Posts

A guest post I wrote on TFS for the non-.NET developer has just been published on the Microsoft Visual Studio UK Team Blog. Why not pop over and have a look.

Brian Harry has just posted on his blog about a bug in SQL page compression (found in SQL Enterprise) that can cause problems with TFS 2010 or TFS1(preview), previous version of TFS did not support page compression. So if you are using TFS and SQL Enterprise have a read and make sure the correct updates are in place.

We have been building ‘standard’ environments for our TFS Lab Management system. Environments that can be used for most of the projects we are involved in without too much extra setup e.g. a small domain controller VM and a Server VM with SQL and SharePoint. These environments have a series of snapshots so it can be used in a number of ways e.g if we just want SQL and IIS we just go back to a snapshot prior to SharePoint being installed. ...

If you want to hear a bit more detail on some of the common security issues we discussed at yesterdays SDL event why not listen to Troy Hunt Secures ASP.NET recent show on .NET Rocks or download his PDF ‘OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers’

Thanks to everyone who attended our SDL event today. Here are a few links to information we mentioned Microsoft SDK home page, full of downloads, links and training videos TFS Build extensions for CAT.NET, showing how to add SDL validation to a TFS build And there are selection of links to books on SDL on my blog’s reading list page

A new 1.3.0.0 release of the Community TFS Build Extensions has been published today. This contains some fixes and two new activities SPDisposeChecker – checks for SharePoint best practice CatNetScan – checks for common security issues

For many years Black Marble has run free events on a wide range of technologies. Originally we only ran these locally in Yorkshire, but as time progressed we have run them across the UK and Eire. They are a great way to help your staff whether technical or managerial get up to speed with new developments in our industry. For 2012 we have decided to try running some events online. The format for these events will be a short 30 minute interactive sessions where you will have the chance to see a short presentation and/or demonstration on a technology followed by a Q&A session with the presenter. ...

A common cause of the TF266026 error is because when the build agent tries to start (it is the build agent that runs the workflows in Lab Management) it cannot access the custom assemblies folder as defined for its parent build controller. Obviously this problem only occurs if you have set a custom assemblies path for parent build controller. The reason for the error is because the agent is running as the Lab Management service account, in my case tfs2010lab, as defined for the TPC in the TFS Administration Console. This account by default has no rights to the source folder assigned for the custom assemblies. This is not usually an issue until it needs to access source control to load custom assemblies (which actually it probably does not ever use as it is not building code!). ...

Whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 build today to the new 1.2 release of the Community TFS Build Extensions we hit an issue. All seemed to go OK until the build tried to use the StyleCop activity, which failed with the error Showing a modal dialog box or form when the application is not running in UserInteractive mode is not a valid operation. Specify the ServiceNotification or DefaultDesktopOnly style to display a notification from a service application. ...

It can be a bit confusing to get work out which tools to use at which stages required to get a lab environment up and running in TFS. Here is a basic workflow showing what you need to do in System Center Virtual Machine Manager prior to starting in MTM Lab Center Note: if you want to copy environments between TFS Team project Collections have a look at this post ...