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Our new Internet line has now been commissioned fully and hopefully any problems you may have had accessing my blog via the blackmarble.com or co.uk domains should be over.

Whilst upgrading a single server instance of TFS 2010 Beta2 to the RC I got a TF254024 error. This occurred at the point in the upgrade wizard where it tries to list the databases available to upgrade. The reason for the error was the account I was logged in as (the domain administrator in my case) did not have rights on the SQL instance to see any TFS DBs. Once this was sorted, by granting owner rights to all the TFS DBs, all was OK. ...

Updated 25th Mar when I found I have three sessions I have just heard that I had two three sessions accepted for the Norwegian Developers Conference. They are: Putting Some Testing Into Your TFS Build Making Manual Testing a Part of Your Development Process Developing Testable Web Parts for SharePoint. So off to Oslo, never been there before, looking forward to it already

For some reason that is beyond me now I did not setup my Lab Manager test system to be a VHD boot. So before installing the 2010 RC version I decided to P2V this system (on the same hardware) to make backups easier whilst testing. All seemed to go well I used IMAGEX to create a WIM of the disk Created an empty VHD Used IMAGEX to apply the WIM to the VHD Formatted the PC with a default Windows 7 install Added a VHD boot Windows Server 2008R2 to the PC, tested this all booted OK Replaced the test VHD with my own and rebooted …. and it just went into a reboot cycle. Pressing F8 and stopping the reboot on error I saw I had a “c00002e2 Directory Services could not start” error. I managed to get into the PC by pressing F8 and using the AD recovery mode (safe mode did not work). After much fiddling around I eventually noticed that my boot drive was drive D: not C: as I would have expected. My VHD and parent drive had reversed letter assignments. So when the AD services tried to start they look on the parent Windows 7 partition (C:) for their data and hence failed. ...

Hope everyone enjoyed my session VS2010 at NEBytes last night. I don’t now about you but I think that quick end to end demo of build, manual test and Intellitrace debug work very nicely. That was the first time I have done it as a single demo and I think it works better than three smaller ones. Truely shows the intergrated team store for VS2010 Anyway as the session was demo lead there are no slides to download, but if you have follow up questions post a comment on this post or email me ...

Just a reminder I am speaking at NEBytes in Newcastle tomorrow on the new features of VS2010. I will be covering project management, architect, dev and test features so something there for everyone.

I upgraded our Beta2 2010 TFS last week, and after a quick local test all appeared to be working OK, so I rushed out the office like you do. However, whilst I have been out the office it was spotted that though it was working within the office using HTTP and the NETBIOSDomain server name (TFSSERVER) it could not be accessed outside the firewall or over HTTPS inside the office, so https://tfsserver.mydomain.com:8443/tfs did not work ...

Interesting time at QCon yesterday, shame I was only there one day, I do like the events that are not limited to a single vendor or technology. The multi presenter session I was involved in on Microsoft interoperability seemed to go well, there is talk of repeating at other events or podcasting. It is a nice format if you can get the sub-sessions linking nicely, like themed grok talks. Due to chatting to people (but that why you go really isn’t it?), I only managed to get to one other session, but I was the one I wanted to see, Roy Osherove’s on using CThru to enable testing of monolithic frameworks such as Silverlight. It got a few things clearer in my mind over using CThu, a tool I have tried to use in the past but not had as much success as I hoped. So I think I will have another go at trying to build a SharePoint workflow testing framework, the problem has rested on the back burner too long. I think I just need to persist longer in digging to the eventing model to see why my workflows under test do not start. Roy’s comment that there is no short cut for this type of problem to avoid an archaeological excavation into the framework under test, I think is the key here. ...

I am please to be able to announce that I am speaking at the SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference in London on the 21st of April. I will be talking about my experiences during the [Prontaprint project](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/CaseStudy.aspx?study=Prontaprint's Website with SharePoint 2007) developing testable components for SharePoint using TypeMock Isolator and other techniques to speed development and improve quality.

Next weeks Agile Yorkshire meeting with Martin Fowler is now full (and the venue is twice the size of our usual one!). I said it would be popular. There is a reserve list but I would not hold out too much hope.