Posts

About a year ago I wrote a post ‘Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint?’. Well this discussion becomes relevant for more people as with Visual Studio 2012.2 (currently available as a CTP) the Microsoft Fakes move from the Ultimate SKU to the Premium SKU. From my experience the Ultimate SKU is not present on too many developer’s PCs. It is most commonly found on the PCs of the team leads, software architects or test developers (managing coded UI/load testing etc. efforts). If a team was historically going to use Microsoft Fakes then they had to buy more Ultimate SKUs; as what is the point of a unit test using a mocking framework that only part of the team can run? ...

Whilst at the MVP Summit in Redmond last week there were MVP2MVP sessions, these are much like DDD conferences we have in the UK, sessions delivered by MVPs on their experiences and products they offer. One of the most interesting I saw last week was VS Anywhere. This is an extension to Visual Studio that allows distributed pair programming. This far more than desktop sharing in Skype or Lync, think more like the concurrent document editing in Office 365. ...

TFS Lab Management can be a good way to manage your development and test environments, providing a means to more easily store, deploy and snapshot environments. Problem is they are not magic, you need to create the virtual machines you will use. You can use tools such the ALM Rangers VM Factory to speed this process, but you still need the source ISOs to create the VMs. Until the release of System Center 2012 SP1 (and TFS 2012 QU1) Lab Management did not support Windows 8 or Server 2012. This was a limitation with the System Center 2008 Virtual Machine Manager. But with the release of these new versions you now have no excuse not to have a look at TFS Lab Management for even your most cutting edge projects. And remember you are licensed Lab Management (including SC-VMM for the sole use of TFS Lab Management) as part of your TFS 2012 MSDN license. ...

I have recently been battling running a command line tool within a Wix 3.6 installer. I eventually got it going but learnt a few things. Here is a code fragment that outlines the solution. <Product ………> ……… loads of other Wix bits <!—Next we define the actual CustomAction that does the work. This needs to be deferred (until after the files are installed) and set to not be impersonated so runs as the same elevated account as the rest of the MSIExec actions. (assuming your command line tool needs admin rights –> <CustomAction Id=“SilentLaunch” BinaryKey=“WixCA” DllEntry=“CAQuietExec” Execute=“deferred” Return=“check” Impersonate=“no” /> <!—Finally we set where in the install sequence the CustomActions and that they are only called on a new install Note that we don’t tidy up the actions of this command line tool on a de-install –> NOT Installed NOT Installed ...

Typemock have released a new version of Isolator (7.3) that addresses some problems they have been having with Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 Resolved all issues concerning the breaking MS update Boosted performance across the board (up to 44% faster) Enhanced SmartRunner UI Improved mocking capabilities Better integration with .NET development ecosystem You can download this release, or a free trial if you don’t have an Isolator license, from the Typemock site ...

On the 17th of April I will be speaking at VISUG Conference in Antwerp. Looks to be an interesting day with 3 tracks, Win8, Web and ALM. I am on the ALM track with Martin Woodward and Neno Loje.

The new Windows 8 ALM Readiness Treasure Map application is available on the store. This is a great way to navigate a whole range of resources available for anyone involved in ALM work.

I recently wrote a post that discussed how the contributor rights had been stripped off areas in TFS 2012 server when QU1 was applied, this included details on the patches to apply the manual steps to resolve the problem. Well today I found that it is not just in the area security you can see this problem. We found it too in the main source code repository. Again the [Team project]contributors group was completely missing. I had to re-add it manually. Once this was done all was OK for the users ...

Microsoft have release Windows Phone 7.8 in the last few days. As usual the rollout appears to be phased, I think based on serial number of your phone. As with previous versions you can force the update, so jumping the phased rollout queue. The process is Put the phone in flight mode (so no data connection) Connect it to your PC running Zune, it will look to see if there is an OS update. If it finds it great, let it do the upgrade If it does not find it, select the settings menu (top right in Zune) You need to select the update menu option on the left menu Zune will check for an update, about a second or two after it starts this process disconnect the PC from the Internet. This should allow Zune to get a list of updates, but not the filter list of serial numbers. So it assume the update is for you. You should get the update available message, reconnect the internet (it needs to download the file) and continue to do the upgrade You will probably have to repeat step 5 a few times to get the timing correct ...

The Git support was not the only announcement for TFS at the ALM Summit last week. On Brian Harry’s blog you can see more on the new features either in the TFS/VS 2012.2 (Update 2) CTP or planned to appear in later CTPs. The list is long, but the ones that caught my eye beyond that of Git support are Microsoft Fakes moves from the Ultimate SKU to Premium, thus making it a ‘free’ option for many corporate developers as they already have that SKU Easier customisation of the Kanban board Tagging of workitems to allow flexible filtering Testing visibility in the web admin pages … and many other improvements. Have a look at the blog posts, or even better pull down the CTP for a look. Also remember if you want to see new TFS features why not try them via a Team Foundation Server account? ...