Posts

Background One area I think can be found confusing in TFS Lab Management is that all environments are associated with specific Team Projects (TP) within Team Project Collections (TPC). This is not what you might first expect if you think of Lab Management as just a big Hyper-V server. When configured you end up with a number of TPC/TP related silos as shown in the diagram below. This becomes a major issue for us as each TP stores its own environment definitions in its own silo; they cannot be shared between TPs and hence TPCs. So it is hard to re-use environments without recreating them. ...

Background One area I think can be found confusing in TFS Lab Management is that all environments are associated with specific Team Projects (TP) within Team Project Collections (TPC). This is not what you might first expect if you think of Lab Management as just a big Hyper-V server. When configured you end up with a number of TPC/TP related silos as shown in the diagram below. This becomes a major issue for us as each TP stores its own environment definitions in its own silo; they cannot be shared between TPs and hence TPCs. So it is hard to re-use environments without recreating them. ...

A new release of Community TFS Build Extensions have shipped. You can find more details on Mike Fourie’s blog or at the project home on Codeplex

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.