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[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. At Black Marble we run a TPC per client model and tend to have fair few projects on the go at any one time, so need plenty of build controllers. However, in general the builds are small, taking minutes not hours If we have a seriously long running build I would still create a dedicated build service VM. ...

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. But if you just want a quick look to see what it can do we have setup a demo web service so you can trial the application, just use the default account details stored in the application. These are ...

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. Exiting the copy of VS2010 on the client and reloading it fixed the problem as the updated team process settings will cached locally. ...

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 ...

Next Tuesday lunchtime (12th Apr 2011 1pm) I will be doing a webcast on on ‘Lab Management and Automated Build’. I will be looking at the build options in TFS and also how they can be extended with Lab Management. The event is free to attend you just need to register at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/visual-studio-events

Whist recently installing a TFS 2010 system onto a single box server, that was also a domain controller, I had a problem that though everything seemed in order I could not view my reporting services based reports in either SharePoint or directly from the http://myserver/reports interface. During the installation I had verified I had the correct password for my [domain]tfsreports account used to run the reports. If went to the http://myserver/reports page and edited the TFS2010ReportsDs or TFS2010OlapReportDS and tried to test the [domain]tfsreports login it failed. However, if I swapped to the [domain]administrator all was fine and my reports worked. ...