team that works in both .NET and Java. ...

When you use the InvokeProcess activity, as I did in my Typemock post, you really need to setup the logging. This is because by default nothing will be logged other than the command line invoked, not usually the best option. There are a couple of gotta’s here that initially caused me a problem and I suspect could cause a new user of the 2010 build process a problem too. The first is that you need to declare the variable names for the InvokeProcess to drop the output and errors into. This is done in the workflow designer putting the variable names in the relevant textboxes (there is no need to declare the variable names anywhere else) as shown below. Use any name you fancy, I used stdOutput and stdError. ...

You may have noticed that Microsoft have had another burst of renaming. The tester’s tool in VS2010 started with the codename of Camaro during the CTP phase, this became Microsoft Test & Lab Manager (MTLM) in the Beta 1 and 2 and now in the RC it is call Microsoft Test Manager (MTM). Other than me constantly referring to things by the wrong name, the main effect of this is to make searching on the Internet a bit awkward, you have to try all three names to get good coverage. In my small corner of the Internet, I will try to help by updating my existing MTLM tag to MTM and update the description appropriately. ...

A bit a a double question here, physically I have been at the the MVP Summit in Redmond, having a great time with my fellow “Team System” MVPs and the Microsoft product group members. But my blog has also been on and off all week, so I guess you could say my online presence has been away. This is because [Black Marble has moved office](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=News&title=Black Marble has relocated to Woodland Park) and our blog server has had intermittent connectivity, which hopefully should be resolved soon. ...

I will be joining Iain Angus (Black Marble) and Giles Davies (Microsoft) this week at Microsoft’s Offices in Edinburgh to [present on Application Life Cycle Management](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Microsoft and Black Marble present Visual Studio 2010 and Managing the Application Lifecycle with Team Foundation Server). We will be looking at how VS2010 can help project managers, architects, developers and testers to build better solutions. There are [still a few places left](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Microsoft and Black Marble present Visual Studio 2010 and Managing the Application Lifecycle with Team Foundation Server),I hope to see you there if you are in the area. ...