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The XP Club did not manage to book the usual venue, the Victoria Hotel Pub in Leeds, for this months meeting as it was already booked. So for one month only, on the 14th of January, will be next door to Victoria Hotel Pub at the O’Neils from 7pm. Also, it has been decided there will be no technical presentation this month, we will meet to discuss the issues and politics around the club, including club’s constitution, bank accounts, rough strategy for the future and so on. You are all welcome to come along and help to shape the future of the club, help with some duties or just come to meet-up with fellow geeks. ...

I had the PDC CTP on my Netbook and that was OK so I had not expected any major issues. That said it has not been without problems, but all the issues I have logged as part of the beta program have been related to hardware detection (missing base stations and ignored physical Wifi switch state) on my Acer laptop. However, these issue can be worked around i.e. don’t use sleep or hibernate. so have not stopped be using the beta on my primary PC. ...

It is good to see how fast sessions have been submitted for SQLBits, a nice range already. And great news that the event on the 28th March is in Manchester. I have submitted an updated version of the session I did for SQLBits II on Team System, hope some people find it interesting.

If you have TypeMock Isolator based MSTests in a solution you will want them to be run as part of any CI build process. To get this to work with Team Build you have to make sure Isolator is started in the build box at the right time (something that is done automagically behind the scenes by Visual Studio during developer testing). This is not actually that difficult as TypeMock provide some tasks for just this purpose. ...

One of the cool feature of the last October 08 release of TFS Power Tools has been that the members of a Team Project are shown inside Team Explorer. One of the ideas of this is that you can use Live Messenger from inside Team Explorer to see team members status, but I and many other were seeing the error shown below as Team Explorer refreshed There had been much talk of it being settings in the registry, UAC being used etc. but none of the fixes detailed worked for me. ...

I posted a while ago about trying to wire in the results from StyleCop into a Team Build, the problem I had was that I could not get the StyleCop violations into the build summary. Well I still can’t, after much checking and asking around I was reliably informed that the build summary is not editable and there are no immediate plans for it to be in the future versions of TFS. ...

If your team build project uses the Publish Target option (to create a ClickOnce deploy) you may see the error BuildWallboard.csproj" (Publish target) (3:5) -> (_DeploymentGenerateBootstrapper target) -> MSB3155: Item ‘Microsoft.Net.Framework.3.5.SP1’ could not be located in BuildWallboard’. MSB3155: Item ‘Microsoft.Windows.Installer.3.1’ could not be located in BuildWallboard’. This is because on the build server needs a ‘default installation’ of Visual Studio Developer (or Suite). The publish function, like the MSTest function is not something the Team Build server can do bit itself it needs Visual Studio to do the heavy lifting. ...

I would say at this time unless you need 64Bit specific assemblies built you are best staying on a 32bit operating system. This will happily build MSIL .NET assemblies which I guess for most of us is the bulk of our work. OK you loose a bit of performance if you have 64bit hardware (or virtual hardware in our case), but I doubt this will be critical, shaving a few seconds of an automated build is not normally important. ...

I have been rebuilding our TFS build systems on Hyper-V based virtualised hardware. The long term plan being to hold a configured build server as as Hyper-V template to we could prevision extra ones quickly, or rebuild all of them if we need to upgrade some library or tool; in effect to give us revision control over our build servers. All seemed to be going OK, initially existing builds seemed to be running OK when targeted at the new server. However I soon saw that tests were failing with the error ...

We use the SharePoint Visual Studio Project Template on CodePlex to create WSP deployment packages for our SharePoint features. I tend to think of this WSP creation project in the same way as a MSI installer; so we don’t put SharePoint components into the WSP solution itself, it is an extra project in the solution that assembles the components from a variety of other solutions (e.g. web parts, workflows, event receivers, shared libraries for the GAC etc) and builds a single deployable WSP file. ...