Posts

I have just posted new ‘how to use it 101’ documentation for the TFSVersion activity on the community extensions site.

MTM has the feature that you can use Expression Media Encoder 4 to record the test run as a video. To enable this feature, after you install MTM, you have to install the basic version of Expression Encoder, and a few patches see notes here for a list of files and the process. I recently did this on PC and tried to record a video. As soon as the recording process started the PC virtually stopped. It ran to 50%+ load on a dual core 2.3GHz CPU and the mouse disappeared. As soon as I stopped MTM (via task manager and the keyboard alone) it became responsive again. If I ran MTM without a video recording it was fine. Should be noted that if I ran the Expression Encoder (not via MTM) I got the same problem. ...

In a recent build I wanted a bit more control over rules used by StyleCop; in the past I have just tended to have the correct ruleset in the Program FilesStyleCop directory and be done with that. This time I wanted to make sure different rules were associated with different given solutions. The StyleCop build activity does allow for this; there is a property to set the path to the settings file. In my build process template I set this property as below, via an assignment activity ...

… of course you do. Microsoft have today released a patch to improve performance and reliability of workflow designer which should help with the Build Process Template design surface. See Buck Hodges blog for details

It is great to see a good wide selection of proposed sessions for DDDNorth, many from new speakers to the DDD events, which is always nice to see. There is still time for you to get involved and propose a session. Go on you know you want to….

When TEE is installed you have to provide a product key if you do not wish to run it in 90 day trial mode. Those of you used to using MSDN Subscriber downloads would guess you press the Key button next to the Download button and a product will be provided. However this is not the case, all you get is the message the product does not require a key. ...

SharePoint in my opinion is a better home for a Word or Visio requirements document than TFS. You can use all the SharePoint document workspace features to allow collaboration in the production of the document. When you have done enough definition to create your projects user stories or requirement then you can create them in TFS using whatever client you wish e.g. Visual Studio, Excel, Project etc. You can add a Hyperlink from each of these work items back to the SharePoint hosted document they relate to, so you still retain the single version of the source document. The thing to note here is that you don’t have to link to the last version of the document. If SharePoint’s revision control is enabled for the document library you can refer to any stored version. Thus allowing the specification document to continue evolving for future releases whilst the development team are still able to reference the specific version their requirements are based on. ...

It was announced at DDDSW that there will be a DDD event on the 8th October 2011 in Sunderland, DDD North. As of today, session submission is now open. Why not proposes one yourself?

Every time I add the Typemock Isolator custom activity to a TFS 2010 build I learn something new that eases the process. In the past I have posted on the basic process to get the activity into your build, and I would also draw your attention to the ALM rangers guide to build customisation, which provides loads of useful information on this front. Today, when I added the activity to a build I made the following improvements to the settings to make life a bit easier. This build is one used wildcard scanning for assemblies containing test with a test configuration file (this is the red usage in the documentation, it will make sense if you read the documentation) ...

I have been having a on-going project to run multiple build controllers on a single VM. Today I needed to reconfigure a on of the controllers to point at a different TPC. You have to do this the correct way to avoid problems. My error log was full of _Http communication failure: _Exception Message: Cannot listen on pipe name ’net.pipe://build/ServiceHost/1’ because another pipe endpoint is already listening on that name. (type AddressAlreadyInUseException) ...