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Winter is rushing on, so it is time for a new season of Black Marble events in Yorkshire. 21 Nov 2012 (All day) - [Whats New in SharePoint 2013](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Whats New in SharePoint 2013) All the updates and announcements from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference around SharePoint 2013. 27 Nov 2012 (AM) - [An Introduction to Windows 8 Development](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=An Introduction to Windows 8 Development) We welcome Microsoft Evangelist Mike Taulty to present a morning on Windows 8 for developers. ...

Just upgraded this blog server to BlogEngine .NET 2.7 from 2.6. Nice straight forward upgrade.

I must have clicked something in error on my Win 8 PC as when I open one of our SharePoint 2010 sites and select a file, right clicked and selected Send To > Email Link instead of an Outlook email opening my PC tries to open Chrome. A bit of quick digging showed the issue was that the file association for mailto: was wrong. You can check this setting in IE > Internet Options > Programs > Internet Programs > set Programs (button) ...

Today has been one of purging build system problems. On my TFS 2012 Windows 8 build box I was was getting the following error when trying to run Windows 8 App Store unit tests 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.’. On further investigation, I am not really sure anything was working too well on this box. To give a bit of background ...

A while ago I posted about seeing the TF900546 error when running unit tests in a previously working TFS 2012 build. The full error being: 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.’. Well late last week this problem came back with avengeance on a number of builds run on the same build controller/agent(s). Irritatingly I first noticed it after a major refactor of a codebase, so I had plenty of potential root causes as assemblies had been renamed and it was possible they might not be found. However, after a bit of testing there were no obvious candidates as all tests worked fine locally on my development PC, and a new very simple test application showed the same issues. It was defiantly an issue on the build system. ...

Ewald’s post explains how to create a WCF web service to act as an end point for TFS Alerts. I have been using the model with a TFS 2010 to check for work item changed events, using the work item’s System.AssignedTo field to retrieve the owner of the work item (via the TFS API) so I can send an email, as well as other tasks (I know I could just send the email with a standard alert). ...

Whilst setting up a TFS 2012 Lab management environment for Coded UI testing we got the problem that none of the tests were running, in fact we could see no tests were even being passed to the agent in the lab On the build report I clicked on the ‘View Test Results’ which loaded the result in Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) and viewed the test run log, and we saw ...

I recently had the need to use IISExpress on Windows 8 to provide a demo server to a number of Surface RT clients. I found this took me longer than I expected. It might be me but the documentation did not leap out. So as a summary this is what I had to do, let us say for example that I want to serve out http://mypc:1234 Make sure you have a project MyWebProject in Visual Studio that works for http://localhost:1234 using IISExpress Open the TCP port 1234 on the PC in the Control Panel > Admin Tools > Firewall Edit C:Users[current user]DocumentsIISExpressconfigapplicationhost.config and find the site name section for your Visual Studio project. And change the to . This means IISexpress can now listen on this port for any IP address You finally need to run IISExpress with administrative privileges. I did this by opening a PowerShell prompt with administrative privileges and running the command C:Program FilesIIS Expressiisexpress.exe /site:MyWebProject Once all this was done my client PCs could connect ...

Just completing the second reinstall of Windows 8 on my Lenovo W520 in 10 days due to my new SSD failing and needing to be replaced. To try to ease the process I though I would try putting on the miscellaneous tools I use such as 7Zip, Filezilla etc. using Chocolatey. I have to say first impressions are good, one command and the product is on, the files pulled from the appropriate site. Obviously there is the issue that packages are may not be kept up to date, unlike Nuget (which is at Chocolatey’s core) the packages are not stored on the Chocolatey site. I noticed the SysInternal package is a bit behind, but I could always submit the updated package myself couldn’t I. ...

Today at Build 2012 it was announced that https://tfspreview.com has RTM’d as Team Foundation Service on https://tfs.visualstudio.com. Up until now there has been no pricing information, which had been a barrier to some people I have spoken to as they did not want to started using something without knowing the future cost. So to the really good news, as of now It is free for up to 5 users If you have an active MSDN subscription it is also free. So a team of any size can use it as long as they all have MSDN The announcement said to look out for further price options next year. ...