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Just watched a good session from TechEd USA 2013, it was billed as Agile Software Development with Microsoft Visual Studio ALM but has little that was specifically TFS based; no demos just war stories from Aaron Bjork and Peter Provost It is a good discussion of the problems, experiences and solutions the Microsoft Visual Studio team went through when trying to move to agile development, including Sprint lengths, be consistent across teams Retrospectives, do you actually act on them? Technical debt, do you write features or bugs? Measure what you do What is the role of the product owner/manager? Well worth a watch ...

If running an Ubuntu guest VM on Windows 8 Hyper-V you have a problem if you want to make use of a wireless network on the host machine. DHCP does not seem to work. Firstly you have to create a virtual switch in Hyper-V and connect it to your wireless card you can then connect a Network Adaptor on the Ubuntu guest VM to the new switch. ...

Today at TechEd USA Brian Harry announced Visual Studio 2013, have a look at his blog for details of the new ALM features. These include… Agile Portfolio Management Git source control on premises Revised team explorer including pop out windows Improvements in code editing and annotation Improvement in web based test management Team Room – chat like collaboration Cloud based web load testing The start of addition of release management to TFS via the purchase of InRelease For more info see the various sessions up on Channel 9 ...

My Windows 8 based Lenovo W520 has an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wifi chipset, it has been giving me problems with this for a while. The most usual problem is that if I sleep or hibernate the PC when I restart it, in a different location, there is a chance I cannot connect to Wifi networks. I can see them, get a limited connection but no IP address as DHCP fails. Sometimes using the hardware Wifi switch on the front left of the PC helps, sometimes switching into Windows 8 airplane mode and back out does, but not always. Often I need to restart the PC. ...

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on ‘TFS for Developers’ at the Grey Matter’s ‘Building Applications for the Future’ event today. As you will have noticed my session was basically slide free, so not much to share there. As I said at the end of my session to find out more have a look at Brian Keller’s TFS 2012 VM – ready to run demo VM with plenty of hands on labs Team Foundation Service – the free hosted version of TFS – go on give it a try. Brian Harry’s Blog – all announcements on TFS can be found here Also a couple of people asked by about TFS and Eclipse, which I only mentioned briefly at the end. For more on Team Explorer Everywhere look at the video I did last year on that very subject ...

I have been out to a number of sites recently where there are C++ developers. We often get talking about package management and general best practices for shared libraries. The common refrain is ‘I wish we had something like Nuget for C++’. Well it was released in Nuget 2.5 and there is a video on Channel9 all about it.

A key requirement for any DevOps strategy is the reporting on how your solution is behaving in the wild. PreEmptive Analytics™ for Team Foundation Server (TFS) can provide a great insight in this area, and there is a good chance you are already licensed for it as part of MSDN. So why not have a look on the UK MSDN site for more details the free Microsoft hosted event. MSDN Webinar Improve Software Quality, User Experience and Developer Productivity with Real Time Analytics Tuesday, May 28 2013: 4:00 – 5:00 pm (UK Time) ...

Why is everything so complex to get going with Wix, then so easy in the end when you get the syntax correct? If you want to allow your MSI installer to upgrade a previous version then there are some things you have to have correct if you don’t want the ‘Another version of this product is already installed’ dialog appearing. The Product Id should be set to * so that a new Guid is generated each time the product is rebuild The Product UpgradeCode should be set to a fix Guid for all releases The Product Version should increment on of the first three numbers, by default the final build number is ignored for update checking The Package block should not have an Id set – this will allow it to be auto generated You need to add the MajorUpgrade block to you installer So you end up with ...

I recently needed to upgrade a DNN V5 site to V7 (yes I know I had neglected it, but I was forced to consider a change due to an ISP change). Now this is a documented process, but I had a few problems. There are some subtleties the release notes miss out. This is what I found I had to do to test the process on a replica web site … ...

If you look at the labels tab in the source control history in Visual Studio 2012 you could be confused by the changeset numbers. How can all the labels added by my different builds, done over many days, be associated with the same changeset? If you look at the same view in VS 2010 the problem is not so obvious, but that is basically due to the column not being shown. ...