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I am doing some work on VS2008 at present and I when I started my VS2008, which I had not used for a while, I was plagued by errors along the lines of “The operation could not be completed”. These occurred when running major features such as: Loading LINQ to SQL Designer Running the SQL 2008 Project Wizard The fix turned out to be resetting the package skip loading flag. It seems a number of add-ins were not being loaded on startup. This command is run from the “Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt” by typing ...

Today we have seen the release of the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and the TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack. Both are available on the MSDN download site. As well was the new downloads they have announced a change to licensing over Load Test Agent. This gives Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN users the ability to do unlimited load testing. No longer do you need to purchase Load Test Packs, thus making load testing an option for more teams. ...

Many development teams hit the problem that they have dependencies on libraries that they do not want to have as part of their solutions. If these dependencies are open source projects then there are options using technologies like NuGet or OpenWrap. However, in many cases the dependency is to an internal project, such as the company standard logging library, which it is never going to put up into a centralised repository. So normally you end up with either: ...

The March 2011 version of the TFS Power Tools has been released. There are plenty of fixes and enhancements, especially to the TFS backup tool. For more details have a look at Brian Harry’s blog.

If you are developing custom application using the TFS API then there is a good chance you will want to mock out the calls to your TFS server to enable better testing of the business logic in your application. The architecture of the TFS API does not lend itself to mocking using the standard means provided in most auto-mocking frameworks i.e there is not an interface for all the objects you care about. However, with Typemock Isolator you can fake the classes required, as Isolator can fake an instance of virtually any class. ...

Back in September I asked the question Does anyone need a VS2010 Custom Build Activity for StyleCop? and a good few people said yes and asked me when the activity would be released. Well I had forgotten to say that the Codeplex TFS Build Extensions project, which the activity code got included into, has made it’s first public alpha release i.e. a release that means you don’t have to download the source and build it yourself. There is now a downloadable ZIP will just the built assemblies. ...

Whilst doing some tidying on a multi-server TFS 2010 system I needed to move a team project collection from one Application Tier (AT) to another. Both ATs (which were not a load balanced pair) shared the same SQL server data tier (DT). It should have been easy using the TFS Administration Console. I backed up the TPC database using SQL Management tools, the TPC was then detached without any issue from the first AT. I then backed up the SQL DB again in the detached state. ...

When loading an ASP.NET 3.5 web application that has been compiler for Any CPU onto an IIS7 server I got the error The ‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0’ provider is not registered on the local machine. This was because the server was running a 64bit OS and only the 32bit Access Driver was installed. The quick fix to get this running was to enable 32-bit applications on the AppPools advanced settings.

DDD South West 3.0 has opened for session proposals, got an idea for one? Why not have a go and submit a session.

The TFS Integration Platform is an ALM Rangers project that provides an excellent set of tools to migrate or synchronise source code and/or work items between different TFS servers or TFS server and third party platforms. For many people the supported release on Code Gallery will do all they need. However if you have a need to connect to a system that there is no adaptor for you need the Codeplex version so you can write it yourself. To get the environment up and running, not unsurprisingly, the best place to start is the Getting Started documents. ...