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I presented last night at the West Yorkshire BCS and received a number of comments that it was great to see free training being available. This for me is one of the most important areas of our community, and an area we are very lucky with. There are plenty of opportunities to access knowledge….. Of late we have seen that the big vendor conferences (such as Microsoft’s TechEd, PDC and MIX) and the platform independent developer conferences (such as NDC) streaming their sessions live for free and also have their sessions available for free download within a few days. Microsoft’ Channel 9 is also an excellent resource of conference sessions and specially made material on a vast range of subjects from language design to scheduling of the buses on Microsoft campus. Or if you prefer to listen to something whist your drive why not try the .Net Rocks podcast. There are plenty more specialist resources out there on the web. ...

[Updated 1 mar 2012 - This should only effect you if Eclipse is unzipped into your ‘c:program files’ folder structure) During my new laptop build I have had to reinstall Eclipse, so I took the chance to upgrade to the Indigo release. When I tried to install the TFS 2010 Team Explorer Everywhere SP1 plug-in I got the error Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found. Software currently installed: Shared profile 1.0.0.1308118925849 (SharedProfile_epp.package.java 1.0.0.1308118925849) Missing requirement: Shared profile 1.0.0.1308118925849 (SharedProfile_epp.package.java 1.0.0.1308118925849) requires ‘org.maven.ide.eclipse [1.0.0.20110607-2117]’ but it could not be found ...

I have had my Lenovo W520 a week now and must say I am very happy with it. I am still hitting the wrong keys a good deal of the time, the only problem being the Fn and Ctrl keys are reversed in position from my old Acer, it is a good job Fn-V and Fn-C does nothing dangerous!. The keyboard is very nice to type on, a far more solid feel than any previous laptop I have had. ...

I have just replaced my old Acer laptop with a rather nice Lenovo W520. This has plenty of memory and is able to run Hyper-V. In the past for TFS demos I had used boot from VHD to boot the Acer into Windows 2K8, as the Acer could not run Hyper-V due to lack of hardware virtualisation support in the bios. So I had a fully configured VHD boot what I wanted to move to Hyper-V. ...

Next week I am speaking at: The West Yorkshire BCS on “Application Lifecycle Management - supporting the software development process from inception to retirement” , Wednesday 20 July 2011, 6.30pm (refreshments available from 5.45pm) at NTI Leeds, Old Broadcasting House, 148 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9EN. and NxtGen Southampton on “TDD & Mocking, a love affair”, Thursday, July 21, 2011 , 7pm, St Andrew’s Hall, Avenue St Andrew’s URC, SOUTHAMPTON, SO17 1XQ ...

Whist on the road I have had need to access our Lab Management system via our TMG firewall through which we expose our TFS 2010 for remote users (via SSL). When I load Microsoft Tests Manager (MTM) I can connect to the TFS server, as expected, and go into ‘Lab Center’ mode. I can see my project’s environment and can start, stop and deploy them without issue (all communication routed via our TFS server). However the MTM environment viewer fails to make a connection to the test VMs in the environments. ...

When trying to create a new Team Project on my test TFS 2010 basic installation I got the error Time: 2011-07-05T11:43:36 Module: Engine Event Description: TF30162: Task “BuildTask” from Group “Build” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Exception Message: Multiple identities found matching workspace name ‘TYPHOONfbb296e15246421e9fc8d25e9d128512typhoon (VC)’ and owner name ‘BLACKMARBLEfez’. Please specify one of the following workspace specs: TYPHOONfbb296e15246421e9fc8d25e9d128512typhoon (VC);BLACKMARBLEfez TYPHOONfbb296e15246421e9fc8d25e9d128512typhoon (VC);BLACKMARBLEfez Stack Trace: at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.Build.ProjectComponentCreator.ExecuteInternal(ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml, Boolean validationOnly) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.Build.ProjectComponentCreator.Execute(ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.ProjectCreationEngine.TaskExecutor.PerformTask(IProjectComponentCreator componentCreator, ProjectCreationContext context, XmlNode taskXml) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.ProjectCreationEngine.RunTask(Object taskObj) -- Inner Exception – Exception Message: Multiple identities found matching workspace name ‘TYPHOONfbb296e15246421e9fc8d25e9d128512typhoon (VC)’ and owner name ‘BLACKMARBLEfez’. Please specify one of the following workspace specs: TYPHOONfbb296e15246421e9fc8d25e9d128512typhoon (VC);BLACKMARBLEfez TYPHOONfbb296e15246421e9fc8d25e9d128512typhoon (VC);BLACKMARBLEfez (type MultipleWorkspacesFoundException) ...

The first stable release of the Community TFS Build Extensions has been shipped. It contains around 100 activities. It is hoped that this project will be be shipping on a 2 to 3 month cycle in the future. So have a look, this project provides many ways to extend your build process. And if you have ideas for more activities why not contribute?

I am really pleased to say I have been re-awarded as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM for 2011, this is my fourth year. I am looking forwarded to another year of working with such a great crowd of people.

Thanks to everyone who came today’s ISV session at TVP. You can find all the slides from the event at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukisvdev/archive/2011/06/27/slides-and-links-from-alm-and-visual-studio-2010-event-on-the-27th-june-2010.aspx