Renaming branches in TFS2010

I recently was asked why a client had experienced some unexpected results when merging a development branch back into the main trunk on a TFS 2010 installation. Turns out the issue was that during some tests that the both the Main and Dev branches had been renamed, and new branches of the same names created. So they had a structure like this: $/ProjectX Dev Newly created after the rename Main...

February 4, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Somewhat nasty upgrade experience with Seesmic Desktop 2

A few days ago I got the regular ‘there is a new version of seesmic’ message. So I pressed update and got the less than helpful message After a quick search on the web I found the log files are in C:Users[username]DocumentsSeesmicSeesmic Desktop 2Logs, why that cannot be listed on the error dialog I don’t know!. Unfortunately there was nothing obvious in the log, just a list of plug-ins it loaded....

February 2, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Problems connecting a Netgear WG111 USB Wifi Dongle to a Netgear DG834GT router

Just spent an interesting hour trying to connect a Netgear WG111v2 USB WiFi Dongle to Netgear (Sky Branded) DG834GT router. They are both from the same manufacturer so you would they would work together! This router was setup with its default Sky settings so WiFi was setup as WPA. I installed the WG111 onto an XP laptop installed the newly downloaded V 5.1.1308 (26 Dec 2007) drivers and tried to connect....

January 31, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Gojko Adzic is presenting at the next Agile Yorkshire meeting on acceptance tests

February’s Agile Yorkshire is on the 8th. The session will be given by Gojko Adzic on ’Long term value of acceptance tests’ I have seen Gojko speak at a number of events, including Agile Yorkshire, he is always an engaging speaker so well worth the effort to attend. I know I am going to give it a go, but have been really struggling to make Agile Yorkshire as Tuesday nights are a bit busy of late....

January 29, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Not made it to DDD9

I was busy for the few minutes that the DDD9 registration was open, so did not manage to get on the attendee list, but I have been try to keep an eye on that is going on at Twitter. The good news is that there are more DDD events on the way DDD Belfast - March 2011 DDD Scotland - May 7th 2011 Session submissions are open for Scotland, I have submitted on writing custom build activities for TFS 2010....

January 29, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Follow up to yesterdays events on ‘enabling agile development with cool tools’

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterdays Black Marble event ‘Enabling agile development with cool tools’, both Gary Short’s and my sessions seemed well received. I was asked if my slides would be available anywhere, well the answer is no. The reason for this is that my session was mostly demo driven, so the slides just set the scene. After a bit of thought, a quick blog post seems a better option; so this post covers the same basic points as the session....

January 28, 2011 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

Follow up to yesterdays events on ‘enabling agile development with cool tools’

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterdays Black Marble event ‘Enabling agile development with cool tools’, both Gary Short’s and my sessions seemed well received. I was asked if my slides would be available anywhere, well the answer is no. The reason for this is that my session was mostly demo driven, so the slides just set the scene. After a bit of thought, a quick blog post seems a better option; so this post covers the same basic points as the session....

January 28, 2011 · 5 min · Richard Fennell

At last my creature it lives – adventures with Lab Management and VLAN tags

After much delay I have at last got our internal Lab Management running on ‘real’ hardware as opposed to it’s initial home on a demo rig PC. We have just been too busy to find the time to reconfigure and redeploy our own kit! You know how it is ‘a plumber’s house is full of drippy taps’. That said I of course still want more hardware, as soon as you start to build up test environments you eat Hyper-V server resources very quickly; memory seems to be my most pressing current limitation on how much I can run at the same time....

January 21, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Preparing for my session next week on ‘enabling agile development with cool tools’

I have spent today preparing my presentation and demos for the Black Marble event next week [Enabling Agile Development with Cool Tools](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Enabling Agile Development with Cool Tools). I will be presenting with Gary Short of DevExpress. He is going to be talking about refactoring under the intriguing title ‘How to Eat an Elephant’. My session will be on the tools to aid the project management side of the ALM process. Specifically the tools available for TFS 2010 both those ‘out the box’ and from third party vendors....

January 20, 2011 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

TF215097 error when using a custom build activity

Whist trying to make use of a custom build activity I got the error TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition Tfsdemo1Candy: Cannot create unknown type ‘{clr-namespace:TfsBuildExtensions.Activities.CodeQuality;assembly=TfsBuildExtensions.Activities.StyleCop}StyleCop’ This occurred when the TFS 2010 build controller tried to parse the build process .XAML at the start of the build process. A check of all the logs gave no other information other than this error message, nothing else appeared to have occurred....

January 6, 2011 · 2 min · Richard Fennell