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Updated 27 July 2013 - Here is a potential solution Update 27 Sep 2011 – this seemed such as good idea when I initially tried it out, but after more testing I see changing the build number part way through a build causes problems. The key one being that when you queue the next build it is issued the same revision number [the $(Rev:.r) in the BuildNumberFormat] as the just completed build, this will fail with the error ...

The video of my recent webinar for Typemock on using Isolator for designing SharePoint webparts is up at http://www.typemock.com/sharepoint-web-parts You can also find a link to it from http://bit.ly/RFennellVideos, as well as links to all the other videos of my presentations I know of that are publically available.

Today I have posted a few more pages of the getting started documentation for the TFS 2010 community build extensions. This is an on-going task, I hope to get a few more written when I get a chance. I am writing the documentation in no obvious order, so let me know if any specific activity is in more need of some introductory level documentation than others.

Mike Fourie has just announced that we’ve just shipped the second stable release of the Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions. Well worth a look if you need to customised your TFS 2010 build with any of the following AssemblyInfo BuildReport BuildWorkspace CodeMetric DateAndTime Email File GetBuildController GetBuildDefinition GetBuildServer GetWebAccessUrl Guid Hello HyperV IIS7 ILMerge InvokePowerShellCommand nUnit QueueBuild RoboCop SqlExecute StyleCop TFSVersion VB6 VirtualPC VSDevEnv Wmi WorkItemTracking Zip

Thanks to any one who attended my Typemock Isolator session today, hope you found it useful. In due course the video will be up on the Typemock site. But of you want to read more on using Isolator with SHarePoint have a look at Mocking Sharepoint for Design with Typemock Isolator Mocks SP2010 64bit Assemblies with Typemock Isolator

There is a good chance if you are using TFS that you will want to create some custom reports. You can write these in Reporting Services via BI Studio or Excel, but I wanted to use Report Builder, but could not see the Report Builder button on this Reporting Services menu The problem was multi-levelled First I had to give the user access to the Report Builder. This is done using folder property security. I chose to give this right to a user (along with browser rights) from the root of the reporting services site ...

Robert Hancock, another one of Black Marble’s ALM consultants, has started blog technical tips on this blog server. You can find Robert’s new blog here or the aggregate feed of all Black marble bloggers here

When using TFS2010 It is possible for a build agent to appear to be ready (or so the status label says) but the icon stays in the off state. This is usually due to a couple of broad categories of error, you can find out which by checking the Windows event log. The build agent cannot communicate with the controller In the event log you see something like Service ‘Default Agent - win7’ had an exception: Exception Message: There was no endpoint listening at http://controller.mydomain.co.uk:9191/Build/v3.0/Services/Controller/1 that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details. (type EndpointNotFoundException) ...

At the Build conference today the preview of TFS on Windows Azure was announced. All the attendees of the conference have been given access codes for the preview. If you did not make it to Build have a look at Brian Harry’s blog for details of how everyone else can get access to the preview.

My development laptop is bitlocker’ed, and yours should be too. It provides a great and non-invasive way (assuming you have a TPM chip) to protect you and your clients data on a machine that is far to easy to steal or loose. However, whilst fiddling with Windows 8 I did trip myself up. I have my PC setup for a boot to Windows 7 from a bitlocker’ed drive C with a non bitlocker’d drive D used to boot to Windows 2008 for demos (and hence no production data). To try out Windows 8 I added a new boot device, a boot from VHD partition. This edited the PC’s master boot record (MBR) and bitlocker did not like it. It thought the PC had a root kit or something similar to prompted me to enter a my bitlocker recovery key (which is 48 characters long) when I tried to boot to Windows 7. However, once this is done my bitlocker’ed Windows 7 partition worked find, but on each reboot I had to type the key in, bit of pain. Removing the new VHD boot entry did not help, the MBR has still be edited, so bitlocker complained ...