Posts

Using the Typemock TFS 2012 Build activity I created I had started seen the error TF900548: An error occurred publishing the Visual Studio test results. Details: ‘The following id must have a positive value: testRunId.’ I thought it might be down to having patched our build boxes to TFS 2012 Update 1, maybe it needed to be rebuild due to some dependency? However, on trying the build activity on my development TFS server I found it ran fine. ...

Black Marble is hosting the Yorkshire Chapter of the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp taking place in several locations globally on the April 27th, 2013. This free community organised event is one day deep dive class where you will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Windows Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. ...

I have been battling setting up a DB deployed via the SQL 2012 DAC tools and Powershell. My environment was a network isolated pair of machines DC – the domain controller and SQL 2012 server IIS – A web front end As this is network isolated I could only run scripts on the IIS server, so my DB deploy needed to be remote. So the script I ended up with was ...

You don’t half get strange errors when building a test environment if when you run SYSPREP’d each copy of your VM base image you forget to check the ‘generalize’ box If you forget this, as I did, each VM has a different name but the same SID. Basically the domain/AD is completely confused as who is what. The commonest error I saw was that I could not setup application (Report Services, SP 2010 and TFS 2012) with domain service accounts. In all cases I got messages about missing rights or cannot communicate with domain controller. ...

With Microsoft Fakes moving to the Premium SKU of Visual Studio in 2012.2 (CTP4 is now available) more people will be looking at using them. I have just installed CTP4 and have seen a behaviour I don’t think I have not seen in the previous version of Visual Studio (I need to check because as well as CTP4 I have recently installed the new version of Typemock Isolator 7.3.0 that addresses issues with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012). ...

Worth noting that when you create a new TPC in TFS 2012, when the TFS configuration DB and other TPC DBs are in SQL 2012 availability groups, the new TPC DB is not placed in this or any other availability group. You have to add it manually, and historically remove it when servicing TFS. Though the need to remove it for servicing changes with TFS 2012.2 which allows servicing of high availability DBs ...

Whilst upgrading our Lab Management system we lost the SC-VMM DB. This has meant we needed to recreate environments we already have running on Hyper_V hosts but were unknown to TFS. If they were not network isolated this is straight forward, just recompose the environment (after clear out the XML in the VM descriptions fields). However if they are network isolated and running, then you have do play around a bit. ...

Another post from Rik Fixing Lab Manager environments with brute force following our Lab Management upgrade

Rik has done a post on creating VMs for Lab management to follow up on the one I did yesterday on our Lab upgrade.

Background We have been successfully using our TFS Lab Management system for a while. However, we have noticed an issue that when deploying environments the performance of the system slowed. This was down to I/O congestion between our servers and the SAN that provided their main VM storage because the library store and the hyper-v host servers all shared the same SAN. Also we had the need to start to create environments using Windows 8 and Server 2012. This is not possible using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 or Hyper-V hosted on earlier than Windows 2012. ...