Posts

I have recently been automating TFS admin processes such as creating a new team within an existing team project. The TFS team is now our primary means we use to segment work so we need to create new teams fairly often, so automation makes good sense. As far as I can see, there are no command line tools, like TF.EXE or WITADMIN.EXE, to do most of the team operations. They are usually browser based. So I have been using PowerShell and the TFS API for the automation. ...

I posted a while ago about the problems with DHCP using a Hyper-V virtual switch with WIFI and an Ubuntu VM, well I never found a good solution without hard coding IP addresses. I recently tried using Mint 15 and was please to see this did not suffer the same problems, it seems happy with DHCP over Hyper-V virtual switches. I think I will give it a go a do a while for any cross platform TEE demos I need for a while. ...

We use the TFS Alerts system to signal to our teams what state project build are at. So when a developer changes a build quality to ‘ready for test’ an email is sent to everyone in the team and we make sure the build retention policy is set to keep. Now this is not the standard behaviour of the TFS build alerts system, so we do all this by calling a SOAP based web service which in turn uses the TFS API. ...

I was at Jodrell Bank to see Sigur Ros last Friday. I could have really done with the low light features of Nokia 925 as opposed to my 820. The shots I took of the projected light show onto the radio telescope disk were not as good as I hoped. But the panorama earlier in the evening worked well

DDDNorth registration is now open, and I am sure will soon close and move to a wait list. So if you want to attend I would get in early

I have just been reading Software Testing using Visual Studio 2012 by Subashni. S and Satheesh Kumar. N from Packt Publishing This book does what it says on the cover, it is a general introduction to the testing tools within the Visual Studio 2012 family. My comment is not about how well it is done, it is a clear enough introduction, but why produce a book that really just covers what is in MSDN, Channel9, numerous podcasts, blogs and ALM Rangers documentation? ...

I have been using a Nokia 800 (Windows Phone 7.8) for a year or so and been happy with it. It does what I needed i.e. phone, email, media player mainly for podcasts. So given all the reported issues with WP8 and podcasts (no Zune client to manage the subscription/sync and you can only subscribe through the store if you are in the USA) I was not too keen to ‘upgrade’ ...

You can now vote for the sessions you wish to see at DDNorth2 Hope to see you there on Saturday 12th October 2013 in Sunderland

I was working on a TFS lab deployment today and to speed up testing I set it to pick the build of the TFS build that actually builds the code, as opposed to queuing a new one each time. It took me ages to remember/realise why it kept trying to deploy some ancient build that had long since been deleted from my test system. The reason was the build means the last successful build, not the last partially successful build. I had a problem with my code build that means a test was failing (a custom build activity on my build agent was the root cause if the issue). Once I fixed my build box so the code build did not fail the lab build was able to pickup the files I expected and deploy them ...

I recently posted about adding extra VMs to existing environments in Lab Management. Whilst following this process I hit a problem, I could not create my new environment there was a problem at the verify stage. It was fine adding the new VMs, but the one I was reusing gave the error ‘Microsoft test manager cannot install test agent on these machines because another environment is being created using the same machines’ ...