Over the holiday I have been reading Professional Foundation Server 2010 by Ed Blankenship, Martin Woodward, Grant Holiday and Brian Keller, yes I know how to have time off and have fun! So who is this book for? It is a comprehensive guide to TFS 2010, the components and their usage, but this does not mean the book is only for teams new to TFS or people planning to take certification exams....
I am always being asked when at events for details of books I have recommended. So I have added a list of books I have found useful to this blog, it can be found at http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/pages/reading-list.aspx. Thus far I have added the ones I have been looking at recently, but will add more as I go along. Hope you find them as useful as I have
[Updated 27th April 2011 Also see How to use the TFS 2010 Community StyleCop Build Actvity (Addendum)] The Codeplex Community TFS Build Extensions contains a StyleCop activity, but the way to use it is less than obvious. This is not helped by the complexity in using any custom activity within TFS 2010 builds. In this post I will try to show how to get going with the StyleCop activity, which might shed some light on using other custom assemblies....
A while ago I posted on my experiences running multiple instances of 2010 build service on a single VM. Well a couple more experiences as now one of my VM is running 3 instances. Firstly it seems to work OK, you have to have the right build profile i.e. fairly low load but a need to support many Team Project Collections. This is not a solution for a highly loaded build environment....
Over the weekend we have released Black Marble’s WP7 TFS Phone client to the WP7 Marketplace. This app allows the user of a WP7 phone to access their TFS server to perform common operations. They can: See recent builds and drill into the results Queue new builds View and add work items This client talks via a custom web service to a TFS 2008 or 2010 server, which are available from Black Marble....
When trying to create a new Team Project on TFS2010 from a client PC I got the following error _Event Description: TF30162: Task “UploadStructure” from Group “Classification” failed Exception Type: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PcwException Inner Exception Details:_ Exception Message: TF205029: No catalog resource type exists with the following identifier: 41c8b6db-39ec-49db-9db8-0760e836bfbe. (type CatalogResourceTypeDoesNotExistException) However if I did the create on the TFS console all was fine. Turned out the problem was due to the caching done by Team Explorer in Visual Studio....
Whist configuring a new TFS2010 server I got the error TF255115: The following service did not start: TfsJobAgent. Cannot start service TfsJobAgent on computer ‘’. This was identical to the thread on MSDN and it turned out my problem was similar. I was installing TFS onto drive D:APPS, not the usual C:PROGRAM FILE. The problem was the User group did not have the default Read & Execute, List Folder Contents and Read rights on the D:APPS directory and sub directory, the right all users have on C:PROGRAM FILES....
When your PC reaches the point that MSI cannot connect to the Install Service you know it is time to repave the PC. This is the time to you have to try remember what you installed on the PC, your license codes and how you actually got things to work. So going through this process this week all went OK until I tried to remember how I handled bitlockered VHDs....
I am speaking at the BCS group in Edinburgh on the 11th of May in Agile and Lean Methods. For more details see http://edinburgh.bcs.org.uk/events/2010-11/110511.htm
Last year I presented at Microsoft UK’s Techdays on Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management and the session was videoed. I recently tried to refer someone to this recording and I found that the Techdays site had been rebuilt for this years event and I could not find the video. Well after a bit of searching I found it on MSN at Putting some Testing into your TFS Build Process