Posts

Whilst moving all our older test Hyper-V VMs into a new TFS 2012 Lab Management instance I have had to address a few problems. I already posted about the main one of cross domain communications. This post aims to list the other workaround I have used. MTM can’t communicate with the VMs When setting up an environment that includes existing VMs it is vital that the PC running MTM |(Lab Center) can communicate with all the VMs involved. The best indication I have found that you will not have problems is to use a simple Ping. If you are creating a SCVMM environment you need to be able to Ping the fully qualified machine name as it has been picked up by Hyper-V e.g: server1.test.local. If creating a standard environment you only need to be able to Ping the name you specify for the machine e.g: server1 or maybe server.corp.com. ...

I don’t know about your systems but historically we have had VMs running in test domains that are connected to our corporate LAN. Thus allowing our staff and external testers to access them from their development PCs or through our firewall after providing suitable test domain credentials. These test setups are great candidates for the new TFS Lab Management 2012 feature Standard environments. It does not matter if they are hosted as physical devices, or on Hyper-V or VMware. ...

I installed Office 2013 customer preview yesterday and all seemed good. Today I needed to create a new document using one of our company standard templates. I opened Word, went to the new document section and was presented with a list of great looking templates, but not my custom ones. The page suggested I used search to find more templates, it did find more templates from the Internet, but did not find my locally stored ones. ...

When I installed Office 2013 customer preview all seemed good, loads of new metro look Office features. However when I tried to load my previously working Visual Studio 2012RC I got the error “The procedure entry point _atomic_fetch_sub_4 could not be located in the dynamic link library devenv.exe”. This is a known issues with the C++ runtime and a patch was release last week, install this and all should be OK

On site recently I had a problem that I could not access the site settings in reporting services if I used Internet Explorer from an client PC. IE worked fine on the server and other browsers were OK on the client, just not IE. Initially I though it was just rights, but that was not the case Turns out this is down to Kerberos negotiation as discussed in the MSDN article. To fix the issue, on this site where we did not need Kerberos, we just disabled Kerberos negotiation in the [Program files]Microsoft SQL ServerMSRS10.MSSQLSERVERReporting ServicesReportServerRSreportServer.config file, e.g. ...

Whilst setting up our new TFS 2012 instance I had a problem getting the build box to connect to the TFS server. When I started the build service (on a dedicated VM configured as a controller and single agent, connected to a TPC on the server on another VM). All appears OK, the controller and agents said they were running and state icons went green About 5 seconds later the state icons go red, but message says the controller and agents are still running, from past experience I know this means it is all dead. On the build service section a new ‘details’ link appears, but if you try to click it get a 404 error (see below) ...

I am really happy to say that I have had my Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM Re-awarded, it is a privilege to get to work with such a great group of people as a have met via the MVP programme.

My slides and those of other presenters at last weeks Microsoft cloud day have been published

As Brian Harry announced on his blog there are new 2012 editions of the two main TFS books on the way. I have added links to them from my reading list page but as yet you can only pre-order them as the release dates are not available.

Update 4/Aug/2012: See post on my implementation of a 2012 version of this activity If you are using Typemock Isolator in your unit testing then you be wanting to include then in your automated build process. Unlike other mocking frameworks you have to do a bit of work to achieve this with Isolator, this is because to enable its advanced features of mocking items like sealed private classes you have to start the interceptor that does the magic prior to running the tests and the switch it off afterwards. ...