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Had an interesting issue on one of our WPF applications that is using MVVM Lite. This application is a front end to upload and download folder structures to TFS. On my development PC all was working fine i.e. when we upload a new folder structure to the TFS backend the various combo’s on the download tab are also updated. However, on another test system they were not updated. After a bit of tracing we could see in both cases the RefreshData method was being called OK, and the CollectionViews recreated and bound without errors. ...

Look what the stork delivered to Robert! He has bought himself a robot, and brought it in to the office to show to everyone today

Today I have been setting up a cross domain TFS proxy. The developers are in one domain and the TFS server in another. Given there is no trust between these domains you have use a trick to get it to work. So I created a local user tfsproxy.local on both the TFS server and proxy with the same password on each. At the proxy end I made this local user a local admin. ...

Interested in some tutor delivered training on TFS 2012? Well Anthony Borton, the TFS trainer and ALM MVP, is over in the UK running his excellent set of the TFS/VS 2012 focused courses. TFS 2012 Configuration and Administration 10th – 12th June 2013 | Course Outline Software testing with Visual Studio 201213th- 14th June 2013 | Course Outline TFS 2012 Developer Fundamentals 17th – 18th June 2013 | Course Outline Interestingly these courses can be taken in the room with the trainer or via Quicklearn’s Remote Classroom Instruction (RCI), so you can take the course in real time with the other students from the comfort of your own home/desk, but with all the benefits of a tutor classroom environment ...

If you want to know the health of the TFS server there are a number of options from a full System Center MOM pack downwards. A good starting point are the performance reports and administrative report pack produced by Grant Holiday. Though the performance pack is designed for TFS 2008 they work on 2010 and 2012, but you do need to do a bit of editing. As the installation notes state, create a new shared data source called “TfsActivityReportDS” Set the connection string to: Data Source=[your SQL server];Initial Catalog=Tfs_[your TPC name] - this is the big change as it this used to point to the tfs_ActivityLogging DB, this (as of TFS 2010) is now all rolled into you Team project Collection DB, so you need to alter the connection string to match your TPC. Also note if you use multiple TPCs you will need multiple data sources and reports. ...

If you are using the TFS 2012 Java API it is important you read the release notes. It is not enough to just reference the com.microsoft.tfs.sdk-11.0.0.jar file in your classpath as you might expect. You also have to pass a Java system property that associates com.microsoft.tfs.jni.native.base-directory with the location of the native library files that provide platform specific implementation for method calls. The command line for this is done in the form ...

With TFS 2012.2 Microsoft have added tags to work items. These provide a great way to add custom information to work items without the need to customise the process template to add custom fields. This is important for users of the hosted http://tfs.visualstudio.com as this does not, at this time, allow any process customisation. It is easy to add tags to any work item via the TFS web client, just press the Add.. button and either select an existing tag or add a new one. In the following PBI work item example I have added two tags, Tag1 and Tag2. ...

The problem I have been working on a project that contains SharePoint 2010 WSP packages and a MSI distributed WPF application. These projects are all in a single solution with their unit tests. I have been getting a problem with our TFS 2012.2 build system, all the projects compile but at the test point I get the unhelpful TF900546: An unexpected error occurred while running the RunTests activity: ‘Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.’. ...

Today Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Global Windows Azure Bootcamp event. To see what is happening check out the photos on our Facebook gallery and the #GlobalWindowsAzure Twitter hashtag

I have been trying to get SQL 2012 SSIS packages built on a TFS2012.2 build system. As has been pointed out by many people the problem is you cannot build SQL SSIS packages with MSBuild. This means you have to resort to call Visual Studio DevEnv.exe from within your build. Jakob Ehn did a great post on this subject, but it is a little dated now due the release of VS 2012 and SQL 2012 ...