All teams have ‘Stakeholder’, the people the are driving a project forward, who want the new system to be able to do their job; but are often not directly involved in the production/testing of the system. In the past this has been an awkward group to provide TFS access for. If they want to see any detail of the project they need a TFS CAL, expensive for the occasional casual viewer. ...
My Channel9 Guy has a new MVP badge
Nice post by Riccardo Viglianisi, one of Black Marble’s Testers, about his experiences with CodeUI and Windows Store Apps published on the MSDN UK Visual Studio blog. Well worth a read if you are looking at this technology.
I am really happy to say that I have had my MVP for Visual Studio (ALM) re-awarded, so am an MVP for the 7th time. It is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.
Back in January I did a post How long is my TFS 2010 to 2013 upgrade going to take? I have now done some more work with one of the clients and have more data. Specially the initial trial was 2010 > 2013 RTM on a single tier test VM; we have now done a test upgrade from 2010 > 2013.2 on the same VM and also one to a production quality dual tier system. ...
DDD North is coming to the University of Leeds on Saturday 18 October. It is now open for Session submission
The ALM Rangers are again producing a list of useful tools and widgets for TFS. It can be found at aka.ms/widgets and should be updated regularly
I am currently involved in moving some TFS TFVC hosted source to a TFS Git repository. The first step was to clone the source for a team project from TFS using the command git tf clone --deep [http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection](http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection) ‘$My Project’ localrepo1 and it worked fine. However the next project I tried to move had no space in the source path git tf clone --deep [http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection](http://tfsserver01:8080/tfs/defaultcollection) ‘$MyProject’ localrepo2 This gave the error git-tf: A server path must be absolute. Turns out if the problem was the single quotes. Remove these and the command worked as expected ...
Seven whole years ago I wrote about re-reading [corrected – getting old and forgetful not William Gibson’s it was] Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and how it compared to his then new book JPod. And how they both reflected the IT world at their time. Speculative fiction always says more about the time they are written than the future they predict. I have just read ‘The Circle’ by Dave Eggers which in many ways is a similar book for our social media, big brother monitored age. I will leave it to you to decide if it a utopian or dystopia but it is well worth a read ...
After my session Techorama last week I have been asked some questions over how we built our TFS Lab Management infrastructure. Well here is a bit more detail, thanks to Rik for helping correcting what I had misremembered and providing much of the detail. For SQL we have two physical servers with Intel processors. Each has a pair of mirrored disks for the OS and RAID5 group of disks for data. We use SQL 2012 Enterprise Always On for replication to keep the DBs in sync. The servers are part of a Windows cluster (needed for Always On) and we use a VM to give a third server in the witness role. This is hosted on a production Hyper-V cloud. We have a number of availability groups on this platform, basically one per service we run. This allows us to split the read/write load between the two servers (unless they have failed over to a single box). If we had only one availability group for all the DBs one node would being all the read/write and the other read only, so not that balanced. ...