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I will be speaking at Microsoft UK’s ‘Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors’ event next Monday. I am one of four speakers, between us well all address a variety of subjects within ALM Modern Software Delivery: The continuous delivery of high quality software - Colin Bird Driving Quality Throughout the Application Lifecycle - Richard Erwin Extending Testing into the Lab - Richard Fennell The Secrets of Repeatable Success - Adam Gilmore I believe there are still spaces available ...

The Build Customisation project was not the only ALM Rangers release over the weekend. The Lab Management Guide was also shipped. This provides scenario based and hands-on guidance for the planning, setup, configuration and usage of Visual Studio Lab Management, backed by custom VM Template automation for reference environments. If you work with Lab Management, or would like, this is well worth a read

For those of you have have not spotted it the TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 is now available. This is a roll up of all the fixes that have be released since TFS 2010 SP1. This form of cumulative release is going to be the way forward for TFS, so it will be easier to know what to install on a server without reading loads of QFE documents. For more details read the full details on Brian Harry’s blog ...

I am really please to say that the first ALM Rangers project I have been involved with, the Build Customization Guidance, has shipped. The project had the primary goal of delivering scenario based and hands-on lab guidance for the customization and deployment of Team Foundation Build 2010 activities such as versioning, code signing, and branching. You can find details at the Rangers blog,the project table of content or the codeplex site I have certainly learnt a good deal working on this projects, thanks to everyone who made it such a interesting experience. Hope anyone reading the materials find them as useful. ...

My WP7 LG-E900 decided to do a factory reset last night. It locked while playing the XBox Live GEODefense game on a particular busy level I had just lost (so lots of graphic processing). The phone paused for a while then restarted and ran the first use wizard, in German. This is because it is one of the PDC units that seem, given the packaging, to have been sourced from Vodafone German. ...

Have you ever thought ‘I know that you get the Team ribbon in Excel to manage TFS work items, and I can use Excel to as a SQL/OLAP client to run reports from the TFS warehouse but I want to do more….’? Have you every considered using VSTO to create an ActionPane that uses the TFS .NET API? In this example I have created an ActionPane that allows you to select a Team Project Collection, a Team Project and then a build definition. Press the button and it lists the builds that have run of this type using the TFS .NET API. ...

Today we had a problem that we could not connect to VMs within a Lab Management environment from the Environment Viewer in MTM. We had composed the environment from VMs independently create and tested on the HyperV host. The plan in the end is to have this as a network isolated environment, but for now it is a private domain that exists on our main LAN. The first issue we had was that as this was a private domain the various hosts were not registered on our DNS, so we got a DNS lookup error for the VM host names. This is best fixed with network isolation, but for a quick fix we put some entries in a local hosts file on the PC we were using to resolve the name to IP addresses. ...

I recently noticed that I had a few too many ‘Typemock Isolator Quickstart’ help menu items in Visual Studio 2010 After a quick check with Typemock it seems this was a known issue with previous versions of Isolator, you should not see it on a new installation (6.0.10). If you do have the problem do as I was advised, run the VS macro, created by Travis Illig, to remove the extra items. ...

I have added page to this blog that has links to videos of my presentations. Should make them easier to find them when I need to refer to them.

Whilst try to record some manual tests in MTM for a new Silverlight application I found I was not getting any actions recorded, just loads of “Fail to record the object corresponding to this action” warnings in the actions window. Turns out to fix this you have to do three things Install the Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 (MSDN Subscribers Only) – this adds Silverlight support to MTM (this I had already done) In your SIlverlLight application you need to reference the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Extension.SilverlightUIAutomationHelper.dll from the folder C:Program Files (x86)Common Filesmicrosoft sharedVSTT10.0UITestExtensionPackagesSilverlightUIAutomationHelper Finally if using IE9 you need to run IE in IE8 mode. To do this in IE9 press F12 and select the browser mode ...