Posts

We use my TFS Alerts DSL to perform tasks when our TFS build complete, one of these is a job to increment the minor version number and reset the version start date (the value that generates third field – days since a point in time) if a build is set to the quality ‘release’ e.g. 1.2.99.[unique build id] where 99 is the days count since some past date could change to 1.3.0.[unique build id] (see this old post on how we do this in the build process) ...

Speaker registration for DDD South West has opened, problem is the event is the same weekend as the Maker Faire in Newcastle, don’t think I can do both. Both are great options though, good to have choices

Seem Windows 10 will be an option on the new Raspberry PI 2, that provides some more nice IoT options. It will be interesting to see which tools Microsoft look to target onto this board, I guess remote development from a PC as per their Galileo board. But there might be enough power for a bit more, we shall see

I have been trying to export a SQL Azure DB as a .BACPAC using the command line “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server120DACbinSqlPackage.exe” /action:Export /sourceservername:myserver.database.windows.net /sourcedatabasename:websitecontentdb /sourceuser:sa@myserver /sourcepassword: /targetfile:db.bacpac The problem is the command times out after around an hour, at the ‘Extracting schema from database’ stage. I got exactly the same issue if I use PowerShell as discussed in Sandrino Di Mattia’s post. The issue is the Azure service tier level I am running the SQL DB on. ...

Whilst setting up a new agent based deployment pipeline in Release Management I decided I to reuse an existing component as it already had the correct package location set and correct transforms for the MSDeploy package. Basically this pipeline was a new copy of an existing website with different branding (css file etc.), but the same configuration options. I had just expected this work, but I kept getting ‘file not found’ errors when MSDeploy was run. On investigation I found that the package location for the component was wrong, it was the build drop root, not the sub folder I had specified. ...

I recently hit a problem that on one of our TFS 2013 build agents we could not run Windows 8.1 unit tests. Now as we know the build agent needs some care and attention to build Windows 8.1 at all, but we had followed this process. However, we still saw the issue that the project compiled but the tests failed with the error ‘Unit tests for Windows Store apps cannot be run with Limited User Account disabled. Enable it to run tests.’ ...

Updated 28 Feb 2015 – Added bit on static addresses When using a DD-WRT virtual router, I have realised it is worth setting static a MAC address in Hyper-V and DHCP lease on the router for any server VMs you want access to from your base system OS. In my case this is TFS demo VM a connect to all the time. If you don’t do this the address of the VM seems to vary more than you might expect. So you keep having to edit the HOSTS file on your base OS to reference the VM by name. ...

I posted in the past on my experience with DD-WRT router running in Hyper-V to allow my VMs internet access. A couple of months on I am still using it and I think have got around the worst of the issues. The big problem is not with the DD-WRT router, but the way Hyper-V virtual switches use WiFi for some operating systems. Basically the summary is DHCP does not work for Linux VMs. ...

Whenever I tried to load an Office 2013 document from our SharePoint 2010 instance I kept ending up in the Office Web Application, the Office application was not being launched. If I tried the use the ‘Open in Word’ context menu I got the following error (and before you ask yes I was in IE, IE11 in fact, and Office 2013 was installed) My PC has been build of our standard System Center managed image, others using the same best image seemed OK, so what had gone wrong for me? ...

I am really pleased to be speaking at Techorama again this year. This is a great friendly conference that covers a wide range of subjects. Like last year the conference is in Mechelen, Belgium on the 12 and 13th of May. Hope to see some of you there