Posts

About 2 hours ago Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released to MSDN subscribers, the usual wait for the download now start! Also the revised SKU and licensing model for 2010 was made public by Brian Harry. This is meant to be simplification, but still remains fairly complex with the usually questions over ‘is that in this SKU or that?’ The key point for me is that the cost of entry for TFS is going to drop significantly, as the TFS server and a client CAL is included in the MSDN subscriptions with the VS Pro, Premium and Ultimate SKUs....

So what I have I been doing of late? The blog has been a bit quiet. Well I have been having a good look at Access Services in SharePoint 2010. This has been an interesting experience, as I am not historically what you might call an avid Access developer. Like most .NET developers I had looked as Access as more of a file format than an application, something from the past....

I am off to present in Ireland this week in a double header with another of Black Marble’s test team, Robert Hancock. We will be appearing at the Microsoft Ireland Visual Studio Academy. Our subject is Improved efficiency throughout the test cycle. As registration is still open I guess there are still spaces, so if it is of interest to you why not sign up (and who is not interested in testing?...

Wednesday this week is the next Agile Yorkshire meeting, there are 2 presentations and a discussion planned: Agile War Stories: A Project Managers Perspective. Ian Carroll User Story Estimation: Alan Williams An open discussion about Lean and Kanban in software development. As usual the meeting is at The Victoria Hotel, Leeds from 6:30 onwards for a 7:00 start. See www.agileyorkshire.org for more details. On Tuesday next week there is the West Yorkshire BCS meeting on ‘The World of Ubuntu and Open Source’ by Matthew Barker of Canonical Ltd....

This week I tried to add a new project collection to our TFS 2010 Beta1 test system. All seemed to be going OK, the settings verified without issue but I got the error TF252005 when it tried to create the associated SharePoint site (on the WSS 3.0 instance on the TFS application tier). Now unlike TFS 2008 this was not a blocking problem. On 2008 if any team project step failed, such as the team WSS site creation, then the team project was rolled back....

Over the weekend Brian Harry posted on this blog about a new ‘Basic’ edition of TFS. This is aimed squarely small team currently using Visual SourceSafe. It will provide version control with work item tracking and can be run on SQLExpress. The key difference for the ‘Standard ‘ edition is that it will not have SharePoint or Reporting Services integration. For far fuller details check the blog post. I think this is going to be a really interesting addition to TFS....

Bletchley Park have announced that they have got some Lottery Grant funding, which is great news. Again I you urge you to visit if you are interested in the history of our trade.

You can now get updates on Agile Yorkshire events via twitter @agileyorkshire

Must be that time of year, I see we are looking at an exam for Scrum Masters I don’t see any point in my repeating myself, especially when Gojko has covered essence of the subject so well

We have been consolidating our Hyper-V system of late, moving various older systems onto a new SAN based cluster. This has meant we have just moved our virtual TFS2008 build machines. After the move I started seeing the following error on all the builds using that server, re-enabling the build machine had no effect. I restarted the build VM but this did not fix the problem; I had to also restart the TFS2008 AT, once this was done all was fine....