Migrating a TFS TFVC based team project to a Git team project retaining as much source and work item history as possible

I have just had a guest blog post published on the Microsoft UK Developers site ‘Migrating a TFS TFVC based team project to a Git team project retaining as much source and work item history as possible’. It discusses alternatives to using TFS Integration Platform to migrate source code and associated work items.

March 14, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Guest post on Microsoft ALM Blog on Lab Management

A clarification blog post I wrote on what to do if you have multiple SCVMM servers in your network and want to use TFS Lab Management has just been published on the Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management blog. For more information on best practices with TFS Lab Management have a look at the ALM Rangers guide

February 25, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

DDD South west

There is a call for speakers for DDD South West on the 17th of May in Bristol. I have submitted as proposal, are you going to? For more details see http://www.dddsouthwest.com/ 

February 25, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

High CPU utilisation on the data tier after a TFS 2010 to 2013 upgrade

There have been significant changes in the DB schema between TFS 2010 and 2013. This means that as part of an in-place upgrade process a good deal of data needs to be moved around. Some of this is done as part of the actual upgrade process, but to get you up and running quicker, some is done post upgrade using SQL SPROCs. Depending how much data there is to move this can take a while, maybe many hours. This is the cause the SQL load. ...

February 25, 2014 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

New ALM Rangers releases

While I have been on holiday there have been a few ALM Rangers releases. I am particularly happy to see the Lab Management Guide … v3 update guidance is available, as this was a project I was working on. The big change from previous editions is that it covers setting up Lab Management to make use of Azure IaaS resources. So if you use TFS have a look at http://aka.ms/vsarsolutions for a full list of resources ...

February 18, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

A walkthrough of getting Kerberos working with a Webpart inside SharePoint accessing a WCF service

Update 2/4/2014 – Added notes about using service accounts as opposed to machine accounts for the AppPool running the web service In the past I have posted on how to get Kerberos running for multi tier applications. Well as usual when I had to redeploy the application onto new hardware I found my notes were not as clear as I would have hoped. So here is what is meant to be a walkthrough for getting our application working in our TFS lab environment. ...

February 6, 2014 · 6 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking at Gravitas’s Tech Talk #3 -

I am speaking at Gravitas’s Tech Talk #3 - “TFS & Visual Studio 2013 vs The Rest” on Tuesday march the 4th about “Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle product has had a lot of changes in the past couple of years. In this session will look at how it can be used provide a complete solution from project inception through development, testing and deployment for project both using Microsoft and other vendor technologies” ...

February 6, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

GDR3 update for my Nokia 820

The GDR3 update for my Nokia 820 has at last arrived. As my phone is a developer unit it is at the end of the automated update list. I suppose I could have pulled it down by hand, but I was not in a major rush as I am not doing WP8 development at present. The update seems to have gone on OK. Only strange thing was I was getting low space warnings prior to the upgrade. I suspect this was the fact the new patch had been download onto the phones main storage, but this was a bit full of content from iPodcast (the otherwise excellent app I use for podcasts can’t store to my SD card). Just to be on the safe side I uninstalled iPodcast, did the GDR3 update and then reinstalled iPodcast. As I have the premium version I could easily restore my podcast lists, including what I had and had not listened to, from the cloud. ...

February 2, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Upgraded older Build and Test Controllers to TFS 2013

All has been going well since our upgrade from TFS 2012 to 2013, no nasty surprises. As I had a bit of time I thought it a good idea to start the updates of our build and lab/test systems. We had only upgraded our TFS 2012.3 server to 2013. We had not touched our build system (one 2012 controller and 7 agents on various VMs) and our Lab Management/test controller. Our plan, after a bit of thought, was to so a slow migration putting in new 2013 generation build and test controllers in addition to our 2012 ones. We would then decide on an individual build agent VM basis what to do, probably upgrading the build agents and connecting them to the new controller. There seems to be no good reason to rebuild the whole build agent VMs with the specific SDKs and tools they each need. ...

February 1, 2014 · 4 min · Richard Fennell

Testing new social plugin for BlogEngine

We are testing the ‘social publish’ plugin for BlogEngine. Rik’s post has the details on what needs to be done to get it working with the current Twitter APIs

January 27, 2014 · 1 min · Richard Fennell