Posts

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. ...

At the last MVP Summit Steve Ballmer said “I’m going to ask you one week switch your default [search engine], one week. At the end of the week…I’ll want feedback, how was your week, what happened, what did you like, what didn’t you like … Can I make that deal with you? (Cheers and applause.) That’s the deal.” Well the week was last week, and how did I find Live Search? ...

Updated 3 Dec 2008 – I got an email from Artem Smirnov the author of Ivonna pointing out a couple of things, so I have updated this post Updated 3 May 2009 – I altered the code samples as the previous ones did not seem to work with Typemock Isolator 5.3.0 . I have previously written a post on using Isolator with Sharepoint, also Andrew Woodward has written a good and more detailed tutorial on the subject, so I don’t intend to go over old ground here. ...

Applications to attend Software Craftsmanship 2009 have opened, this is a free conference that aims to discuss ‘the “hard skills” that programmers and teams require to deliver high quality working software’. If you have not heard of Software Craftsmanship take a look at Peter McBreen’s book Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative well worth the read.

The next meeting is on the 10th of December at Victoria Hotel in central Leeds at 7pm as usual. The speaker is Gary Short who is speaking on Design Patterns. Come to this free event to find out more about this vital subject to developers in any language from an excellent speaker. As an added bonus we will all head off to Leeds Christmas Market, to have some wurst, sauerkraut and continental lager. ...