Posts

Today we got Direct Access working; I can now access all the features of our TFS Lab Management instance from home. No more remoting onto on box to hop to another. I never need to go to the office again!

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is now coming down as part of Windows Update. Watch out for this, my PC has just taken best part of two hours to reboot as it decided to apply this service pack, even though I had already applied it manually when I built the PC

If you are working with CodedUI tests in Visual Studio you sometimes get unexpected results, such as the wrong field be selected in replays. When trying to work out what has happened the logging features are really useful. These are probably already switched on, but you can check by following the details in this post. Assuming you make no logging level changes from the default, if you look in the %Temp%UITestLogsLastRun ...

DevOps seems to be the new buzz role in the industry at present. People who can bridge the gap between the worlds of development and IT pros. Given my career history this could be a description of the path I took. I have done both, and now sit in the middle covering ALM consultancy where I work with both roles. You can’t avoid a bit of development and a bit of IT pro work when installing and configuring TFS with some automated build and deployment. ...

When trying to run a newly created manual test in MTM I got the error dialog ‘You cannot run the selected tests, Object reference not set to an instance of an object’. On checking the windows event log I saw Detailed Message: TF30065: An unhandled exception occurred. Web Request Details Url: http://……/TestManagement/v1.0/TestResultsEx.asmx So not really that much help in diagnosing the problem! Turns out the problem was I had been editing the test case work item type. Though it had saved/imported without any errors (it is validated during these processes) something was wrong with it. I suspect to do with filtering the list of users in the ‘assigned to’ field as this is what I last remember editing, but I might be wrong, it was on a demo TFS instance I have not used for a while. ...

I have just published some documentation on theTFS2010 community build extensions RoboCopy activity

I have just published updated documentation on the SharePoint build activity for the Community TFS build extensions.

My Lenovo W520 is the best laptop I have owned, but I have had one major issue with it, external projectors. The problem is it does not like to duplicate the laptop screen output to a projector, it works fine if extending the desktop, not duplicating. Every time I have tried to use it with a projector I either end up only showing on the projector and looking over my shoulder, or fiddling for ages until it suddenly works, usually at a low resolution, I don’t know what I did to get to this point so I don’t dare fiddle any more so use it anyway. A bit of a problem given the number of presentations I do. A quick search shows I am not alone in this problem. ...

Recently I have had a problem with my LG E900 Windows Phone 7 running Mango. Whenever I try to make a purchase on marketplace I was getting the error “There has been a problem completing your request. Try again later” and seeing the error code 0x80070490. A search on the web, asking around everyone I thought might have an answer and placing a question on Microsoft Answers got me no where. ...

We have all done it, opened Word typed all morning, not bothering to save the file as we go along and then for some mad reason exited Word say you did not want to save. So you loose the mornings work. Now we know that Word does an auto save, but if you are stupid enough to say yes on exit without saving how do you get the auto backup file? Does Word even keep a backup if you never saved the file for the first time? ...