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. As usual the venue is the The Met, King Street, Leeds, LS1 2HQ ...
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. It is a really nice feature of 2010 that if there is an error it does try to do as much as it can. So in my case, I ended up with TFS collection with no associated SharePoint site collections, not what I wanted but usable. ...
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. This announcement answers a question I was repeated asked at our [TFS2010 event last week](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Managing the Application Lifecycle&Code=), ‘we are a small team with VSS, I want something simple to move us forward, what should I use? TFS seems a bit complex and expensive’ So for me it is well timed and well placed within the marketplace. ...
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. I guess that there was a cached IP/ARP table somewhere routing packets the wrong way. ...
I have been having a play with the boot from VHD functions in Windows 7, it seems like a really useful feature when you need the raw power of your PC, but would like the ease of management of Virtual PCs (i.e. can copy them around and archive them), There are many posts on the steps that are required to add a boot from VHD partition to an existing standard install (remember the VHD must be for a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 operating system), I followed notes on knom’s developer corner. Just a couple of things that got me: ...
Telerik have just release a new work item manager and dashboard application for TFS, first impressions are very good. Why not download your copy and have a look?