Posts

I did a post at the start of the year about Lab management and VLAN tags, how they are not supported, but you can work around the problems. Over the past few months we have split our old Hyper-V cluster into one for production and one for test/lab development. This gave our IT team a chance to look at the VLAN problem again. So a quick reminder of the issue – the deployment tools in Lab management that create environments provide no means to set a VLAN tag for any networks connections they create. Once an environment is created you can manually set a VLAN tag, but it is all a bit of a pain and certainly unsupported. ...

Typemock have recently released a new version of Isolator, 6.2. As well as the usual fixes and enhancements you would expect, this is the first version to support TFS 2010 team build out the box. Prior to this release Typemock supported MSBuild based TFS builds (2005/2008) but not the Windows Workflow based version in TFS 2010. The issue was that in TFS 2010 builds it was possible for build steps to run in parallel, maybe on different build agent PCs, so you could not guarantee that Typemock Isolator was intercepting the correct threads. You could call the MSBuild tasks to enable the mocking interception, as in 2005/2008) it was just that they did not work in practice on 2010. ...

We got a good turn out of Black Marble staff at this years Age UK Abbey Dash 10K in Leeds. We were amongst over 8000 runners who turned out for a cool and foggy Yorkshire Sunday morning run. We had a handicap race amongst ourselves, using a wisdom of crowds poll to estimate everyone target time. This was won by Steve Spencer our Development Director. He beat his target by 20 minutes. I am not sure whether this says more about his fitness or our staff’s opinion of him! ...

In my post experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD I said I thought the reason my Windows 7 Media Center was hanging at the “TV signal configuration” step was down to using mixed tuner cards. Well my second PCTV nanoStick T2.arrived yesterday so I was able to try the same process with a pair of identical USB T2 tuners. Guess what? I got the same problem! However, being USB devices it mean I could test the tuners on my laptop, a Lenovo W520 (Core i7, 16Gb, Windows 7). So I plugged them both in, they found drivers from the web automatically, I ran Media Center, select setup the TV signal and……. it worked! A few worrying pauses here and there, but it got there in about an hour. ...

When you are trying to run a command line tool via the InvokeProcess activity in a TFS 2010 Team build you might see the somewhat confusing ‘Access denied’ error. There appears to be no more detail in the log. I have found that this is usually down to a type on the filename property of the activity. It should be set to something like “c:my toolstool.exe” but is actually set to ...

Whilst I have been on holiday Black Marble have announced some new events and this time they are not just in the UK, we have a couple in our new Dublin office location. The programme up to new year is: 17 Nov 2011 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) Am - [Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Delivering High Impact WebSites with SharePoint) SharePoint 2010 creates a dynamic and striking internet experience for your users. Pm - [A Guide to Successfully Adopting the Cloud for IT Managers](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=A Guide to Successfully Adopting the Cloud for IT Managers) This session will be exploring the business value of cloud computing with Microsoft Windows Azure. 30 Nov 2011 (Black Marble office Cleckheaton) Am- [TFS for the small team – hosted in the cloud](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=TFS for the small team – hosted in the cloud) I’m doing this one and I will be talking about the hosted version of TFS, its UI, the new features it exposed from TFS vNext. 6 Dec 2011 (Dublin) Am - [The Right Tools for your Application Lifecycle](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=The Right Tools for your Application Lifecycle) This session will discuss how this Application Lifecycle Management process can be managed, and what are the right tools to do that – Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Pm - [An Afternoon of Windows 8](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=An Afternoon of Windows 8) Following the fanfare, what is there in Windows 8 for developers and the IT professional? 8 Dec 2011 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) All day - [Architecture Forum in the North 4](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Architecture Forum in the North 4) The top Microsoft Architecture Forum in the UK returns for its fourth year. 26 Jan 2012 (Holiday Inn Leeds/Bradford) Am - [Black Marbles Annual Technical Update for Microsoft Technologies – 2012](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Black Marbles Annual Technical Update for Microsoft Technologies - 2012) Return of our roadmap for all things Microsoft! Pm - [Implementing the Secure Development Lifecycle in your ALM Process](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=Implementing the Secure Development Lifecycle in your ALM Process) A look at how implementing Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) into your development process can improve quality, reliability and long-term maintainability. Hope to see you at some of these events, I won’t be at all of them due to client commitments, shame I enjoy doing these. ...

[Update: Also so More experiences upgrading my Media Center to receive Freeview HD] I have used a Windows Media Center as my only means to watch TV for about 5 years; upgrading over the years from XP to Vista and onto Windows 7.  I am a completely hooked on the ease of use, especially if you just want a means to watch and record Freeview (the UK free to air terrestrial service). Far easier UI than any Freeview PVR I have seen, and I personally think easier than Sky+ box (satellite) or Virgin’s Tivo (cable) though I don’t have much experience of these device (and they do look a bit of a pain to integrate with Media Center, but they are not really designed for that) ...

When using VMPrep to setup a VM for use in a Lab Management system I got the error cross at the bottom of the dialog Not too much help, usually there is a link to the log file or a message. If you look in the log file in c:user[name]AppdataRoamingLMInstaller.txt you see that the path to the Patches folder is invalid. This is fixed by editing the VMPrepToolVMPrepToolLibraryApplications.XML file and correcting the path (which I had made a typo in) ...

I will be speaking at a [Black Marble event on the 30th November on the new TFS vNext announcements for TFS on Azure](http://www.blackmarble.com/events.aspx?event=TFS for the small team – hosted in the cloud). Though this event is target as hosted TFS, I will be doing demos of the new web based UI for agile project management in TFS that is common across all VNext versions. Hope to see you there

At one of our recent events I was asked if I had any experience using Nuget within a TFS 2010 build. At the time I had not, but I thought it worth a look. For those of you who don’t know Nuget is a package manager that provides a developer with a way to manage assembly references in a project for assemblies that are not within their solution. It is most commonly used to manage external commonly used assemblies such a nHibernate or JQuery but you can also use it manage your own internal shared libraries. ...