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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 ...

Cameron Skinner’s TechEd session that goes into more depth on the announcements for TFS vNext is up on Channel 9. Just downloading it for to watch on the train to London this afternoon. I tried streaming live on the East Coast mainline before, their on train WiFi is just not up to it.

Watching the keynote of TechEd 2011 there were some interesting announcements on the vNext for TFS (the TFS section starts about 1:20 into the keynote). Storyboarding Assistant – A new product using PowerPoint as the core tools to gather requirements New web based dashboard to help manage requirement work items, with loads of drag and drop and pulling much of the functionality of the current Excel planning workbooks into the browser. A new web based taskboard (that was demo’d using a huge touch screen monitor) Giving the developer a task oriented means to say what work they are working on, and behind the scenes setting their workspace appropriately New tooling to allow users to provide feedback on the release in an MTM like style Also mentioned was code review tooling, intellitrace in production and much more… Have a look at the keynote (the video is available now) and breakout session video streams when they appear. Also there is more detail on Jason Zanders blog ...

In the 27th June I will be speaking on Lab Management at Microsoft’s “Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors” event at TVP. For more details see the Microsoft event site

Whist trying to do a cross domain migration of some source between two TFS2010 servers, I got the less than helpful runtime exception System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: activeWorkspace at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Migration.Tfs2010VCAdapter.TfsUtil.CleanWorkspace(Workspace activeWorkspace) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Migration.Tfs2010VCAdapter.TfsVCMigrationProvider.ProcessChangeGroup(ChangeGroup group) On checking the _tfsintegrationservice_.log I found the more useful TFS::Authenticate : Caught exception : Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationServerUnauthorizedException: TF30063: You are not authorized to access tfsserver.otherdomain.com. —> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized. ...

Great news the Black Marble’s WP7 TFS Phone client has won one of the three top prizes on Red Gate Software’s Windows Phone 7 Competition You can read the judges comments on the competition blog, I would stress it only mentions my name, but this was Black Marble team effort. If you want to try it out get the trial version from the marketplace

Are you unsure how TFS 2010 hangs together or what is entailed in installing it? Well never fear, Microsoft are hosting a webcast on the 12th May that will be given by Black Marble’s own Robert Hancock one of our ALM consultants, which will explain all. To register check the Microsoft events site